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Lyssa
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PostSubject: Brahman Brahman EmptySat Jan 05, 2013 8:28 pm

The Aryan-Vedic world-view sees life as Need, as Lack, which can only be kept at bay by continued sacrifices. Sacrifice meant ex-tension of the self, in the literal self - to placate the Tension outward through offerings and lengthen, increase one's Self. Sacrifice was conceived as a sort of symbiotic circuit - as in the simple example of a fire sacrifice - production of fire ex-tended itself into rain because of the smoke, which in turn ex-tended into water-sap for trees, which in turn as fuelwood for the fire. The Brahman was the nexus of these (ex)Tensions - in the 'tense' sense of fire being both fire as well as rain, tree, etc. [Laconian obfuscates this into an either/or as he does with his views on meditation, which is an error.]

To Burkert and Girard, sacrifice redirected violence and protected society from a total collapse. In fact, the giving away of the first fruit  [perhaps also the case with Abraham of Issac] displaying a stance of total unselfish disinterest to the cosmos was to preclude conflict and competition. Therefore Heesterman presents Sacrifice as a 'domestication of domestication [of fire, agriculture, etc.]'. Sacrifice attempts to 'uroborize' a Broken World, by setting in motion sacrifice as the necessity to make up for another sacrifice ad. infinitum. Desire, then, becomes the prime mover of the world. The Vedas say, the gods sacrificed the sacrifice [purusha, the giant, the cosmic man] by sacrifice. In other words, the Primal Man itself is perceived as a sacrifice - broken. Cosmogenesis is the sacrificial break-up of the Purusha into a series of differentiations [water, sun, fire, human,s plants, etc.] which sacrifice tries to integrate back again; to keep the cycle moving, reconnect the circuit.

From this follows, the Potlatch as Mauss had it. The 'Gift' economy was a sacralization of violence between a Host and his Guest, who was his Rival contender for the same resources. [More on this later].

The Vedic Sacrifice was essentially Agonistic. A question of Life and Death. Of sustenance and social-feasting, where the Sacrificer's Honour was at stake in presenting himself as a Host, a Patron, a Releaser of the "sap of life". Cattle-raids and such Indo-European myths were obviously poetics for plundering and Re-distribution of wealth. Sacrifice was the setting in motion of a life-giving Circulation. The one who "grasped" or "stole the Fire" [or the cattle] from his Rival in a direct battle, or a chariot race, or a verbal contest proclaimed himself the Conqueror or Brahman as in "I have Expanded". Heesterman makes a remarkable observation here; that the lighting of the hearth-fire by the new bride as was the patrilineal custom was nothing but the plundering of resources/stealing of the Fire by one clan of another's. The Hearth-fire was inclusive of the "bride-price".
The rune-poems on Fehu are a strong reminder of this:
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But.

The instability of the sacrificial world, the agonistic uncertainity ushered in Ritualism which displaced the warrior's sacrificial order into a safe, demarcated, artificial stability by means of Homological Equivalences between macro and microcosm, and removing the Agon out of the sacrifice. Ritualism destroyed the broken-world of sacrifice into a Monistic transcendentalism.

The Rival contender became demonic asuras, 'keepers of the treasures', dragons that had to be slayed. Sacrifice of animals were substituted by tree-trunks. Chariot-races by liturgical wheels and perfectionism of mantras. Weapons by stotras. Death itself was Interiorized, and therefore, one now only sacrificed to the Fire-inside with one's Breath for fuel and True Speech for oblations. The sacrificial self that won over death by defeating a rival, did away with the contender, and now integrated death/rival within one's own self by the cunning means of macro-microcosmic equivalences. The conquering of the "enemy within" became the winning of Immortality. Ritualism fused Brahman with Atman.

With the interorization of Death, one said,  "tat tvam asi" - "I am that also". One became death also and thus embodied the eternal Absolute within. That is, the 'Absolute Brahman' became the Knower of the Equivalences.
Brahman which was the agonistic excellence of the verbal contests - the winning of the Fire or Excellence of speech ['I have expanded'] was de-socialized from the world of conflict and hyper-individualized into the figure of a world-renouncer/sanyasin/ascetic/inner-sacrificer, who sheds the world out for the world within.

While in India, ritualism led to the maximum interiorization of fire [prana-agnihotra], in Iran, ritualism led to the opp. - the maximum exteriorization of worshipping an ever-burning fire, as an immortal cult-object. In China, Taoism replaced immolation with incense. In Greece, likewise, with Pythagoreanism displacing the bloody Cuisine of sacrifice into an individualistic cult of vegetarianism; it broke apart from the bloody world of communal feasting. Judaeo-Xt. legitimated the killing of Jesus into a 'sacrifice to end all sacrifice' becoming extra-social to the max.

Ritual removed the agon to make the uncertain outcome of life and death struggles certain, and destoyed the sacrificial flux universe for a closed static universe. Ritual trancendalitized the warrior's agon [brahman] and broke down the reciprocity and the nexus [brahman] of the gift-giving circuit.

This is what Brahman meant - the expanse of the psyche, of space, of Self ex-Tension in all its interconnectedness - of holding Maximum Tension by linking maximum things together.
Atman cut off this link, demarcated away the chaotic world and homologized the Brahman into the self-Absolute of modern day Hinduism, i.e. the non-dual Advaita Vedanta of Shankara.

Original Buddhism which grew to overthrow precisely this transcendentalizing ritualistic aspect ,and verses from a few original old Upanishads retain the concept of the 'esoteric' Brahman. Evola highlights the former; the Bhagavad Gita does of the latter.

Rosenberg was right when he remarked,
"Viewed from the outside, philosophical acceptance of an equation of Atman-Brahman engendered racial decay." [Myth of the 20th century].

Heesterman is one of the few authors who presents the original concept of the Aryan Brahman before it decayed into a term for a static absolute.
Following are excerpts from his copyright protected book 'The Broken World of Sacrifice'.

[This thread will be a work in progress; much more needs to be added.]

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"ἐδιζησάμην ἐμεωυτόν." [Heraclitus]

"All that exists is just and unjust and equally justified in both." [Aeschylus, Prometheus]

"The history of everyday is constituted by our habits. ... How have you lived today?" [N.]

*Become clean, my friends.*


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PostSubject: Re: Brahman Brahman EmptySat Jan 05, 2013 9:26 pm

Interesting.

In the west the pagan spirit grew weak on its own success and was then infected by a dogma of nihilism from the lowest social stratum upwards.
Eventually it had to capitulate to the political force and the rest is history.

In the east the infection seems to be from the inside out.
Was overpopulation and resources pressures a factor in this compromise that brought in the decline?

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PostSubject: Re: Brahman Brahman EmptySun Jan 06, 2013 11:42 am

Satyr wrote:
Interesting.

In the west the pagan spirit grew weak on its own success and was then infected by a dogma of nihilism from the lowest social stratum upwards.
Eventually it had to capitulate to the political force and the rest is history.

In the east the infection seems to be from the inside out.
Was overpopulation and resources pressures a factor in this compromise that brought in the decline?

In the Indian case, the sacrificial worldview led to an extreme decimation of the strong by the strong - as the historical epic, the Mahabharata records.

In the Greek case, long before any sign of Christianity taking root, both Heesterman and Detienne/Vernant point out to the Pythagorean age, even Empedocles' beliefs about reincarnation in animal forms and non-injury to these.

The caste-system ensured a redistributive network of wealth, an unstable but ecological circuit of ecomony; ritual domination resulted in discrimination Against the lower castes, etc. and one no longer had to depend on the third caste farmers for cows for ghee as fuel/oblation for the fire; the upper caste homologized ghee into true word/right thought and broke the link with the third caste.
Originally, this is why Purusha - the cosmic person whose mouth was the priestly, whose arms were the warriors, body of the traders and feet of the labourers, was called the Brahman - because of the highly tense interconnecting nexus. The Brahman was a joint, a bridge that linked things together while keeping them apart. [What I've explained in 'Primer on Nothingness'].
With ritualism, Purusha became a God-head literally - the head alone. Brahman became a term for God.


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"ἐδιζησάμην ἐμεωυτόν." [Heraclitus]

"All that exists is just and unjust and equally justified in both." [Aeschylus, Prometheus]

"The history of everyday is constituted by our habits. ... How have you lived today?" [N.]

*Become clean, my friends.*
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PostSubject: Re: Brahman Brahman EmptyFri Jan 18, 2013 6:46 pm

I like the indian term: Advaita (literally, non-duality). Instead of Singularity or One-Ness or Brahman, God ect.. It offers a different perspective. I just heard it in a Satsang.
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PostSubject: Re: Brahman Brahman EmptyFri Jan 18, 2013 8:47 pm

Lyssa wrote:
Satyr wrote:
Interesting.

In the west the pagan spirit grew weak on its own success and was then infected by a dogma of nihilism from the lowest social stratum upwards.
Eventually it had to capitulate to the political force and the rest is history.

In the east the infection seems to be from the inside out.
Was overpopulation and resources pressures a factor in this compromise that brought in the decline?

In the Indian case, the sacrificial worldview led to an extreme decimation of the strong by the strong - as the historical epic, the Mahabharata records.

In the Greek case, long before any sign of Christianity taking root, both Heesterman and Detienne/Vernant point out to the Pythagorean age, even Empedocles' beliefs about reincarnation in animal forms and non-injury to these.

The caste-system ensured a redistributive network of wealth, an unstable but ecological circuit of ecomony; ritual domination resulted in discrimination Against the lower castes, etc. and one no longer had to depend on the third caste farmers for cows for ghee as fuel/oblation for the fire; the upper caste homologized ghee into true word/right thought and broke the link with the third caste.
Originally, this is why Purusha - the cosmic person whose mouth was the priestly, whose arms were the warriors, body of the traders and feet of the labourers, was called the Brahman - because of the highly tense interconnecting nexus. The Brahman was a joint, a bridge that linked things together while keeping them apart. [What I've explained in 'Primer on Nothingness'].
With ritualism, Purusha became a God-head literally - the head alone. Brahman became a term for God.

Explain why the Greeks explored and settled around the Mediterranean, some accounts have them venturing up towards England, and how later Europeans explore and settle all over the world, when in the east, despite the huge populations, they go nowhere.

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PostSubject: Re: Brahman Brahman EmptyFri Jan 18, 2013 9:15 pm

Two kinds of non-duality in Indian thought.

Shankara's Advaita is nihilistic. It says the world is all illusion, maya. Only the impersonal absolute is real, and calls for a self-dissolution like a river into an ocean.

Ramanuja's Qualified Advaita makes a theology out of the Gita. The Gita, at places atleast retains the earlier meaning of the non-abs. Brahman described esoterically in the Upanishads.

Since you are given into spirituality, you could try all the articles at [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]

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"ἐδιζησάμην ἐμεωυτόν." [Heraclitus]

"All that exists is just and unjust and equally justified in both." [Aeschylus, Prometheus]

"The history of everyday is constituted by our habits. ... How have you lived today?" [N.]

*Become clean, my friends.*
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Lyssa
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PostSubject: Re: Brahman Brahman EmptyFri Jan 18, 2013 9:26 pm

Satyr wrote:

Explain why the Greeks explored and settled around the Mediterranean, some accounts have them venturing up towards England, and how alter Europeans explore and settle all over the world, when in the east, despite the huge populations, they go nowhere.

Great point.

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"ἐδιζησάμην ἐμεωυτόν." [Heraclitus]

"All that exists is just and unjust and equally justified in both." [Aeschylus, Prometheus]

"The history of everyday is constituted by our habits. ... How have you lived today?" [N.]

*Become clean, my friends.*
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PostSubject: Re: Brahman Brahman EmptyFri Jan 18, 2013 10:25 pm

I wouldn't make a negative value judgment against Nihilism. Nihilism itself is a tool. Both are paths. The Nihilism of the 1 and the Nihilism of the 0. They both meet at the peak and recognize themselves as Nihilism. Overcoming Nihilism isn't so easy. You cannot just push it away, in this:

good and evil distinction (see my Esotericism 101 on this)

Paganism: Good
Christianity: Evil
Greeks: Good
Indians: okay, but a little too feminine
China: Evil (feminized)
Jews: Evil
Nietzsche: supergood
Schopenhauer: good

See, how ridiculous this is? It's useful in everyday life. We do it all the time. Discrimination is necessary. But in growing conscious, becoming spiritually more aware, of the deeper layers of life and existence....
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PostSubject: Re: Brahman Brahman EmptySat Jan 19, 2013 6:23 pm

Thanks for reducing it to your level of comprehension, and then telling us you are deeper than this.
What is ridiculous is that you do not even see how ironic your little description is.

"Good"?
"Evil"?

Who, the fuck, do you think you are talking to boy?
Your kind?

Listen...what I prefer is based on my idiosyncrasies, created by my past.
You have your own.

I'll follow my path...you follow yours.

A gorilla can follow his.

What dominates today?
Coincidentally all the shit you call evil.
So, as you see, I am on the losing side.

You, on the other hand, are in some realm where neither applies...so you can never win or lose.
The moment you started talking about Scientology I knew you were someone special.

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PostSubject: Re: Brahman Brahman EmptySat Jan 19, 2013 7:59 pm

Laconian wrote:
I wouldn't make a negative value judgment against Nihilism. Nihilism itself is a tool. Both are paths.

True. There's an Active and a Passive Nihilism.
One sees the meaninglessness of all things and tries to posit and assert its own value-judgements into things, into the world from self-affirmation - Active.
And the other wants to take down and destroy everything along with it, with its own self-destruction - Passive.

The rest of your comment is garbage.

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"ἐδιζησάμην ἐμεωυτόν." [Heraclitus]

"All that exists is just and unjust and equally justified in both." [Aeschylus, Prometheus]

"The history of everyday is constituted by our habits. ... How have you lived today?" [N.]

*Become clean, my friends.*
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PostSubject: Re: Brahman Brahman EmptySat Jan 19, 2013 9:38 pm

Satyr wrote:

What dominates today?
Coincidentally all the shit you call evil.

Paganism: Good

--> Paganism is on the rise.

Christianity: Evil

--> The churches and instituionalized Religions are on the decline. Taxpayers aren't paying their church taxes anymore here. They are optional. In the US you have the New Atheists promoting their secular humanism, which is sweeping over here too.

Greeks: Good

--> At least they got into the spotlight in the financial crisis. Also their historical worth was discussed. Ancient greek philosophy. The cradle of civilization.

Indians: okay, but a little too feminine

--> They suffer of overpopulation and poverty.

China: Evil (feminized)

--> They produce cheap products, from cheap labour. This is just a matter of time, that their power will decrease.

Jews: Evil

--> This weeks news story in the biggest weekly newsmagazine in Germany ("Der Spiegel"): "Is Isreal critique antisemite?" Isreal critique is rising even here amongst the general population.

Nietzsche: supergood
Schopenhauer: good


--> Nietzsches popularity is constant. And that these two are not discussed at the McUniversities (these socialist breeding centers with their worthless McDiplomas).

right-wing is good

--> And rising. Even counter-currents admitted that Obama was better for the New Right than Romney would have been. Because he would have lured away, some people who now grow more interested in the real right. A new one, not a nazi one and not a mere conservative one.

the left is evil.

--> And heavily criticized for it. At least in the US. It's unfortunate that people don't see both major parties as contributing to the problem. That they still either think Socialism or Capitalism is the problem. Where in fact these two have merged in a form of Corporatism. Money Socialism.

Maleness is good

--> And I at least see that women are beyond their peak of liberation. This "Sex and the City" craze is over. They want more stability. Of course their empowerment still holds them back from loving men. They still do not respect men enough.

femininity is evil

--> And unpopular at least. I see the Feminization going on, but it's ridiculed. Men want to be men again. And women want real men too. It's not happening, but the ideal is there. It's archetypical, it doesn't go away by feminizing mens fashion.

Discrimination is good

--> And popular. That's why the internet is rising and television struggling. Just one example.

Egalitarianism is evil.

--> On the second biggest weekly newsmag here, this week ("Focus") was a title story on the front page of celebrity women opposing the womens quota in the workplace!

The jews are evil

--> Isreal is getting heavy criticism in the public. Protests, even here in Germany.

aryans are good

--> I am amazed by the hype in the english speaking countries about aryanism and an objective WWII and Hitler evaluation. Unfortunately I cannot participate in this yet, from my Country and much less in my Country.

Hedonism is evil

--> And fitness is a Religion. Obesity is openly ridiculed over here. People try to get in shape.

ascesis is good

--> Tibetan Buddhism is popular here. Diets.

Religion is evil

--> It's trashed everywhere here. And in the US by the New Atheists.

science is good

--> And worshipped very much.

The West is good


--> It lacks an identity. But Islamization is feared at least. Happing anyways, but feared.

East is evil

--> And not overly popular here.

Paganism is good

--> And rising

Christianity is evil

--> It is trashed. Not just Catholicism, with the scandals of child abuse. But that was a trigger.

Traditionalism good

--> And people here want to return at least to more traditional gender roles! But you cannot just pretend like all this feminism didn't happen. And women are still empowered by the government.

Progressivism evil

--> And there is no real progress happening. People are working out, but not reading books.

sluts evil

--> And called out for being sluts today

Laziness evil!

--> Absolutely everybody accuses everyone else these days of being lazy. It is because most physical work was replaced by machines in the Industrialization. So todays work happens on a computer or at a telephone, which is done in a sitting position.

evil feminists


--> They stay alone today. No guy wants to engage with them. Thanks to you, the MRAs, the MGTOW, the Man'o'Sphere in general.

Scientology evil.

--> And they are exposed for their evils on youtube. They were also labeled state enemy No. 1 over here. With mass media campaigns.

Quote :

So, as you see, I am on the losing side.

I don't think so anymore.

Quote :

You, on the other hand, are in some realm where neither applies...so you can never win or lose.

It is true that I don't fight like you do. But I am on your side mostly. I am more a spectator. I admit that. But I also try to evaluate the situation. For example: Feminism. I wonder if there was some truth about it. I don't buy into the 1950's traditionalist ideal of working man and housewife/mother either. I think this isn't
what women want. I think there was some truth about Womens Lib. Even if it was immensely destructive and overhyped to cheer misandry till this day by the mass media.
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PostSubject: Re: Brahman Brahman EmptyWed Jan 30, 2013 8:28 pm

Satyr wrote:

Explain why the Greeks explored and settled around the Mediterranean, some accounts have them venturing up towards England, and how alter Europeans explore and settle all over the world, when in the east, despite the huge populations, they go nowhere.

I suspect one of the reasons for this is the divergence that occurred in the attitudes of the Greco-Romans/the West in general and the Indo-Iranians/the East, in the cultural and philological evolution of the figure of the 'Guest'.

"The primitive notion conveyed by hostis is that of equality by compensation: a hostis is one who repays my gift with a counter-gift. Thus, like its Gothic counterpart, gasts, Latin hostis at one period denoted the guest. The classical meaning “enemy” must have developed when reciprocal relations between clans were succeeded by the exclusive relations of civitas to civitas (cf. Gr. xénos ‘guest’ > ‘stranger’)." [E.Benveniste]

While the Host who originally denoted the Guest, a visiting divinity, gradually turned into the Enemy, in the West; in the East, as Heesterman points out in the first post here, the conflict culture where the Host was once Enemy, a rival contender for the goods of the sacrifice, gradually devolved into a 'friendly'/pacified participatory Guest.

So, you have an Enemy-outlook in the West that sets out to conquer outwardly, while in the East, you have a Gift-outlook that draws in the Other as a divine guest, shifting the focus to an inner self-conquest.


Excerpts from the following two books will show the difference. Its a long read!!



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"ἐδιζησάμην ἐμεωυτόν." [Heraclitus]

"All that exists is just and unjust and equally justified in both." [Aeschylus, Prometheus]

"The history of everyday is constituted by our habits. ... How have you lived today?" [N.]

*Become clean, my friends.*
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Lyssa
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Brahman Empty
PostSubject: Re: Brahman Brahman EmptyWed Jan 30, 2013 8:28 pm

The East.

Quote :
"In the dāna relation the donor and the recipient define each other morally and religiously. A donor cannot gain merit, honor the tradition, or display her piety without the presence of a worthy recipient. This is no less true for royal largesse than face-to-face lay almsgiving: the righteous king cannot perform his kingly duties without true religious beneficiaries to lavish royal wealth on. In a sense, he cannot be a true king. And the recipient requires the support of the donor not just materially, but also spiritually and morally. The recipients are expected to rise to the occasion and receive as worthy representatives of their traditions.
Gift ritual is a kind of religious aesthetics. The particular “manners” deployed in giving a gift described in the three traditions differ in important ways meant to mark off ideological
boundaries, even while certain common patterns demarcate a shared cosmopolitan aesthetic.
Yet the ritual of the gift does more than express symbolically religious and moral ideals. It also is designed to constitute them, to generate moral agency (that is, the capacity for moral dispositions and action), and also moral subjectivity (that is, awareness of oneself as a moral agent). I argue that ritual was seen to stimulate
moral disposition. Formalized gift behavior was deemed to inspire generosity on the part of the donor and worthiness on the part of the recipient.

The Dharmaśāstra Sea of Giving has a number of section headings which describe the formal procedure of a gift: the etiquette of giving, the etiquette for accepting, “technicalities,” the duties for one who is negligent, and the duties for those who are unfit. Among the procedural rules for giving we find a general stipulation to give and to receive with reverence.5 All gifts are to be preceded by [the sprinkling] of water and by uttering the greeting “Best wishes” (svasti) to the righteous recipients. The recipient should mention
the presiding deity of the gift when he formally accepts it (each gift object is associated with a particular deity who should be invoked).
Additionally, the rules for receiving are correlated with the social status of the giver. The recipient should conclude the gift with a blessing in a loud voice when receiving from a brahman, in a low voice in the case of a kshatriya, in a whisper in the case of a vaiśya, and only mentally to śūdras.” [Maria Heim, Theories of the Gift in S.Asia]

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"ἐδιζησάμην ἐμεωυτόν." [Heraclitus]

"All that exists is just and unjust and equally justified in both." [Aeschylus, Prometheus]

"The history of everyday is constituted by our habits. ... How have you lived today?" [N.]

*Become clean, my friends.*


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PostSubject: Re: Brahman Brahman EmptyWed Jan 30, 2013 8:32 pm

The West.


Quote :
Plutarch wrote:
"The soul is itself exiled, errant, an arrival from elsewhere.
Birth is a voyage into a foreign land." [On Exile]

The problem of hospitality is coextensive with the development of Western civilization, occupying an essential place in virtually every religion and defining the most elementary of social relations: reciprocity, exogamy, potlatch, “brotherly love,” nationhood. In almost every Western religion, hospitality is the attribute or special domain of the principal divinity (YHWH, Zeus, Jupiter Capitolinus, the Holy Trinity), who evaluates the character of human hosts by ap- pealing for hospitality disguised as a supplicant. In ancient Greece, one could even argue that hospitality is religion, the defining social ethics of Zeus Xénios, Zeus god of strangers.

Plato makes hospitality one of the fundamental duties of the republic, and Immanuel Kant sees in it the necessary precondition of cosmopolitan law, as the only means to guarantee perpetual peace among a global society of strangers.
In modern history, the focus on hospitality has largely shifted away from religion and philosophy into two very different areas: the so-called hospitality industry (tourism) and a social and political discourse of parasitism, in which the stranger is construed as a hostile invader of the host nation or group. In this shift, the theological importance of hospitality appears to have been supplanted entirely by something that is mutually exclusive with it: in religious myth, the hospitality act was forbidden to have any economic dimension, and the stranger was held to be divine and to merit the absolute respect of the host. And yet as these increasingly impersonal and formalized means of relating to the stranger displace the ethical importance of a more intimate encounter, the irrational side of our relation to the stranger—fear, anxiety, and hatred—seems to grow ever more virulent. In some ways hospitality seems to have barely survived its separation from the religious sphere, as witnessed by the disproportion between the enormous significance of hospitality in ancient times and up through the Enlightenment, and its present archaic, or even quaint, signification. In spite of this apparent archaism, however, hospitality has in the last century emerged as an increasingly important topos for questions of ethics.

Benveniste observes that,
At this historical period, the institution [of hospitality] had lost its power in the Roman world: it presupposed a kind of relation that was no longer compatible with the established regime. When the ancient society became a nation, the relations of man to man, and of clan to clan, were abolished; the only distinction that remained was between those who were internal to the ciutas and those who were outside of it.
From this time forward, hostis is applied exclusively to the “enemy,” and no longer names the guest (95); similarly, the Greek xénos comes increasingly to mean “stranger,” to the exclusion of “guest”.
This transformation in the civic or national attitude toward the stranger explains how hostis became the linguistic root of “hostility,” an affect that otherwise seems at odds with the insti tution of hospitality.

The guest’s hostility is an immanent possibility within the hostis relation, a menacing consequence of his potential interchangeability with the host. In his guise as an enemy, the hostis is someone who threatens to overtake the host, who must be excluded by reason of his potential similarity to the host and capacity for usurpation of his power. Western literature and myth are full of legends that cast the relationship between the host and guest as potentially menacing. In classical literature, the figure who best personifies the uneasy position of the host is Odysseus, who returns home to find his wife and his house under siege by unruly suitors, usurping guests who use up their host’s property and then deny him the sacred right of hospitality when he appeals to them as a beggar.

In the same vein, Aeschylus’s Agamemnon and Shakespeare’s Gloucester are hosts whose authority is forcibly seized by their guests, who ultimately take their lives. King Lear, on the other hand, meets his demise as a result of having surrendered his rightful authority to become a guest, who is then reviled as an enemy of the state. In each of these cases, hospitality is represented as a threat to the sovereign: the leader, monarch, or lord. But these leaders stand in for the more general target of hospitality, namely, the very possibility of sovereignty as an eminent personification of ipseity: the sovereignty of the state, but more importantly the sovereignty of the subject “itself.”

Odysseus is often read as a figure for the dialectical recovery of identity; he is a master who leaves his home only to return to it,
victoriously reclaiming the chez soi. His involuntary “hospitality”—the open- ing of his house to the usurping suitors—represents a sinister (but merely temporary) dispossession of his mastery, which is regained when he expels the strangers and retakes possession of what is rightfully his. Odysseus represents the pureness of an ipseity un- contaminated with false pretendants to mastery: the ipseity of the ipsissimus, as “the master himself, the only one who matters.”

Conceived in this manner, his legend is the index not only of a possible relation to hospitality, but of a certain metaphysical tradition. Gilles Deleuze sees its contours in Plato’s thought, which he identifies as the philosophical equivalent of Odysseus’s victorious assertion of his identity as the true master:
Platonism is the philosophical Odyssey. The Platonic dialectic is not a dialectic of contradiction or of contraries, but a dialectic of rivalry (amphisbetesis), dialectic of rivals or of suitors. The essence of division appears not in breadth—in the determination of the species of a genus—but in depth, in the selection of a lineage. Its function is to sort through the claims, to distinguish the true suitor from the false ones.
Or, in the words of Michel Foucault, Plato’s method distinguishes the false from the authentic not by discovering a law of true and false (which opposes truth to error, and not to false appearances), but by looking beyond it to “a model that exists so forcefully that in its presence the sham vanity of the false copy is immediately reduced to nonexistence. With the abrupt appearance of Ulysses, the eternal husband, the false suitors disappear.


To the trajectory of Odysseus, Lévinas opposes the trajectory of Abraham. If Odysseus represents the return of the self to its point of origin, Abraham models an ethics of subjectivity in which the self leaves home never to return:
The heteronomous experience we are seeking is an attitude that cannot be converted into a category, whose movement toward the Other is not recuperated through identification, and does not re- turn to its point of departure. . . .
But this would require us to think of the Work [penser l’Oeuvre] not as the apparent agitation of a content or ground [fond] that af terward remains identical to itself, in the manner of an energy that remains equal to itself through all of its transformations. Neither could we think of it as the technique whose famous negativity reduces a foreign world [un monde étranger] to a world whose alterity has been converted to my idea. Both of these conceptions continue to affirm being as identical to itself, and reduce its fundamental event to the thought that is—and here we see the ineffaceable lesson of idealism—thought of itself, thought of thought. The Work radically thought is in essence a movement of the Same toward the Other that never returns to the Same. To the myth of Ulysses returning to Ithaca, we would oppose the history of Abraham leav- ing his country forever for an unknown land, and forbidding his servant to lead even his son back to this point of departure.

In Abraham’s wake, the biblical injunction to “make the stranger native among you” (Leviticus 19:35 [NRSV]) inaugurates a relation to subjectivity defined by nomadism and dispossession, figuring strangeness as something “native” or uncannily intimate to subjectivity.
The hospitality relation concerns the crisis of what is properly “mine,” the limits of the “at home-ness” of identity. To call for an understanding of the subject as hospitality is thus to oppose to the notion of identity—with all that it implies of the self-identical, the total, and the integral—an understanding of subjectivity as foreign to itself, as nonidentical. The act of introducing a foreigner into the home thus recalls the dispossession of identity that is uncannily in ternal to identity itself, to the chez soi of having and possessing.

In almost every religious tradition, the unknown stranger or guest is understood as a manifestation of the divine. In the ancient Greek, Jewish, and Christian tradi- tions, the
principal deity (Zeus, YHWH, Christ) incarnates hospitality and evaluates the character of human hosts by appealing for hospitality disguised as a supplicant. But this also means that the offer of hospitality is motivated by the potentially sacred nature of the guest. Were the guest not potentially divine, or at least an occasion to gain recognition by the divine, the dispossession of the host by the stranger would simply imply the annihilation—and not the realization—of identity.

In the monotheist religious context, the dispossession of identity that is mandated by the ethics of hospitality is arguably precluded by its spiritual valorization, which inevitably results in a dialectical recuperation of identity on another plane (where earthly poverty translates into spiritual wealth, the meek inherit the kingdom of God, and immortality redeems the death of the faithful servant).

One could even argue that Christianity in particular entails the gradual domestication or even neutralization of divine alterity, since the godhead not only becomes less and less of an unknown (as in the exhortation to “know Jesus”), but functions increasingly to secure the faithful subject’s “true” identity even as it contests the claims of his or her “worldly” persona. We see something similar in the Native American ritual of potlatch, whose extreme version of hospitality is facilitated by an elaborate economy in which the giver gains in social prestige what he loses in material goods. The more the master gives, the more he has: because his prestations will eventually be reciprocated by others, but more importantly be- cause his prestige accrues in the act of giving. In this respect, potlatch never effects the pure “expenditure” it seems to mandate, since the precipitous surrender of goods secures the chief’s mastery in the very act of jeopardizing it. Both examples confirm the his- torical and
etymological interdependence of “host” and “master,” since the master’s identity is not so much surrendered as recuperated in another form.

As I noted earlier, the abstract notion of personal property—the ipseity or properness of the person—is originally tied to the notion of property ownership. Benveniste demonstrates that the root term poti- is the basis not only of potis, the master, but of a group of verbs (Sanskrit pátyate, Latin potior) meaning “to have power over” or “to dispose of” something. Similarly, the Latin possidere, “to possess,” is formed from the composite pot-sedere, which des- ignates the “possessor” as the one who is imprinted upon a thing.

In this semantic genealogy, self-mastery and personal identity extend into social and symbolic authority through the possession and disposal not only of inert property or chattel, but of dependents bereft of symbolic personhood: in particular the household depen- dents who are defined as the property of the master of the home. The connotations of
“lord,” “master,” and “possessor” are inti- mately bound up in one another, since the master is self-possessed only insofar as he is also possessed of material and human prop- erty. What is significant about this definition is that these posses- sions are heterogeneous with the master—owned by or subjected to him—and at the same time constitutive
of his “personal proper- ty,” his personification of identity as what is “eminently, precisely” proper to him.

The concept of the persona in Roman law came increasingly to designate not the artificial self or semblance, but its opposite: “the personal nature of the law had been established, and persona had become synonymous with the true nature of the individual”; hence in time the general “right to the persona” was recognized. From a purely contingent attribute, guaranteed solely through possessions subject to theft, loss, or legation, personhood evolved into an ontological quality, innate to the individual as a natural unity.

However, this new understanding of personhood did not en- tirely efface the more contingent conception from which it derived. Mauss notes that even after being made synonymous with the “true nature” of the individual, personhood continued to be withheld from those who were not possessed of the property that guaranteed it: “Only the slave
is excluded from it. Servus non habet personam. He has no ‘personality’ [personnalité]. He does not own his body, nor has he ancestors, name, cognomen, or personal belongings”. As in the Native American example cited above, personhood still inheres in the possession of personal property, and is annulled in the act of being made the property of another.

These accounts of the relationship between personhood and property accord with the archaic notion of the master-as-host described by Benveniste, according to which the personal possessions of the master constitute his personal identity. In other words, the master “eminently personifies” personal identity insofar as he
disposes of his possessions, just as the thief in archaic tradition acquires the personhood of a family lineage by usurping the possessions of the household, or the Roman Senator disposes of a persona through possession of the mask of his ancestor.

In place of the biblical injunction to “love thy neighbor as thyself,” Nietzsche embraces a love of the “most distant”: the foreign, the dissimilar, the unknown.

Finally, I consider the condemnation of hospitality in the books of the Hebrew prophets as an attempt to resolve its antinomial relation to monotheism. Generally writing from a position of exile and national disaster (an enforced, second-order, catastrophic “nomadism”), the prophets are increasingly wary of Israel’s relationswith strangers in the form of foreign alliances, intermarriage, idolatry, and temple prostitution. The act of hospitality is thus increasingly bound up in the problem of idolatry, or what the metaphor of Israel’s “marriage” to God figures as the wife’s adulterous “welcoming” of strangers in the place of her husband. The alignment of idolatry and adultery reflects the changing meaning of “feminine receptivity” pre- and post-Decalogue, since it casts the antinomy as a conflict between an ethics of unlimited receptivity to the Other, coded “feminine,” and the formalized laws (of hospitality, of monotheism, of identity) that are erected as a barrier against this feminization. Israel is the too-good-hostess who thereby becomes a bad wife.

The neutralization of the guest’s difference under this generalized affection, which integrates and dissipates the stranger’s strangeness, is also at work in many doctrinal interpretations of hospitality. In the words of one theologian, The practice of hospitality, the sharing of the goods of the earth with another fellow creature, the unconditional acceptance of the stranger and his integration into our life, constitute the very essentials of a eucharistic relationship with the Creator of all. By giving generously of what has been bestowed on us to the stranger, by sharing the fruits of the earth, we render to God our thanksgiving for what has been generously offered to us. The stranger becomes the pretext, the means through which we enter into eucharistic communion with the Creator. Thus, the stranger acquires a sacred character.

Exile is not just a historical moment but a state of being in which one is never “at home.” Whenever hospitality takes place, therefore, it necessarily serves as a reminder of its own impossibility.
The Israelites are never truly “hosts”—that is, self-possessed masters and proprietors—because they are always and above all “strangers” enjoying the hospitality of God. Abraham is a stranger who receives strangers, that is, a divided subject who receives the divine presence or law as a stranger to it.

The demands of the Israelites’ concrete political and historical situation call for a limitation of the infinite obligation to the stranger implied by the mythical narratives of Genesis. Israel is now a nation, defending itself against those who would want to destroy it. Honoring God now involves not only respecting his alterity and unknowability, but also maintaining the purity and inviolability of his chosen people. As a result, the boundaries between host and stranger, which in Genesis are fluid or even nonexistent, also be-come increasingly reified. In the books of the prophets, the host/ stranger relationship of the Torah, whose terms were dictated not by nationality or faith but by a structural relation (between the sedentary and the transient, the housed and the homeless), is in- creasingly displaced by the oppositional pairing of Israelite and non-Israelite, which recasts the stranger specifically as a “stranger” to the Jewish faith.

The second commandment further complicates the Israelites’ relationship to the possibility of hospitality by demanding that their relation to “strangers” respect the boundaries established by monotheistic adherence:
You shall not make for yourself an idol, whether in the form of anything that is in heaven above, or that is on the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth. You shall not bow down to them or worship them; for I the LORD your God am a jealous God, punishing children for the iniquity of the parents, to the third and fourth generation of those who reject me, but showing stead- fast love to the thousandth generation of those who love me and keep my commandments. (20:4–6)

The qualification of God’s steadfast love for his people as a “jealous” love lays the groundwork for one of the key metaphors of the Hebrew Bible, the extended conceit of Israel as the “wife” of God, bound in a monogamous marriage. But the trope of jealous love implies not only the sanctity of the marriage, but the threat of its violation: the possibility of alternate objects of desire with which God’s bride might practice infidelity. When she makes idols or worships other gods, Israel not only violates the commandment against idolatry, she also contaminates the sanctity of their marriage with “adultery.” As a result, a new avatar of the stranger emerges: the extramarital lover, a potential rival for God’s love.

The two principal words for the stranger in Hebrew—ger and zar—access a rich semantic field that attests to the complexity and ambivalence of the stranger’s position within the Israelite commu- nity. In the Torah, the word used almost exclusively to designate the stranger is ger, which denotes the alien, sojourner, or one passing through; in a more restricted sense it can name the resident alien living among the Israelites, or the convert to their faith. But in the historical and prophetic books, the word zar almost entirely replaces ger as the dominant word for the stranger.

Zar is a primary root meaning “to turn aside,” especially for lodging; hence by implication the “stranger,” “foreigner,” or “alien.” Zar is the stranger stranger, the more foreign or alien of the two. It also designates the more general category of foreignness, signifying “strange,” “profane,” or even “strange god.” As an active participle it can mean “to commit adultery,” “to go astray,” or “to estrange,” or may designate an “estranged thing or woman.”
After Genesis, the act of receiving strangers is increasingly bound up in the problem of idolatry. Any act of welcoming the stranger runs the risk that the “divine” visitor may turn out to be one of God’s rivals, that the zar might be not only a “stranger,” but a “strange god.” The Deuteronomist draws upon this expanded sense of zar in his indictment of the Israelites, who betrayed YHWH’s jealous love by consorting with idols: “They stirred him to jeal- ousy with strange gods [zarim]; with abominable practices they provoked him to anger. They sacrificed to demons which were no gods, to gods [elohim] they had never known” (32:16–17).

Accordingly, Israel’s “adultery” marks the problematic intersection of two competing discourses: the obligations of a “jealous” monotheism and the pluralist exigencies of the hospitality act it- self, which presuppose the unknowability of the guest and a cele- bration of his alterity. But the figuration of Israel as an adulterous wife also suggests that her wayward relation to God’s jealousy is uniquely “feminine.”

Ezekiel is one of a number of pro- phetic authors who accuse Israel of adulterously receiving strangers instead of her husband. But in this case, the charge of
stranger- worship extends not only to idolatry, but to the act of hospitality as a reception of human strangers:
You played the whore with the Egyptians, your lustful neighbors, multiplying your whoring, to provoke me to anger. Therefore I stretched out my hand against you, reduced your rations, and gave you up to the will of your enemies, the daughters of the Philistines, who were ashamed of your lewd behavior. You played the whore with the Assyrians, because you were insatiable; you played the whore with them, and still you were not satisfied. You multiplied your whoring with Chaldea, the land of merchants; and even with this you were not satisfied. . . . Adulterous wife, who receives strangers [zarim] instead of her husband! (Ezekiel 16:26–32)

“Receiving strangers” is now an act of adulterous sin in and of itself and not just a subset or implied ancestry of the worship of foreign idols. The reception of strangers is now a recognizable sin and not simply an ambivalently coded but fundamentally sacred act. The inclusion of “neighbors” and “foreigners” in the catalogue of adulterous lovers translates the specific condemnation of the worship of foreign gods into a more general denunciation of all instances of consorting with or paying tribute to strangers. Any re- ceptivity to the foreign, as such, now risks being determined as an infidelity to Israel’s divine husband. Ezekiel’s text identifies three possible connotations of “stranger love,” all of which are closely related: the welcoming of strangers (hospitality as such), the idolatrous worship of foreign gods, and engaging in acts of prostitution (allowing strangers to “enter”).

In her adulterous errancy, Israel surpasses even the crimes of those sinners of legend, the Sodomites and the Samarians, whose wickedness has already incurred God’s wrath and led to their de- struction.
Ezekiel characterizes Israel and her traditional enemies as feminized “sister cities,” whose different sins are encapsulat- ed in their
manner of receiving strangers. Samaria’s crime is the idolatrous worship of foreign idols, in the form of the golden calf; Sodom’s is the mistreatment of guests. But Jerusalem’s adulterous reception of strangers makes the iniquity of her sinning “sisters” pale in comparison..

For Nietzsche, Christianity is the dominant expression of European nihilism. But he also envi- sions its abolition through the “ultimate nihilism,” the logic of the Eternal Return. As the ultimate nihilism, the Eternal Return is also, presumably, the most uncanny of all guests: uncanny first of all to Christian nihilism itself, whose cult of monotheism and the positive principle of identity that depends upon it precludes any sense of the other—or for that matter of the self—as an unknown. In Nietzsche’s wake, the hospitality relation once
again becomes the focus of an attempt to maintain an aporetic relation to the un- known in other than compensatory, salvational modes: an attempt that paradoxically aligns itself with the concerns of ancient, “divine” hospitality.

Like Klossowski’s chance stranger, whose seizure of the master’s personal property is both illegitimate and fortuitous, the Eternal Return as the “uncanniest of guests” dissolves its host in a way that is both destructive and liberating. If the monotheist God reifies not only subjective boundaries, but also the unknown itself, then the death of God allows the unknown to manifest itself in other forms. But although Nietzsche sees the “murder” of God as essential to this possibility, he also warns that, even “after” God, we run the risk of
preserving or instituting principles that will not transvalue nihilistic Christian values, but simply create new and equally insidious ones. For the transvaluation of all values to be complete, he argues, we must overcome not only the monotheist understanding of God, but also the positive idea of personal identity that depends upon it.

Although we tend to think of personhood as an innate, ontic property, Nietzsche and Klossowski both emphasize its often unacknowledged grounding in Christian theology. For example, Paul famously reconceives personhood as a universal attribute by identifying it with baptism in Christ: “There is neither Jew nor Greek, neither slave nor free, neither male nor female; for you are all one person [είς] in Christ Jesus” (Galatians 3:28–29). But although this verse seems to posit the inalienability of personhood, it actually makes it
contingent upon playing host to the oneness of Christ’s person, bestows a proper personhood by dwelling in one’s heart.

This is no doubt what Nietzsche has in mind when he has Zarathustra declare that human beings are merely wearing the “mask” of the monotheist God, which gives the illusion of a co- herent, privative self. In his study of the concept of the “per- son,” Marcel Mauss notes the Roman notion of the person—the persona—was derived from the idea of the mask, and specifically the wax image of the dead ancestor.

The legal concept of the “per- son” designated the one who possessed this mask, whether legiti- mately or not. Although Roman law gradually came to associate the concept of the persona with the “true nature” of the individual, its original identification with the mask also gave rise to another conception of the persona, as a simulated, artificial, or even duplicitous “mask” of the self.14 Despite the best efforts of the church fathers, the survival of this genealogy continued to hint at the uncomfortable proximity between ontological personhood and its repudiated siblings, the simulacrum or theatrical personnage.

In his early study of the god, The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche approaches under the aegis of myth what he later pursues by following what he calls “the thread of the body,” investigating the “impulses” that take possession of his being and dissolve his self-consciousness. What his quest re- veals is that to “welcome Dionysus” is to play host to the fragmented body of the drives, which dwells within “us” like a foreign agent, undermining the integrity of the self or ego. But Nietzsche also shares with Freud and Lacan an unswerving devotion to the ethics of living from the site of this fragmented body, without the support of narcissism and the unified image of the self it upholds.

Zarathustra says of the Self, “he lives in your body, he is your body”. But although the Self unifies and lends coherence to the body, it is but an “image,” an artificial construct imposed on the subject from the “outside”:
What are we ourselves? Are we not also nothing but an image? A something within us, modifications of ourselves that have become conscious? Our Self of which we are conscious: is it not an image as well, something outside of us, something external, on the outside? We never touch anything but an image, and not ourselves, not our Self. Are we not strangers to ourselves and also as close to ourselves as our neighbour?" [Tracy McNulty, The Hostess]

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"All that exists is just and unjust and equally justified in both." [Aeschylus, Prometheus]

"The history of everyday is constituted by our habits. ... How have you lived today?" [N.]

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PostSubject: Re: Brahman Brahman EmptyFri Feb 01, 2013 8:54 pm

That Heesterman book sounds really interesting. I am continuing the Evola book on Buddhism, in english. English on that level is difficult for me, but I understand it better now. I heard of the potlatch before. I think some indian or mayan tribes have it too. The Kabbala has a dynamic like that of course as well, with the Adam Kadmon. Fallen or broken creator, a fallen creation, that needs to get back into the cosmic order. But we want to get away from Judeo-Christianity as I understand it. So their means might not be the best ones. I have the Website Kathodos in print. And the Author claims Mahayana Buddhism came from China. Or was influenced from there?... I always thought that was the Judeo-Christian influence on tibetan Buddhism. So much to learn. I also would like to know about the Vajrayana origins. Since I do believe in oral transmissions, whereas he puts all faith in the earliest written sutras. I have seen (experienced) some of the Vajrayana means "work". He is really metaphysical. On his aryan Blog he explains how Buddha statues are depictions of Mara (of course!). Since the Buddha is non-physical. So the physical statues (like bodies) must be all Mara. (I am paraphrasing. The article is really good.) I am at the moment trying to find a balance between spirituality and intellectualism. I think you have definitely proven, how unbalanced I am at least away from the intellectual understanding of some parts of spirituality. (I started to learn about Esotericism the western hermetic way. Through Thorwald Dethlefsen, who lived in India for a while and was real good in drawing analogies, but he fell for the Kabbala in the end.) I am not in line with all your views and quotes, but some are really on top. Like the Heesterman. Evola too goes back 10.000 years BC or earlier even in India. My question is though if everything in the past must be superior to what followed. Sacrificing people for example. Spengler has an idea of cycles. So there would be ups and downs. Civilizations, that rise and fall. I think it is very useful for an understanding to know the history as far back as possible though. I also got the Coulanges book so I will be busy shattering my worldview. And when I am all in bits and pieces, I will have to find a guru to put me together again. :-) You're not so bad, keep up the good work. It was actually in part you, that made me sign up for this forum and I deserve all the "love" I get from you. What exactly do you object to regarding the Shape of Ancient Thought by McEvilley? Kathodoswebmaster calls it the "Metaphysics book of the decade", Evolas Revolt against the modern world only takes second place along with another title. Satyralways puts a lot of emphasis on non-absolutism and the dynamic (change/flux) of everything. Some of the modells look static, but they are in fact not. From my first esoteric understanding the basic east/west difference is, that the east are internalizing more. The West still "sacrifices", but to what "deities"/ideals? That's the problem. With Buddhism in the West there is really a lot of room for discussion. There is another title:
"Cult of Nothingness" that is recommended and so I'll post it here. I read a bit in Hesse's Siddartha and it "felt" wrong. He drew a suicidal Buddha in the part I read. Nietzsche's Buddha isn't the "real" one either from my understanding and this author agrees. ( I hope it's okay to post it here, since it is all later than "Brahmanism", I highlighted two paragraphs):

;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;

"Review by David R. Loy:

In May this year media headlines announced the discovery that Buddhists are happier. Smaller print summarized the results of new research into the effects of meditation on brain activity, behavior, and even immune responses to flu vaccine. Richard Davidson, director of the Laboratory for Affective Neuroscience at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, and a participant in Dharamsala meetings with the Dalai Lama, used new scanning techniques to examine the brain activity of experienced meditators. MRI scanners and EEGs showed dramatic changes in brain function, including high activity in brain centers associated with positive emotions. Similar results were also achieved with new meditators. Although still provisional, these findings led the philosopher Owen Flanagan to comment in New Scientist magazine: "The most reasonable hypothesis is that there's something about conscientious Buddhist practice that results in the kind of happiness we all seek."[1]

Such scientific results show a rather different perception of Buddhism than the understanding that horrified Westerners throughout most of the nineteenth century. Buddhism today is usually seen as a kind of pragmatic therapy that cures or reduces suffering, but from approximately 1820 to 1890--the period of focus for Droit's book--Europe was haunted by the nightmare of an alternative religion that denied existence and recommended annihilation. The Cult of Nothingness summarizes and analyzes the history of this (mis)understanding. He concludes that it had less to do with the rudimentary state of Buddhist studies during that period than with Europe's fears about its own incipient nihilism, which would later ripen into the horrors of the twentieth century. "Thinking they were talking about the Buddha, Westerners were talking about themselves" (p. 21).

At the end of the eighteenth century, new translations of Indian texts were exciting European intellectuals, giving rise to hopes for another Renaissance greater than the one that had resulted from the late-medieval rediscovery of Greek texts. But it never happened. About 1820, when scholarly research first clarified the distinction from Brahmanism, "Buddhism" became constructed as a religion that, amazingly, worshiped nothingness, and European commentators reacted in horror.

In their descriptions of nirvana, earlier scholars such as Francis Buchanan and Henry Thomas Colebrooke had been careful to deny that it was equivalent to annihilation. Their influence, however, was overwhelmed by the philosophical impact of Hegel and later the unsurpassed authority of Eugene Burnouf at the Coll=ge de France. Hegel established the strong link with Nichts that would endure throughout most of the century. Instead of benefiting from the best scholarship then available, he relied on earlier sources such as de Guignes and the Abbots Banier and Grosier, evidently because their views of Buddhism fit better into his equation of pure Being with pure Nothingness. In Hegel's system this equation signified the advent of interiority, a "lack of determination" that was not really atheistic or nihilistic in the modern sense--more like the negative theology of Rhineland mystics such as Meister Eckhart. Later, Burnouf's Introduction a l'histoire du Buddhisme indien (1844) was immensely influential because it provided the first rigorous study of the Buddha's teachings, thus taking Buddhist studies to a new level of sophistication, but one which firmly established the nihilistic specter: despite making cautious qualifications due to the West's still-limited knowledge, Burnouf did not hesitate to identify nirvana with total annihilation.

Burnouf's scholarly objectivity was soon supplemented by apologetic and missionary ardor. Catholic preachers such as Ozanam declared that, behind his serene mask, the Buddha was Satan himself in a new incarnation. The Buddha's cult of nothingness aroused in Felix Neve's soul the need to liberate Buddhist peoples from their errors, weakness, and immobility. Victor Cousins, who played a major role in establishing philosophical education in mid-century France, and who proclaimed that Sanskrit texts were worthy of Western philosophical attention, nevertheless followed Burnouf in reacting against the Buddhist system: it was not only an anti-religion but a counterworld, a threat to order. His follower Barthelemy Saint-Hilaire took a further step and denied that such a "deplorable and absurd" faith could be philosophically relevant, even asking whether such a strange phenomenon meant that human nature in India "is still the same nature we feel within ourselves," since Buddhism's "gloomy meaning" led only to "moral suicide" (pp. 122-23). Ernest Renan called Buddha "the atheistic Christ of India" and attacked his revolting "Gospel of Nihilism" (p. 120).

Schopenhauer discovered in Buddhism many of his favorite themes--renunciation, compassion, negation of the will to live--but relatively late, so, according to Droit, Buddhism had no significant influence on his system. However, his annexation of Buddhist principles brought the Buddhist challenge back to Europe, from missionary conversion to counteracting home-grown nihilism. Ever the philosopher, however, Schopenhauer was careful to say that nirvana could only be nothingness "for us," since the standpoint of our own existence does not allow us to say anything more about it. Would that other commentators had been so sensible!

The nihilistic understanding of Buddhism had a significant impact on Arthur de Gobineau's Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races (1853), which would become enormously influential for the Nazis and other twentieth-century racists. For Gobineau, humanity was rushing to perdition and nothingness due to degeneration caused by intermingling of the races. He viewed Buddhism as the effort of an inferior people to overthrow the racially superior Aryan Brahmins. The failure of this attempt--the fact that Buddhism was largely eliminated from India--was somewhat inconsistent with his own historical pessimism, which accepted the inevitability of decline; but it may have encouraged the Nazis to attempt their own program of extermination for the sake of racial purity.

Nietzsche, too, accepted the view of Buddhism as aspiring to nothingness, although for him it was the similarity with Christianity, not the difference, that was the problem. Despite the undoubted value of Buddhism as a moderate and hygienic way of living that denied transcendence and viewed the world from more rigorous psychological and physiological perspectives, in the end the choice is between Buddhism, Schopenhauer, India, weakness, and peaceful inactivity, or strength, conflict, Europe, pain, and tragedy. Buddhism's spread in Europe was unfortunate, Nietzsche believed, since "Nostalgia for nothingness is the negation of tragic wisdom, its opposite" (p. 148).

About 1864 the annihilationist view of Buddhism began to decline. Carl F. Koppen's The Religion of the Buddha (2 vols., 1857-59), very influential in the 1860s and 70s, emphasized the Buddha's ethical revolution, which affirmed a human deliverance and proclaimed human equality. Although literary fascination with the worship of nothingness continued, by the early 1890s emphasis was on Buddhism as a path of knowledge and wisdom, a "neo-Buddhist" view attacked by a still-active Burnouf. In place of Christian apologetics, there was a growing tendency to think of different religions as converging, as Vivekananda argued at the 1893 World Parliament of Religions in Chicago (although elsewhere he imagined Buddhism as responsible for various spiritual degenerations). As Droit summarizes: "The cult of nothingness was ending.... The time of wars was soon to come. Another cult of nothingness was beginning" (p. 160).

He argues persuasively that the issue at stake was always Europe's own identity. With "Buddhism" Europe constructed a mirror in which it dared not recognize itself. (Here perhaps Droit could have strengthened his case with some more reflections on Darwin, the death of God, and Europe's own hopes for/fears of a religion of Reason without transcendence.)

"When the question of the Buddha's atheism arose, it was the atheism of the Europeans that was really in question. No one really believed, and almost no one ever said, that the beliefs of the Buddhists on the other side of the world were going to come and wreak havoc among the souls of the West. It was not a conversion, a corrosion, a 'contamination' of any kind that was threatening, coming from outside. It was in Europe itself that the enemy, and the danger, were to be found." (p. 163)

This was not only a threat to the foundations of one's personal belief-system, but a challenge that threatened to undermine social order. "The nothingness of order corresponded to the nothingness of being. Once again, this nothingness was not the equivalent of a pure and simple absence. It was supposed to undo and disorganize. It was dangerous because it shattered, it leveled, it instigated anarchy" (p. 165).

Tragically, the decline of this nihilistic view of Buddhism was accompanied by the unprecedented triumph of a more active nihilism in the following century, with well over a hundred million war-dead, two-thirds of them civilian non-combatants.

Today, to say it again, Buddhism for us has become a pragmatic and non-metaphysical kind of therapy that reduces suffering. But how confident should we be about this view, given how well it reflects the postmodern West's own pragmatic, anti-metaphysical, therapeutic self-understanding? If we cannot leap over our own shadow, must we resign ourselves to "misinterpretations" of Buddhism that always reflect our own prejudices? Or is "Buddhism" better understood as the still-continuing history of its interpretations? Interpretations that must reflect our prejudices because they reflect our own needs.

The Cult of Nothingness concludes with a 65-page chronological bibliography of Western works on Buddhism, most of it derived from a more extensive (15,073 titles!) bibliography compiled by Shinsho Hanayama and published by the Hokuseido Press in 1961. Droit claims that his own bibliography is almost complete for 1638-1860, omitting only more specialized works on archaeology, philology, etc. for 1860-1890. The translation is clear and fluent, although I have not compared it with the French original. And, although not a specialist in this field, I do not doubt that this work is indispensable to anyone studying the history of the Western reception of Buddhism.

Note

[1]. The research results are summarized in Dharma Life 21 (Autumn 2003): pp. 8-9.

Citation: David R. Loy. Review of Droit, Roger-Pol, The Cult of Nothingness: The Philosophers and the Buddha. H-Buddhism, H-Net Reviews. December, 2003."

;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;

I will read your other posts too, plus the post on Heraclitus. Thanks again.
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PostSubject: Re: Brahman Brahman EmptySat Feb 02, 2013 8:07 pm

East: Giving and receiving
West: Hospitality

I have witnessed these elements too. The east is more focused on Time and it's changes. In this way Heraclitus may be somewhat eastern and Heidegger. Whereas the West is focused on Space.
Sloterdijks Spheres Trilogy was an attempt to write "Being and Space" as an answer to Heideggers "Being and Time". Sloterdijk somewhat captures the Western spirit in his books very well I think.

That is an interesting way to look at the East/West difference.

I am more interested in time epoches (so eastern, but in a logical western way to look at it). In this way I admire Spengler. East and West, as of India and Greece become blurred in their differences once one focusses on the time periods and the parallels.

In his list the culture in India started a few hundred years earlier than that of Greece. So the phases of spring, summer, fall and winter, all occur earlier in India than in Greece (Rise and Fall of a Culture/Civilization).

I haven't read much of Spengler, but if you can get that chart! (There are about 4 or five of them!) I really recommend them! I'd get them scanned for this Forum, but only have the German version.

One can really look at those charts also without value judgements. I can analyze, WHY tibetan Buddhism is so popular today, because it is analog to the "winter" phase of that Indian Civilization. So I don't bother to fight against it. I save my energy and ride this train, as long as it feels comfortable. But do my own research as well. Same goes for Greece. Plato appeared in "late fall" of the hellenic civilization. Epicur appeared in Winter, amongst others I know even less about.

It'd be great if someone could scan these Spengler charts for the Forum and put them here. (I've searched for them on the Web, but didn't find them.)

Around 1900 there was still more interest in the Upanishads even or original Buddhism, that too "declined". For me these Spengler insides help me save energy. Heraclitus is of course of a nobler age. 500 B.C. in Greece. The Buddha himself was already in a later phase of India 500 B.C.. So they cannot be compared on the same terms. To find an Indian Analogy to Heraclitus, one would have to look into the Upanishads. Even "nobler" in India were the Vedas, since they stood at the very beginning.

So I would like to hold back on these value judgements of "nobler", "lesser" and replace them by "suitable for a certain day and age". Tibetan Buddhism and Neoplatonism are the leading dogmas in analogy in India&Greece to our current phase in the Western (Abendland) Civilization. This is why they are the leading paradigms. So it is very useful to study earlier periods, but to reach other people one would have to go by these paradigms. Adapt. To not fall into complete elitist detachment.

But Tibetan Buddhism would be in this listing the latest of the late winter period. Unless one would/could see it as the beginning of a new culture, when the transition occured from India to Tibet.
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PostSubject: Re: Brahman Brahman EmptyMon Feb 04, 2013 4:36 pm

Laconian wrote:
East: Giving and receiving
West: Hospitality

I have witnessed these elements too. The east is more focused on Time and it's changes. In this way Heraclitus may be somewhat eastern and Heidegger. Whereas the West is focused on Space.
Sloterdijks Spheres Trilogy was an attempt to write "Being and Space" as an answer to Heideggers "Being and Time". Sloterdijk somewhat captures the Western spirit in his books very well I think.

That is an interesting way to look at the East/West difference.

Yes. You could say the Dancing Shiva [Nataraja - Lord of the Dance] or the Bacchic Dionysian is about the destruction of space and concentration of rhythm, time, the immediate, the abyss, merging. It is about intensity and thrusting "into" the "wells" of life - deeper and deeper. its about creating inner folds - Space ironically.
Zazen is typically Heraclitean.
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The Apollonian is about Space, Distance, Conquest, Thrusting "out of", "outward", "out through" space; its about Duration of life ironically.

Quote :
I am more interested in time epoches (so eastern, but in a logical western way to look at it). In this way I admire Spengler. East and West, as of India and Greece become blurred in their differences once one focusses on the time periods and the parallels.

Yes, if you look at it as one Indo-Europe for a moment, then McEvilley's presentation is beautiful.
The lines go blur.

Quote :
One can really look at those charts also without value judgements. I can analyze, WHY tibetan Buddhism is so popular today, because it is analog to the "winter" phase of that Indian Civilization. So I don't bother to fight against it. I save my energy and ride this train, as long as it feels comfortable. But do my own research as well. Same goes for Greece. Plato appeared in "late fall" of the hellenic civilization. Epicur appeared in Winter, amongst others I know even less about.

Ah. I finally FINALLY understand your conundrum, and your constant grasping with Spengler and Tibetan Buddhism, and the need to understand this decline of civilization. HAHA you are a hedonist to the core.
Now, I know where you're coming from. Thanks.
Only 1968 is left to be unravelled. pirat

Quote :
So I would like to hold back on these value judgements of "nobler", "lesser" and replace them by "suitable for a certain day and age".

Sit on the fence, waiting for the day you'll be ready to call a rose a rose.

Its one thing to take a stand and then apply perspectives like tools, on/off switches, knowing when to use what, which ideology to bring forward and which to keep back. One can afford and is able to do this only Because value-judgements have been passed. There's hierarchy.
Its another thing to not arrive at some conclusion too quickly and you Actively partake of a slower consciousness, to steady yourself.
Its still a whole other thing to wallow in total relativity waiting for the "right time" to announce itself... Kairos is Seized, is even Made, not given.

Quote :
So it is very useful to study earlier periods, but to reach other people one would have to go by these paradigms. Adapt. To not fall into complete elitist detachment.

Reach other people for what?

What are the disadvantages of complete elitist detachment? What would such snobs be missing?

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"All that exists is just and unjust and equally justified in both." [Aeschylus, Prometheus]

"The history of everyday is constituted by our habits. ... How have you lived today?" [N.]

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PostSubject: Re: Brahman Brahman EmptyMon Feb 04, 2013 4:44 pm

-

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"ἐδιζησάμην ἐμεωυτόν." [Heraclitus]

"All that exists is just and unjust and equally justified in both." [Aeschylus, Prometheus]

"The history of everyday is constituted by our habits. ... How have you lived today?" [N.]

*Become clean, my friends.*


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PostSubject: Re: Brahman Brahman EmptyMon Feb 04, 2013 4:50 pm

Lyssa wrote:
Laconian wrote:
That Heesterman book sounds really interesting. I am continuing the Evola book on Buddhism, in english.

Whaaaa...?! After all that bravado you pulled out saying, you were only going to read the original scriptures and you didn't Need to read Evola  Razz

Embarassed

Ahh, nevermind nevermind.

Quote :
I heard of the potlatch before. I think some indian or mayan tribes have it too. The Kabbala has a dynamic like that of course as well, with the Adam Kadmon. Fallen or broken creator, a fallen creation, that needs to get back into the cosmic order.

You expose the level of your intelligence here. Yes, you are on the right path.
I would never even think of correcting you on silly details like Judeo-Xt. edenic singularity and the excess-regulatory constant sacrificial universe of the potlatch people. Nope.
You carry on.

Quote :
But we want to get away from Judeo-Christianity as I understand it. So their means might not be the best ones.

WE?

Who's that?

Are you in that flavour of the week now? Inclin.....ing.... this way...

Thou art a spleeny ill-nurtured bladder!  tongue


Quote :
I have the Website Kathodos in print. And the Author claims Mahayana Buddhism came from China. Or was influenced from there?... I always thought that was the Judeo-Christian influence on tibetan Buddhism. So much to learn.

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Quote :
I also would like to know about the Vajrayana origins. Since I do believe in oral transmissions, whereas he puts all faith in the earliest written sutras. I have seen (experienced) some of the Vajrayana means "work". He is really metaphysical. On his aryan Blog he explains how Buddha statues are depictions of Mara (of course!). Since the Buddha is non-physical. So the physical statues (like bodies) must be all Mara. (I am paraphrasing. The article is really good.) I am at the moment trying to find a balance between spirituality and intellectualism. I think you have definitely proven, how unbalanced I am at least away from the intellectual understanding of some parts of spirituality. (I started to learn about Esotericism the western hermetic way. Through Thorwald Dethlefsen, who lived in India for a while and was real good in drawing analogies, but he fell for the Kabbala in the end.) I am not in line with all your views and quotes, but some are really on top.

I like Kathodos because he presents Buddha's views and the texts in their close original. He personally, and his personal neo-platonic anti-racialist-aryanism is not my kind. He likes to keep it "pure" and "bloodless".
I love his rants against those new-age buddhist faggots though.

Twerpp, such vanity! I didn't have to prove anything about you; you expose your own imbalance.


Quote :
Like the Heesterman. Evola too goes back 10.000 years BC or earlier even in India. My question is though if everything in the past must be superior to what followed. Sacrificing people for example. Spengler has an idea of cycles. So there would be ups and downs. Civilizations, that rise and fall. I think it is very useful for an understanding to know the history as far back as possible though. I also got the Coulanges book so I will be busy shattering my worldview.

I can't wait.
I love debris.

Quote :
And when I am all in bits and pieces, I will have to find a guru to put me together again. :-)

No, no. Just Walk like an Egyptian.
Get a saviour to come find you! Ex-ploy-t.....Twerp. Exploit.
No

Quote :
You're not so bad


I come apart like shoe-laces when someone compliments; you shouldn't. I'm really fragile.

Quote :
keep up the good work.

You go "Cut. And Action...". And then I'll know its my turn now to pay you back a compliment.  

Quote :
It was actually in part you, that made me sign up for this forum

Yea, I know. You don't have to say.
As if someone could resist my prose. pffff

Quote :
and I deserve all the "love" I get from you.

Nietzsche's camel metamorphosizing into a lion.... needs Spirit. Not everyone who goes into the desert of their solitude makes it. Some come out worse than before. Wisdom is knowing your limitations and exploiting this knowledge.
See, even if I gave you the best or the worst, you still wouldn't know "how" to "take". You only receive.

Quote :
What exactly do you object to regarding the Shape of Ancient Thought by McEvilley?

I actually recommend the book; its a fantastic study of Indo-Greek philosophical parallels. Its beautiful "theoretically". He tries to undo the one-sided Western view of Greek hegemony, by tracing what Greece took from others and what Greece lent to others, and the shape of this influence on ancient thoughts.
I'm not interested in this kind of politics - because these will in the end only remain conjectures.
My objection is he makes the cultural interactivity and mutual influence for a case against any Aryan Invasion theory.

Quote :
Kathodoswebmaster calls it the "Metaphysics book of the decade", Evolas Revolt against the modern world only takes second place along with another title. Satyralways puts a lot of emphasis on non-absolutism and the dynamic (change/flux) of everything. Some of the modells look static, but they are in fact not. From my first esoteric understanding the basic east/west difference is, that the east are internalizing more. The West still "sacrifices", but to what "deities"/ideals? That's the problem. With Buddhism in the West there is really a lot of room for discussion.

Was it Dugin or Sunic, someone suggested east-west is quickly losing relevance. New memes have overtaken this obsolete division.
Preservation of Whites has changed this into two blocks: Values over Value block, and Value [globalization] vs. Values [traditionalists] block.
For now, its going to be confusion and ugly and coarse and broad-inclusivity like that. And it should be exactly like that... a dust-storm where no one can see, one must even keep it up, keep people blind, till you are ready for when the dust settles and who's who will inevitably stand out clearly.

Quote :
There is another title:
"Cult of Nothingness" that is recommended and so I'll post it here. I read a bit in Hesse's Siddartha and it "felt" wrong. He drew a suicidal Buddha in the part I read. Nietzsche's Buddha isn't the "real" one either from my understanding and this author agrees. ( I hope it's okay to post it here, since it is all later than "Brahmanism", I highlighted two paragraphs):

Loy is not rigorous about Nietzsche. I don't have the time to get into this.
Books by Joan Stambaugh are better than Loy.
I'm yet to read Graham Parkes 'Nietzsche and Asian Thought'; he was recommended, no idea.

Nietzsche is spot on about Buddha and Buddhism even when he didn't have access to original texts like Evola.
Nietzsche just went with his instincts; I don't disagree with anything he's said abt. Buddhism always given the contexts he places them. I've already discussed this here elsewhere.

Quote :
I will read your other posts too, plus the post on Heraclitus. Thanks again.

You should. Because I only write them for you. ; )

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"ἐδιζησάμην ἐμεωυτόν." [Heraclitus]

"All that exists is just and unjust and equally justified in both." [Aeschylus, Prometheus]

"The history of everyday is constituted by our habits. ... How have you lived today?" [N.]

*Become clean, my friends.*


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PostSubject: Re: Brahman Brahman EmptyMon Feb 11, 2013 12:34 pm

Plotinus Veritas (Webmaster of Aryan Buddhist Blog and Kathodos):




Apophatic Theology:
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PostSubject: Re: Brahman Brahman EmptyMon Feb 11, 2013 12:44 pm

When he started the blog back in 2004, he in fact argued Buddhism was an ontology, and Not any kind of theology. Looks like his Plotinian studies have taken him in a different direction.
Its good to note.

Thanks for posting.

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"All that exists is just and unjust and equally justified in both." [Aeschylus, Prometheus]

"The history of everyday is constituted by our habits. ... How have you lived today?" [N.]

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PostSubject: Re: Brahman Brahman EmptyTue Feb 12, 2013 9:40 am

Satyr wrote:

Explain why the Greeks explored and settled around the Mediterranean, some accounts have them venturing up towards England, and how later Europeans explore and settle all over the world, when in the east, despite the huge populations, they go nowhere.

Even the webmaster of aryan buddhist blog (youtuber: kathodosdotcom), states that all indian intellectuals move from old indian cultural studies to Greek philosophers, because these are more systematic. I hope I have enough intellectual capacity, but this might be my direction too. (Starting with Plotinus next month. To transcend my lesser Gnosticism, at least the nihilistic parts.) Even if you compare the paganism that Coulanges describes in his book, you see the difference to the most ancient aryan text of India the Rig Veda, where the sacrifices are to Brahman, and not to ones ancestors. So there is more "system"(logic)/politics/order in Greece already, even in the most ancient times. That's why Greece is actually very unpopular in modernity (even Socrates and Plato and the later Philosophers, not just Heraclitus) and Indian Religion and Buddhism are employed easily for new-age-an exploitations of and by judeo-christian rejects and atheists/agnostics in the west. Greece is too dry for modernity. (As original Buddhism would be too, why modern Buddhism is the opposite of "original" early Buddhism). The West is more intellectual than the East. The East is more feminine, intuitive. Which is also a "dark side", Westerners shy away from (especially males). Which leads to overly rational hypermasculinity and detachement from emotions.
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PostSubject: Re: Brahman Brahman EmptySun Feb 17, 2013 4:34 pm

Laconian wrote:
Even if you compare the paganism that Coulanges describes in his book, you see the difference to the most ancient aryan text of India the Rig Veda, where the sacrifices are to Brahman, and not to ones ancestors. So there is more "system"(logic)/politics/order in Greece already, even in the most ancient times.

You have No idea what you are talking about. Its not as simplistic as you make it out, like that.

For the ones who want it quick, Evola is always there differentiating the two paths - Devayana [solar path of the Gods: "I am Brahman-become"] and Pitriyana [lunar path of the Fathers: The Genius of the hearth].
To Evola, the former symbolized the Polar center of an Impersonal Individuality[i.e. transcendental of all mundane personality where one had not become a "law" unto oneself], and the latter symbolized the site of the Genii-Daemonic or the power In the Fides, Sraddha [skt. 'devotio'] which fueled the Impersonal. See his Metaphysics of War.

Laconian blabs that the Vedas record the sacrifice to the 'Gods', and not to one's ancestors, but the 'god' and the chief of the gods Indra is praised as the 'Engenderer of the Aryans', Kinsman and Hero of the Aryans, their pride; he who shattered the forts of the enemies. This historic Aryan Invader was poeticized as storm 'god' or 'strength of the senses', 'thundering inertia breaker', 'the hero's psychic force', etc.

Quote :
"Hero, let hostile spirits sleep, and every gentler genius wake..." [RV, 1.29]

The Greeks and Vedics in fact have had a similar, and common-I.E. evolution of how these two paths came about. Here's a passage from one of my favourite scholars Gregory Nagy (whenever I read him, he takes me to a different era...):

Nagy wrote:
"Suffice it now to add another overt comparandum besides Indic mánas- on one side and Greek ménos on the other: the Indic word pitŕ̥- 'ancestor' is directly cognate with the Greek element patro- of Patro-kléēs, a name that literally means 'he who has the glory [kléos] of the ancestors [patéres]. In view of Erwin Rohde's observation that the Funeral of Patroklos in the Iliad bears the distinct features of hero cult and that the cult of heroes is itself an institution that evolved from the worship of ancestors, we may recover an Indo-European theme.
I cite Rohde's thesis that the cult of heroes was a highly evolved transformation of the worship of ancestors—a transformation that took place within the social context of the polis. This thesis, perhaps most appealing from the viewpoint of cultural anthropology, allows room for considering the constituent elements of hero cults to go back far beyond the eighth century. In other words, we can posit a lengthy prehistory for not only the epics of heroes but also the cults of heroes, with this qualification... The strong eighth-century upsurge in the local cults of heroes can thus be viewed as a phenomenon parallel to—rather than derivative from—the pan-Hellenic epics of heroes, namely, the Iliad and Odyssey.

Thus the ideological heritage of Greek heroes may still in principle be reconstructed as Indo-European in character.
Both the Iliad and the Odyssey reveal a pervasive theme that implicitly tells of a hero's parallelism, not only in character but also in action, with a corresponding god. This theme is particularly manifest in the case of Achilles and Apollo in the Iliad. For example, both the hero and the god have mênis 'anger' that inflicts álgea 'pains' so as to be a loigós 'devastation' for the Achaeans. Moreover, the hero and the god are traditionally represented as look-alikes, for example both appearing unshorn in the manner of a koûros 'uninitiated male'. Their physical parallelism has led Walter Burken to describe Achilles as a Doppelgänger of Apollo. We see here a remarkable analogue to the five epic heroes known as the Pāṇḍava-s in the Indic Mahābhārata, heroes whose parallelism with corresponding gods (Dharma, Vāyu, Indra, and the two Aśvin-s) has been traced in detail by Dumézil.

In Greek epic there is a consistent pattern of mutual antagonism between a god and the hero who is parallel to him, Moreover, this pattern of antagonism on the level of myth is matched by a pattern of symbiosis on the level of cult.
...The claim can be made, then, that the themes associated with the major Homeric heroes do indeed match the themes associated with gods, and that Dumézil’s doubts about the applicability of his reconstructions to Greek epics can in the end be dispelled. Moreover, since the Greek evidence shows parallelisms of god and hero attested even on the level of cult, Dumézil’s vision of epic as structured by myth may even be extended one level further: from epic to myth to ritual."
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1.

In other words, in a kinship society, where there existed memetic solidarity, an ancestor who stood out and accomplished extraordinary feats was received as a Hero of the Whole kinship community, and this Hero was venerated as one of the 'Gods'.
So you have a natural pagan worship of the "Gods" as the elemental forces of nature [sun, moon, river, etc.], and heroic ancestors merging into the idea of Gods for being God-like.
This is Devayana. The path of the Unmoved-mover or the 'Brahman' - the aggressive swelling force of one's psyche becoming 'absolute' law with nothing above it; permitting nothing above it. This was the Heroic Solar Path, an Immortal-path. - Sacrificing to the Brahman and the Gods, Was! sacrificing to one's Ancestors.

The very First, most ancient verse of the Rig begins with sacrifice to the fire as one would to one's father:

Quote :
Quote :
"To thee, dispeller of the night, O Agni, day by day with prayer
Bringing thee reverence, we come
Ruler of sacrifices, guard of Law eternal, radiant One,
Increasing in thine own abode.
Be to us easy of approach, even as a father to his son:
Agni, be with us for our weal." [RV, 1.1]

Quote :
"I choose as God for Father-worship Agni, flesh-eater, who hath past within your dwelling,
While looking on this other Jātavedas. Let him light flames in the supreme assembly.
With offerings meet let Agni bring the Fathers who support the Law.
Let him announce oblations paid to Fathers and to Deities.
Right gladly would we set thee down, right gladly make thee burn and glow.
Gladly bring yearning Fathers nigh to eat the food of sacrifice." [RV, 10.16]

"Two distinct stages.
There is first that stage in which early peoples believe that the soul of the departed, like the man alive, depends on food and drink for its continued existence. Those who hold this belief in this simple form of course consider the soul to be a material substance, or at most have but a dim idea of a non-material spiritual existence.
And just as they felt it their duty to provide their father or mother with food while still alive, so they thought it their duty to continue to provide them with sustenanceafter they were dead. Food was therefore laid out in the open, and the souls of the dead were called to take it. Up to this point piety to the dead is an act of service rather than worship.

Ancestor-worship proper begins when the natural awe of the dead, or the traditions of the prowess or wisdom of some ancestor leads to the conviction that the dead man possesses power still to influence the affairs of his descendants. The memory of their great deeds or of their judicious sayings was invoked to inspire courage or to settle disputes. It was a simple transition to the belief that the man who imitated their valour in battle was helped by them, or that the man who obeyed their precepts was blessed by them, while the man who disregarded them was accursed. And so the presentation of offerings ceased to be merely dutiful service and became religious worship ; the spirits of the ancestors thus became gods in the families of their descendants; and the offerings made to them were intended to secure their care for the family or tribe to which the dead had belonged.

The ancient Aryan race, before it had left its original home and separated into different lands, had reached this stage of belief about ancestors and so alongside the worship of the gods there was the worship of the ancestors, or ' the Fathers,' the Pitris.
...There is another distinction that is worth attention.
The ancestors of the great Aryan families, though historically next to nothing was known about them, were exalted in tradition till they become almost as great as the gods, while the fathers but lately departed are scarcely more than remembered. In accordance with this distinction the term Pitri sometimes means ancestor of a tribe or race or even of mankind, as mankind seemed to the Aryan singer, but when used of an ordinary man's fathers, the term includes only his father, grandfathers and great-grandfathers.
In the Vedas the Pitr is are very often invoked along with Agni or other devas, and sometimes the adjective deva is applied to the Pitris, the Pitris never become devas. They are thought of as living in a state of blessedness in the world where Yama reigns." [ [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.], Clayton]

Quote :
"MAY they ascend, the lowest, highest, midmost, the Fathers who deserve a share of Soma-
May they who have attained the life of spirits, gentle and righteous, aid us when we call them.
Now let us pay this homage to the Fathers, to those who passed of old and those who followed,
Those who have rested in the earthly region, and those who dwell among the Mighty Races.
I have attained the gracious-minded Fathers, I have gained son and progeny from Viṣṇu.
They who enjoy pressed juices with oblation seated on sacred grass, come oftenest hither.
Fathers who sit on sacred grass, come, help us: these offerings have we made for you; accept them.
So come to us with most auspicious favour, and give us health and strength without a trouble.
May they, the Fathers, worthy of the Soma, invited to their favourite oblations.
Laid on the sacred grass, come nigh and listen: may they be gracious unto us and bless us.
Bowing your bended knees and seated southward, accept this sacrifice of ours with favour.
Punish us not for any sin, O Fathers, which we through human frailty have committed.
Lapped in the bosom of the purple Mornings, give riches to the man who brings oblations.
Grant to your sons a portion of that treasure, and, present, give them energy, ye Fathers.
Come to us, Agni, with the gracioug Fathers who dwell in glowing light, the very Kavyas,
Who thirsted mid the Gods, who hasten hither, oblation winners, theme of singers' praises.
Come, Agni, come with countless ancient Fathers, dwellers in light, primeval, God-adorers,
Eaters and drinkers of oblations, truthful, who travel with the Deities and Indra.
Fathers whom Agni's flames have tasted, come ye nigh: ye kindly leaders, take ye each your proper place.
Eat sacrificial food presented on the grass: grant riches with a multitude of hero sons.
Thou, Agni Jātavedas, when entreated, didst bear the offerings which thou madest fragrant,
And give them to the Fathers who did eat them with Svadha. Eat, thou God, the gifts we bring thee.
Thou, Jātavedas, knowest well the number of Fathers who are here and who are absent,
Of Fathers whom we know and whom we know not:
accept the sacrifice wellprepared with portions.
They who, consumed by fire or not cremated, joy in their offering in the midst of heaven,—
Grant them, O Sovran Lord, the world of spirits and their own body, as thy pleasure wills it."  [RV, 10.15]


2.

You have a parallel path, where veneration of your most personal and immediate dead ancestors, famous or not! upto 3-7 generations as the 'genius' of the hearth, going by the name of the lares/manes, where it was believed, by offering your food/devotio, their spirit would take a rebirth and assure fertility of a continuous lineage. This is Pitriyana. A flowing back, or the recurrent 'Brahmin' - a "guest" like the "fire at one's home", who as part of the funerary anniversary custom was fed and gifted lavishly in the belief he was the geni of the 'undying' dead ancestor. This was the Serpentine Lunar Path, a Death-path.

So in 1. you have the sacrifice to the Brahman, and in 2. you have the sacrifice to the Brahmin.

Brahman initially was the expanding, vitalizing power of heroic courage, the swelling psyche of your ancestor in war and contests, the bridge that held together-apart  life or death in the contest...; later ritualized into something impersonal and as a given, as Heesterman points out. When one sacrificed to the 'Brahman' in the Vedas, one was indeed sacrificing to his own ancestor. He embodied the bridge where life and death contested together. Who won wealth from his rival contenders and provided inspiration to keep the "line going".
The figure of the Brahmin fed and sacrificed to, in place of one's dead father or grandfather, is meant to act as that same bridge between life and death, as the vitalizer who with his spiritual power could presence your dead father here and take his stead in the underworld temporarily. He presenced the genius or the guardian spirit.

Note how the Hero's journey always requires or involves a 'sinister'/left-hand/transgressive 'serpentine Initiation' into solar gnosis. A psychic 'death' and self re-birth.
The Serpent is the "Guardian of the treasure", and why the Hero has to "slay" it to make it his own.
Why the most wisest woman among the anglo-saxons was called a "cunning-woman" or a "hedge-witch" because she "guarded" the treasure of the hearth, the gold-like gleaming Fire. This was called practising Hyge-craft. Soul-making.

Quote :
"These texts say this. There were various classes of Pitrs, of different origins, forms, grades and abodes. One broad distinction is into Pitrs who were divine and Pitrs who were deceased men. ...Also some dwelt in heaven and some in the underworld. The former who dwelt in heaven were as gods, and they and the gods were reciprocally gods and pitrs. They were the most primeval deities and were indeed from everlasting and never cease to exist. But the Pitrs who were human ancestors (comprising the father grandfather and great grandfather') attained to and became one with the divine Pitrs through righteousness* and dwelt blissfully in heaven with them." [Ancient Indian Historical Tradition, F.E. Pargiter]


Quote :
"A second main feature of Indo-European religion was the worship of spirits of the dead. Over against the  "heavenly ones," the bright powers of the upper world,  stood a host of subterranean divinities, among whom spirits of the dead occupied the most conspicuous place.
These two classes of divinities, nature-spirits and spirits of the dead, were distinct in their origin, in their functions, and in their manner of worship. The second of  these must now receive our more detailed consideration.
The Latin conception of the genius is peculiar. Genius is derived from  gigno, 'beget,' and the marriage-bed is known as lectus genialis. Every man has his genius and every woman  her juno. On the birthday rites of worship were paid to  one's genius or juno as the case might be. The celebrant  clad in white, with a garland on his head, offered incense,  cakes and wine and prayed for protection during the coming year. Buildings, regions, towns, cities, trades, and other groups of men, were thought to have their genii. The genius, accordingly, seems to have been a guardian-spirit, who was born with a man, and who shared his experiences in life and in death. Spirits of the dead were grouped under the collective name of di manes, 'kind gods,' a euphemism designed to avoid actual mention of their names. They were also known as inferi, 'those beneath' and umbra, 'shadows, shades.' Apparently the lares were guardian-spirits of the hearth and of the home, who were honoured with domestic rites, and were originally the ancestors of the family who watched over its interests. Etymologically the word is connected with larva, 'ghost,' and with larentalia, the festival of the dead.

The cult of the dead was thus primarily a family affair {sacra privata) as opposed to public worship {sacra publica) of the great gods of the State. Only when a tribe or community was united in the worship of a common ancestor or hero did worship of the dead take on a national character. It was the duty of the State also to provide offerings for spirits of the dead who had left no descendants, and to this extent offerings to the di manes became sacra publica.

In India the feeding of Brahmans at funeral feasts and other rites of ancestor-worship is regarded as identical with feeding the pitaras.
In White Russia beggars take the place of the Brahmans.
They repeat their songs and prayers, and are bountifully fed in return. At Roman funerals impersonators were chosen to represent the ancestors. They wore their death-masks that were preserved in the family atrium, were dressed in their garments, wore their insignia of office, and sat in state in their ivory chairs of office.
They received the new-comer into their company, and partook of the funeral meats that were laid before them. When the ceremony was over, the masks were returned to their boxes in the atrium and continued to share in the life of the family.

Next to birds snakes are most frequently associated with spirits of the dead in Indo-European religions.
The serpent-cult of modern India is distinctly connected with ancestor-worship. On Greek tombs snakes are constantly represented as the embodiment of the spirit of the dead. In the so-called "hero reliefs" a large bearded serpent appears behind the seated hero. In "banquet reliefs" a serpent appears twisted about a tree, or drinks from a cup in the hero's hand. In vase pictures serpents are often depicted at the foot of burial mounds. The meaning of these representations is clear from a passage in Plutarch 83 who states that when Cleomenes, King of Sparta, had been executed by Ptolemy, King of Egypt, and impaled in public, "a huge snake wound about the head and hid the face so that no bird of prey should light on it. Thereupon a superstitious fear fell upon the King, and such a dread that it started the women on purification ceremonies." Cecrops, the oldest Athenian hero, was worshipped originally as a snake, subsequently as a half-human, half-serpentine being. Erechtheus, his son, was also a snake.

In Italy serpents were regarded as the embodiments of the spirits of ancestors and as the guardian-heroes of places. Pliny 85 says that snakes were protected and fed in Roman houses. A fresco in Herculaneum represents a snake twisted around an altar and eating cakes from the top. The accompanying inscription reads, genius hunts loci montis. In the AEneid, v. 84ff., Vergil tells how AEneas, having arrived in Sicily, prepared to celebrate the anniversary of his father's death with sacrifices and games. A magnificent serpent appeared which tasted of the sacrificial viands and silently disappeared beneath a mound. AEneas is "uncertain whether to think it the genius of the place or the familiar spirit of his father."

The cult of ancestors under the form of serpents among the pagan Lithuanians is well attested. Menecius, the authority on these matters, says: "Moreover the Lithuanians and the Samagitas keep snakes in their houses under the hearth, or in a corner of the oven where a table stands. Reverencing these as manifestations of spirits, they call them forth at a certain time of the year with prayers to the sacrificial table.
Other animals, such as dogs, wolves, hares, etc., appear as the embodiments of spirits in Indo-European folk-lore, but much less frequently and universally than birds and serpents."
[ [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.], Lewis Bayles Paton]

Quote :
"In the Veda the Pitris are invoked together with the Devas, but they are not confounded with them. The Devas never become Pitris, and though such adjectives as deva are sometimes applied to the Pitris, and they are raised to the rank of the older classes of Devas, it is easy to see that the Pitris and Devas had each their independent origin, and that they represent two totally distinct phases of the human mind in the creation of its objects of worship.
We read in the Rig Veda VI>52,4: 'May the rising Dawns protect me, may the flowing Rivers protect me, may the firm Mountains protect me, may the Fathers protect me at this invocation of the gods.' here nothing can be clearer than the separate existence of the Fathers, apart from the Dawns, the Rivers, and the Mountains, through they are included on one common invocation of the gods.
We must distinguish, however, from the very first, between two classes, or rather between two concepts of Fathers, the one comprising the distant, half-forgotten, and almost  mythical ancestors of certain families, or of what would have been to the poets of the Veda, the whole human race, the other consisting of the fathers who had but lately departed, and who were still, as it were, personally remembered and revered.
The old ancestors in general approach more nearly to the gods.
They are often represented as having gone to the abode of Yama, the ruler of the departed, and to live there in company with some of the Devas.
We sometimes read of the great-grandfathers being in heaven, the grandfathers in the sky, the fathers on the earth, the first in company with the Adityas, the second with the Rudras, the last with the Vasus. All these are individual poetical conceptions.
…The daily Pitriyagna, or ancestor worship, is one of the five sacrifices, sometimes called the great sacrifices, which every married man ought to perform day by day. [T.B.Griffith, The Vedas]

The five daily sacrifices:

Quote :
- Honouring the gods with burnt offerings,
- the ancestors with libations,
- the seers/poets/teachers by remembering daily, the ancient Aryan wisdom, living the ancestral way,
- sacrificing to all beings like plants and animals, at least with water,
- and all humans by honouring them with hospitality as guests.
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Apart from sacrifices to the gods and fathers, the teacher becomes included. This is easy to accept when you realize, initially your Father or the head of your Clan was your Teacher. [How 'gotra' developed.]
To the Vedics, these five sacrifices were relief from the triple debt one owed to one's gods, fathers, and teachers.
Animals and plants were regarded as 'family-wealth', and guest-hospitality as 'family-fame'.  

So basically, every sacrifice was regarded as a 'self'-sacrifice.
Evola reminds us of this interconnectivity between the two paths; of how an ancestor becomes a hero, and a hero becomes a god/god-like...

Evola wrote:
"The regal idea occurs in an already weakened form when it no longer becomes incarnated in beings who are naturally above human limitations, but rather in beings who must develop this quality within themselves. In the ancient Hellenic tradition, such a distinction corresponded analogically to that between a "god' (Olympian ideal) and a "hero." In terms of the Roman tradition this distinction was formally sanctioned through the titles of deus and divus, the latter always designating a man who had become a god, the former designating a being who had always been a god. What emerges in this context is a situation in which there is a certain distance between the person and the function being exercised: in order for a person to embody a certain function what is required is a specific action capable of producing in him a new quality; this action may appear either in the form of an initiation or of an investiture (or consecration). In the first case this action has a relatively autonomous and direct character; in the second case it is mediated, or it takes place from the outside through a priestly caste distinct from the regal caste." [Revolt against the Modern World]

The Germanic expression for this self-consecration was the Valknot.

The Vedics call this sacred investiture - a thin consecrated cord of three strands, worn to symbolize the "three debts" one owes to one's gods, one's ancestors, and one's seers/teachers/initiators/poets - 'Yagnopavita', and this sacred initiation - 'Upanayana' - literally "dwelling close to the Brahman", "nearness to the self", or "initializing one's near-absolute self".

A Vedic-Aryan was thus a twice- or thrice-born by performing the five daily sacrifices to relieve himself of his triple debt. The wearing of his triple-girdle is an oath and a birth to himself - a sacrifice of himself to himself from his 'gods' [spiritual birth], his ancestors [biological birth], and his teachers [intellectual birth].

To be an Aryan is Self-possession In the three: in words, deeds, and thoughts.

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"ἐδιζησάμην ἐμεωυτόν." [Heraclitus]

"All that exists is just and unjust and equally justified in both." [Aeschylus, Prometheus]

"The history of everyday is constituted by our habits. ... How have you lived today?" [N.]

*Become clean, my friends.*


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PostSubject: Re: Brahman Brahman EmptyMon Feb 25, 2013 5:04 pm

The Brahman is the nexus of tensions, as already pointed out. It was the 'joint' between life and death that was played out in the I.E. verbal contest. The 'knower' of the equivalences or the riddle-solver was proclaimed Brahman, while his opponent was decapitated or bowed down in recognition to the new philosophical school.
The Brahman-ical Sacrifice was an agonistic Contest, that was later stabilizized and ritualized formulaically into an Absolute given.
Huizinga comments on the nature of the Riddle and how such cosmic questions evolved gradually into a 'systematic' philosophy in the West as well, similar to the Vedic decline.


Huizinga wrote:
"The riddle-contest is far from being a mere recreation; it is an integral part of the ceremonial of sacrifice.

The riddle is a sacred thing full of secret power, hence a dangerous thing. In its mythological or ritual context it is nearly always what German philologists know as the Halsriitsel or "capital
riddle", which you either solve or forfeit your head. The player's life is at stake. A corollary of this is that it is accounted the highest wisdom to put a riddle nobody can answer.

Greek tradition, too, has the riddle-solving and death-penalty motif in the story of the seers Chalcas and Mopsos.
The riddle-contest with life at stake is one of the main themes of Eddic mythology. In the Vafthrudnismal Odin measures his wisdom against the all-wise giant, Vafthrudnir, each asking questions in turn. The questions are of a mythological and cosmogonic nature, similar to those quoted from the Vedic texts: Where did Day and Night come from, Winter and Summer, and the Wind? In the Alvissmal Thor asks the dwarfAlvis how the various things are called among the Ases, the Vanes (the subsidiary Eddie pantheon) , among men, giants, dwarfs and lastly in Hel; but before the end of the contest day breaks, and the dwarf is thrown into irons. The Song of Fjolsvinn has a similar form, also the Riddles of King Heidrek, who has vowed to reprieve from the death-sentence any who can propound a riddle that he cannot solve.
Most of these songs are attributed to the later Edda, and the experts may be right in holding them to be no more than examples of deliberate poetic artifice.
The fact remains, however, that their connection with the riddle-contests of a remote past is too obvious to be denied.

The answer to an enigmatic question is not found by reflection or logical reasoning. It comes quite literally as a sudden solution­ a loosening of the tie by which the questioner holds you bound. The corollary of this is that by giving the correct answer you strike him powerless. In principle there is only one answer to every question. It can be found if you know the rules of the game. These are grammatical, poetical, or ritualistic as the case may be. You have to know the secret language of the adepts and be acquainted with the significance of each symbol -wheel, bird, cow, etc.-for the various categories of phenomena. Should it prove that a second answer is possible, in accord with the rules but not suspected by the questioner, then it will go badly with him: he is caught in his own trap. On the other hand, a thing may be figuratively represented in so many ways as to allow of concealment in the most diverse riddles. Often the solution depends wholly on the knowledge of the secret or sacred names of things, as in
the Alvissmal cited above.

The riddle, we may conclude, was originally a sacred game, and as such it cut clean across any possible distinction between play and seriousness. It was both at once: a ritual element of
the highest importance and yet essentially a game. As civiliza­tion develops, the riddle branches out in two directions: mystic philosophy on the one hand and recreation on the other. But in this development we must not think of seriousness degenerating into play or of play rising to the level of seriousness. It is rather that civilization gradually brings about a certain division between two modes of mental life which we distinguish as play and seriousness respectively, but which originally formed a con­tinuous mental medium wherein that civilization arose.

The riddle or, to put it less specifically, the set problem, is, apart from its magical effects, an important element in social intercourse.
As a form of social recreation it adapts itself to all sorts of literary and rhythmical patterns, for instance the chain­ question, where one question leads on to another, or the game of superlatives, each exceeding the other, of the well-known type: "What is sweeter than honey?" etc. The Greeks were very fond of the aporia as a parlour-game, i.e. the propounding of questions impossible to answer conclusively. It may be regarded as a weakened form of the
fatal riddle.

The "riddle of the Sphinx" still echoes faintly in the later forms of the riddle-game-the theme of the death-penalty is always in the background. A typical example of the way in which tradition modified it is afforded by the story of Alexander the Great's meeting with the Indian "gymnosophists". The conqueror has taken a town that dared to offer resistance, and accordingly sends for the ten wise men responsible for that advice. They are to answer a
number of insoluble questions propounded by the conqueror himself. The penalty for a wrong answer will be death, and he who answers worst will die first. Of this one of the ten sages is to be the judge. If his judgement is deemed to be right he will save his life. Most of the
questions are dilemmas of a cosmological nature, variants of the sacred Vedic riddles. For instance : Which is more-the living or the dead? Which is greater-the land or the sea? Which came first-day or night? The answers are tricks in logic rather than specimens of mystic
wisdom. When, finally, the question is put: "Who has answered worst?" the wily judge replies: "Each worse than the other!" thus upsetting the whole plan, for now nobody can be killed'!

The question calculated to "catch" your opponent is properly called the dilemma, the answer to which, by forcing him to admit something else not covered by the original proposition, invariably falls out to his disadvantage. The same is true of the riddle allowing of two solutions, of which the more obvious one is obscene. Such are to be found in the Atharvaveda.

At the centre of the circle we are trying to describe with our idea of play there stands the figure of the Greek sophist. He may be regarded as an extension of the central figure in archaic cultural life who appeared before us successively as the prophet, medicine-man,
seer, thaumaturge and poet and whose best designation is vates. The sophist has two important functions in common with the more ancient type ofcultural rector: his business is to exhibit his amazing knowledge, the mysteries of his craft, and at the same time to defeat his rival in public contest. Thus the two main factors of social play in archaic society are present in him: glorious exhibitionism and agonistic aspiration. It should also be borne in mind that before the coming of the sophist proper Aeschylus uses the word "sophist" to denote the wise heroes of old like Prometheus and Palamedes, both of whom, we read, proudly enumerate all the arts they have invented for the good of mankind. In this boasting of their knowledge they resemble the later sophists, such as Hippias Polyhistor, the man of a thousand arts, the mnemotechnician, the economic autarch whose boast it is that he has made everything he wears and who turns up time and again at Olympia as the all-round genius ready to debate on any subject (prepared beforehand!) and answer any questions put to him,claiming never to have found his better'! All this is still very much in the manner of Yajiiavalkya, the riddle-solving priest of the Brahmanas who makes his opponent's head fall off.

The sophist's performance is called epideixis-an exhibition. He has, as we hinted above, a regular repertoire and charges a fee for his disquisitions. Some of his pieces have a fixed price like the fifty-drachma lectures of Prodicus. Gorgias made so much money out of his art that he was able to dedicate a statue of himself to the god at Delphi, made of solid gold. The itinerant sophist like Protagoras booked fabulous successes. It was an event when a famous sophist
visited a town. He was gaped at like a miraculous being, likened to the heroes of athletics; In
short, the profession of sophist was quite on a par with sport. The spectators applauded and laughed at every well-aimed crack. It was pure play, catching your opponent in a net of argument ! or giving him a knock-out blow.  It was a point of honour to put nothing but twisters, to which every answer must be wrong.

When Protagoras calls sophistry "an ancient art" he goes to the heart of the matter. It is indeed the ancient game of wits which, starting in the remotest cultures, vacillates between solemn ritual and mere amusement, sometimes touching the heights of wisdom, sometimes sinking to playful rivalry.

Sophistry, technically regarded as a form of expression, has all the associations with primitive play as we found them in the sophist's predecessor, the vates. The sophism proper is closely related to the riddle. It is a fencer's trick. The Greek word, in its original concrete sense, meant either something you place before yourself as a defence-a shield, for instance-or something you throw down at another's feet for him to take up­ a gage. Both meanings taken in the abstract hold good for the art of the sophist.  His questions and arguments are so many "problemata" in precisely this sense.

Games, or what we might call jeux d'esprit, designed to catch people out by trick-questions, held an important place in Greek conversation. The various types had been systematized under technical names and comprised the sorites, apophaskon, outis, pseudomenos, antistrephon, etc. One of Aristotle's disciples, Clearchus, wrote a Theory of the Riddle, particularly of the kind called griphos: a joke question-game played for rewards or forfeits. "What is the same everywhere and nowhere?" Answer: "Time". "What I am you are not. I'm a man, therefore you're not a man". Diogenes is supposed to have said:
"If you want it to be true you'd better begin with me".

Euthydemos in the Platonic dialogue of that name is sometimes playing with purely childish tricks of grammar and logic, and sometimes verging on the profundities of cosmology and epistemology.  "The profound utterances of early Greek philosophy, such as the Elean conclusion that there is neither "genesis nor motion nor plurality", come in the form of a game of question and answer. Even so abstract a deduction as that which leads to the impossibility of framing a judgement of general validity was made from a simple sorites or chain-question. "When you shake out a sack of corn, which grain makes the noise? The first?" "No". "The
second?" "No". "The third, etc.?" "No". "Therefore. . . ."."

Chrysippus wrote a whole treatise on certain sophisms. All these catch-questions rest on the condition that your opponent shall tacitly accept the logical validity of the game without raising objections and spoiling everything like Diogenes. The proposi­tions could be stylistically adorned with rhymes, refrains or other artifices.
The transition from this "fooling" to the pompous perorations of the sophist and the Socratic dialogue is always fluid. The sophism is akin both to the common riddle and the sacred, cosmogonic enigma.

Werner Jaeger speaks depreciatingly of "the modern fashion of describing Pythagoras as a sort of medicine-man", deeming so base an opinion unworthy of contradiction. He forgets, however, that the medicine-man or whatever you choose to call him is, both by nature and from the historical point of view, in very truth the elder brother of all philosophers and sophists, and that they all retain traces of this ancient kinship." [Homo Ludens]

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"ἐδιζησάμην ἐμεωυτόν." [Heraclitus]

"All that exists is just and unjust and equally justified in both." [Aeschylus, Prometheus]

"The history of everyday is constituted by our habits. ... How have you lived today?" [N.]

*Become clean, my friends.*


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Brahman Empty
PostSubject: Re: Brahman Brahman EmptyThu Apr 18, 2013 9:43 pm

Brahman - Aletheia.

Quote :
"Already Rigveda, the oldest text of Vedic period, presents us with Vedic man positioned within the fourfold (here we are following Mehta’s philosophical intuition) – i.e. the world of man, inhabitant of earth, a mortal (martyas) who, however, in the capacity of Inspired Poet is Open to the heavenly world and its inhabitants, gods (devatas). Vedic Indians called the ten thousand stanzas of rig vedic hymns mantras, which in Sanskrit means “instrument of thought” ["techne is a mode of knowing or revealing aletheuin"], prayer and the (sacred) speech of Vedic poets.

Hence, a hymn is a mental act, and speech comes to the poet/seer – through bráhman(n.), i.e. that which he has grasped and expressed in the hymn.
A brahmán (m., poet, priest; brăhma, m., who knows/chants Vedic texts) is thus one who, in his mind, ‘hears’ the mantra and formulates it poetically. According to Thieme, the original Vedic meaning of bráhman (which later became the Upanishadic and Vedăntic absolute) is “poetic formulation” (dichterische Formulierung), an activity in which the poet is assisted by gods: the god Indra is the greatest poet, while the god Bťhaspati is the greatest master of speech. However, by being brought and beautifully formulated into hymns (“well recited”), bráhman brings truth (rta) into the world.

Taittriya samhita III, 5, 2, 1 says, in Indra’s voice, to the poet Vasishta: “I will reveal bráhman to you!”, and through the divine gift of poetry, the god Indra brings to man – the mortal – the truth, whose spring is in the highest heaven.The guardian of truth is Varuna, and its spring is the origin of both gods and humans. This truth is discerned as luminous, its highest symbol being light.

Thus, according to Thieme, bráhman is an act on the borderline of being inspired with thought/intuition and articulating it – first in voice and only later (after remembering it in mind) in the written form of a text –, and rigveda is an epiphany of this truth, the truth which, however, according to Mehta is not grasped through the representational relation of some correspondence theory of truth, but rather in the sense of a Clearing (Lichtung), the opening up of space and the bringing of truth (the rta; by bráhman) into the world.

Bráhman is speech, and what is true in this speech is bráhman.

Gradually, bráhman evolved from the original rigvedic meanings of a power –manifesting itself as sacred speech (Gonda), ‘speaking in riddles or enigmas’ (Renou), or the already mentioned ‘poetic formulation’ (Thieme) – into the Upanishadic first principle and the later Vedãntic absolute. However, for the early Vedic thought, if related to Heidegger’s and Mehta’s hermeneutic thought, the important analyses are those made by J. A. B. van Buitenen in relation with another important term of Vedic tradition, akshara (‘the syllable’): in addition to bráhman, this word can guide us towards that locus within the course of Vedic-Upanishadic thought where we are, as earth-inhabiting mortals, presented with speech.

If according to Indian scholarly research, bráhman in its original sense may be understood as the mysterious power of poetic formulation or hearing by the inspired Vedic poets, and if the related akshara is understood as a manifestation of the formationof speech/word in the silence of the dawn of the universe, is it not that their coming about (Ereignis), to which Vedic poets respond when forming their words into mantras, is the locus from which we can set off on the long-expected hermeneutic return?"

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Heidegger wrote:
"The Greek for ‘to bring forth or to produce’ is tikto. The word techne, technique, belongs to the verb’s root tec. To the Greeks techne means neither art nor handicraft but rather: to make something appear, within what is present, as this or that, in this way or that way. The Greeks conceive of techne producing, in terms of letting appear. Techne thus conceived has been concealed in the tectonics of architecture since ancient times. We think of creation as a bringing forth. But the making of equipment, too, is a bringing forth. Handicraft.

The word techne denotes rather a mode of knowing. To know means to have seen, in the widest sense of seeing, which means to apprehend what is present, as such. For Greek thought the nature of knowing consists in aletheia, that is, in the uncovering of beings. It supports and guides all comportment toward beings. Techne, as knowledge experienced in the Greek manner, is a bringing forth of beings in that it brings forth present beings as such beings out of concealedness and specifically into the unconcealedness of their appearance; techne never signifies the action of making."

J.L.Mehta wrote:
"A building, a Greek temple, portrays nothing. It simply stands there in the middle of the rock-cleft valley. The building encloses the figure of the god, and in this concealment lets it stand out into the holy precinct through the open portico. By means of the temple, the god is present in the temple. This presence of the god is in itself the extension and delimitation of the precinct as a holy precinct. The temple and its precinct, however, do not fade away into the indefinite. It is the temple-work that first fits together and at the same time gathers around itself the unity of those paths and relations in which birth and death, disaster and blessing, victory and disgrace, endurance and decline acquire the shape of destiny for human being. The all-governing expanse of this open relational context is the world of this historical people. Only from and in this expanse does the nation first return to itself for the fulfilment of its vocation.

Standing there, the building rests on the rocky ground. This resting of the work draws up out of the rock the mystery of that rock’s clumsy yet spontaneous support. Standing there, the building holds its ground against the storm raging above it and so first makes the storm itself manifest in its violence. The lustre and gleam of the stone, though itself apparently glowing only by the grace of the sun, yet first brings to light the light of the day, the breadth of the sky, the darkness of the night. The temple’s firm towering makes visible the invisible space of air.

The steadfastness of the work contrasts with the surge of the surf, and its own repose brings out the raging of the sea. Tree and grass, eagle and bull, snake and cricket first enter into their distinctive shapes and thus come to appear as what they are. The Greeks early called this emerging and rising in itself and in all things phusis. It clears and illuminates, also, that on which and in which man bases his dwelling. We call this ground the earth. What this word says is not to be associated with the idea of a mass of matter deposited somewhere, or with the merely astronomical idea of a planet. Earth is that whence the arising brings back and shelters everything that arises without violation. In the things that arise, earth is present as the sheltering agent.

The temple-work, standing there, opens up a world and at the same time sets this world back again on earth, which itself only thus emerges as native ground. But men and animals, plants and things, are never present and familiar as unchangeable objects, only to represent incidentally also a fitting environment for the temple, which one fine day is added to what is already there. The temple, in its standing there, first gives to things their look and to men their outlook on themselves. This view remains open as long as the work is a work, as long as the god has not fled from it. It is the same with the sculpture of the god, votive offering of the victor in the athletic games. It is not a portrait whose purpose is to make it easier to realize how the god looks; rather, it is a work that lets the god himself be present and thus is the god himself..." [Heidegger]
803.

"In view of the attention recently given to the concept of 'text' by literary theorists and philosophers, it may not be out of place to mention, the very notion of 'text' is for the first time mentioned by the seer­poets who composed the hymns. Etymologically, a text is a piece of cloth: textus, from which the word derives, means 'woven', the Latin verb ‘texo,—ere’ meaning weaving of cloth, intertwining or interlocking of any kind of material.
As Roland Barthes said, 'Text means tissue; but whereas hitherto we have always taken this tissue as a product, a ready­made veil, behind which lies, more or less hidden, meaning (truth), we are now emphasizing, in the tissue, the generative idea that the text is made, is worked out in a perpetual interweaving'.

The Vedic poets, while composing their mantras, were aware not only that they were weaving together a fabric but also what was involved in such activity. Addressing this fire within men, the rsi * says, 'I do not know how to stretch the thread and weave the cloth; he, Fire, is the one who knows how to stretch the thread and weave the cloth; we will speak the right words, for he is the immortal light within mortals, the light in the hearts of men, the one source of all thought.'

Another rsi* prays to Varuna* 'May we attain the fountainhead of the Truth that you guard. Do not let the thread break while I am still weaving this thought, nor let the measuring­stick of the workman shatter before its time'.

The ritual offering of this fabric of words to the gods is the sacrifice and this, too, is conceived by these poets as a text 'woven out of seven threads'. A hymn describing the primordial creation of sacrifice by the Cosmic Purusa* says, 'The sacrifice that is spread out with threads on all sides, drawn tight with a hundred and one divine acts, is woven by the fathers as they come near: 'weave forward, weave backward', they say as they sit by the loom that is stretched tight. The Cosmic Man stretches the warp and draws the weft; the Man has spread it out upon the dome of the sky. These are the pegs that are fastened in place; they made the melodies into the shuttles for weaving. That was the model for the human sages, our fathers, when the primeval sacrifice was born.

The verb taksa* is used to describe the poetic activity of making, fashioning or forming; both a poem and a sacrifice are 'made', with heart and mind, as a carpenter works with a chisel." [Reading the Rig Veda]


Quote :
"Explication, elsewhere termed “thematization” (after Heidegger, Being and Time 412-15), is making implicit or “latent” things “explicit” or manifest. In his dichotomy of explication and latency, Sloterdijk plays on Heidegger’s correlative characterisation of truth as aletheia (αλήθεια: from alethes, true, lit. not concealing, thus unconcealment, i.e., openness or remembering), and lethe (λήθη: “forgetfulness, oblivion,” thus concealment, i.e., closure or forgetting [N.B. the word "latency" derives from lethe also]). Hence, explication is “a rephenomenalization of the aphenomenal”, and it answers “the [modern] need to perceive the imperceptible".

Sloterdijk and Heidegger’s etymological readings of their respective terms suggest that they see unfolding truth as primarily textual, something which is implicit in the root word of explication: “explicit.” Explicit comes from L. explicitus, past participle of explicare “unfold, unravel, explain,” from ex- “out” + plicare “to fold.” Unfolding is indeed a textual metaphor: “explicitus” was written at the end of medieval manuscripts, short for explicitus est liber,“the book is unrolled”—or unfolded. Hence, Heidegger primarily thinks of truth as etymological, hermeneutic or poetic, as deep explanation akin to reading; so, to a degree, does Sloterdijk.

But unfolding can also be a textile (“woven”), or even textural (“of the visual and, especially, tactile surface of” or “of the characteristic physical structure of”), metaphor. Sloterdijk’s idea of explication is in the main textural. It aims to get at the characteristic physical structure of “reality,” as it is taken to be (we could say “metaphysical structure of reality,” if it weren’t illegitimate to speak in such a way). Sloterdijk adds to the temporal aspect of truth a spatial one (not unlike Heidegger with his notion of truth as “clearing“).

Bruno Latour explains explication, which he calls “explicitation,” in this way in “A Plea for the Earthly Sciences,” the keynote lecture at the annual meeting of the British Sociological Association (Apr. 2007), to be published in Judith Burnett, Syd Jeffers and Graham Thomas (eds), New Social Connections: Sociology’s Subjects and Objects(London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010):

History was never about “modernization” or about “revolution,” but was rather about another phenomenon, . . . “explicitation.” As we moved on, through our technologies, through our scientific inquiries, through the extension of our global empires, we rendered more and more explicit the fragility of the life support systems that make our “spheres of existence” possible. Everything that earlier was merely “given” becomes “explicit.” Air, water, land, all of those were present before in the background: now they are explicitated because we slowly come to realize that they might disappear—and we [sic] with them.

So this shift is about how we understand how we exist both in the world and with others (these dimensions of existence being inseparable):

[T]he whole idea of “social connections” was linked to a moment in history, that of modernization and of emancipation. What happens if we have shifted to another period, one of explicitation and of attachments?

[Or rather, s]ince “we have never been modern”, we have always been living through a completely different history than the one we kept telling ourselves about: until the ecological crisis began to strike hard and tough, we could go on as though “we” humans were living through one modernization after another, jumping from one emancipation to the next. After all, the future was one of greater and greater detachment from all sorts of contingencies and cumbersome ties. Free at last!

What happens to our identities, if it finally dawns on us that that very same history always had another meaning: the slow explicitation of all of the attachments necessary for the sustenance of our fragile spheres of existence? What happens if the very definition of the future has changed? If we now move from the taken into account of a few beings, to the weaving of careful attachments with an ever greater and greater list of explicitated beings? Attached at last! Dependent! Responsible!"

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"ἐδιζησάμην ἐμεωυτόν." [Heraclitus]

"All that exists is just and unjust and equally justified in both." [Aeschylus, Prometheus]

"The history of everyday is constituted by our habits. ... How have you lived today?" [N.]

*Become clean, my friends.*


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PostSubject: Re: Brahman Brahman EmptyMon Jun 03, 2013 7:40 am

'In Money and the Early Greek Mind', Seaford presents the Greek corollary to Heesterman's thesis - how both extreme contest/agon [beyond gold] and extreme trade [all worth in gold value] cut off an egalitarian stability of a Ritualized sacrificial economy.


Quote :
"Achilles rejects gain in favour of a grim heroic solidarity. One does not sell a philos.

This is not the first time that Achilles has rejected an offer of goods. In book 9 he stated that no amount of wealth – not even all the wealth of Orchomenos or of Egyptian Thebes, not even gifts as many as the sand or dust – will reconcile him to Agamemnon ‘until he gives back to me all the heartrending insolence’ (9.387).
In the same speech (401–9) he insists again on the ineffectiveness of wealth: all the wealth of Troy, and of Delphi too, is not equivalent in value (antaxios) to his psuche (soul or life): cattle and sheep can be plundered and tripods and horses can be obtained, whereas the psuche of a man cannot be plundered or captured to come back again once it were to exchange the barrier of his teeth. Once you lose it, through a kind of exchange that involves (like trade rather than gift-exchange) total and irrevocable alienation, you cannot reacquire it even by heroic force.

Agamemnon describes the long list of gifts he offers Achilles: seven tripods, ten talents of gold, twenty cauldrons, twelve horses that have won gold, seven women, and (if Troy is sacked) as much gold and bronze as he likes, twenty Trojan women, and (if they return to Greece) a daughter as bride and seven citadels. But for Achilles wealth is incommensurable with life, with independence, and with the honour that is the supreme value for the heroic life. It is striking that Achilles will in his words to Lycaon again reject an offer of wealth as meaningless in the face of certain death.

The ‘gifts’ offered by Agamemnon and Lycaon are ineffective. Moreover, in general – complains Achilles – there has been no gratitude (charis) for fighting. The good and the bad fighter get the same, and are held in equal honour (9.316–19). Agamemnon has not only taken Briseis but kept for himself most of the booty won by others (330–3). Reciprocity between leader and warrior, the form of centralised reciprocity known as redistribution (2a(4)), has been destroyed by the leader’s selfish control of the process. The breakdown is forcefully encapsulated in the words ‘hateful to me are his gifts’ (9.378).

More is at stake than the relation between two individuals. Honour (tim ̄e ) and its material manifestations as reward for bravery are conferred by the Lycians as a whole (Il. 12.310–21). Honour is an essentially social phenomenon. But among the Greeks before Troy it seems that the right to redistribute booty belongs only nominally to the people, in fact to the leader (2e). Agamemnon’s control of the process has produced not just a rift between himself and Achilles but a generalised crisis.

What Achilles complains of is a general disparity between worth (in battle) and reward. The implication is that worth should attract its equivalent in the concrete manifestations (booty) of honour (tim ̄e), that this general equivalence has been selfishly abolished by Agamemnon. In a sense this implication embodies the spirit of trade: one cloak is equivalent to three vases or ten drachmas, whatever the personal relations (e.g. leader and follower) between their respective owners. It illustrates how the breakdown of the interpersonal relations of reciprocity might favour the development of the impersonal equivalence inherent in trade and of a universal measure of value. Socially conferred tim ̄e, inherent in distributed booty, has fallen under the control of a leader (Agamemnon) who denies it to Achilles, but will in the monetised economy embody – with the depersonalised meaning ‘price’ – the relationship between commodity and money (10b).

This does not however mean that Homeric epic embodies the historical transition from reciprocity to trade. Indeed, we have seen in detail how it tends to marginalise or denigrate trade and monetisation. Moreover, the heroic Achilles is far from being a proponent of trade.

The exchange of Lycaon for a specified price is described only in order for another such exchange to be heroically rejected by Achilles with the assertion of a personal relation of solidarity. By invoking the idea – alien to reciprocity and essential to trade – of equivalence in value Achilles rejects the integrative power of reciprocity, leaving himself isolated. It is an isolation that derives from the breakdown of reciprocity, but cannot be overcome by the newer kind of integration provided by trade. Achilles responds to the emphatically enumerated list of goods by insisting that no amount of goods would be ‘equivalent in value to his psuche’.

Trade and monetisation make for the isolated autonomy of the individual (14a), who as the beneficiary of the exchange cannot himself be exchanged (whereas the tim ̄e and its material manifestations conferred by the Lycians are a fair exchange for the life of its recipient: 12.315).
This rejection by Achilles of the integrative power of goods (whether as gifts or commodities) isolates him from the community. But the impasse is in a sense resolved by a remarkable statement: told that he will be honoured like a god with gifts, he replies ‘I have no need of this honour (tim ̄e ). I think I am honoured by the ais ̄e (ordinance, distribution: 3a) of Zeus’ (9.607 – 8 ). True value is here separated from, no longer depends on, the material goods by which it is normally conveyed.

This separation will prove to be highly significant (14c). Let us note here merely its detachment of the subjective from the objective.
Symmetry is introduced only by the pure heroic subjectivity of Achilles, which lies beyond all objects and their power to create equivalence, just as, at the other extreme, the objective equivalences of trade lie beyond the power of honour, loyalty, and personal identity to embody themselves in objects. Commodification, in contrast to the gift, separates out the purely subjective (isolated individual) from the purely objective (11b, 14c).

For Odysseus as for Achilles, no amount of goods can be equivalent to the wrong suffered. His rejection of goods offered as compensation by the suitor produces a mass slaughter and thereby another crisis, the armed attack by the suitors’ relatives. Similarly Achilles, reconciled with Agamemnon, returns to battle to avenge Patroclus, and rejects offers of goods from Lycaon and then from Hector, the latter rejection resulting in the mutilation, unacceptable to the gods, of Hector’s corpse.
In both epics the final crisis of reciprocity is helped to its resolution by orders from the gods, and in the Iliad also by the integrative power of ritual. The next step in our argument is to show that in Homer ritual also provides an ideal form of the allocation of goods, one that contrasts with both the instability of booty-distribution and the marginality of trade. I mean the ritual of animal sacrifice. ..."[Richard Seaford, Money and the Early Greek Mind]

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"ἐδιζησάμην ἐμεωυτόν." [Heraclitus]

"All that exists is just and unjust and equally justified in both." [Aeschylus, Prometheus]

"The history of everyday is constituted by our habits. ... How have you lived today?" [N.]

*Become clean, my friends.*


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PostSubject: Re: Brahman Brahman EmptyMon Jun 03, 2013 7:50 am

Quote :
"The crisis of the Iliad is a breakdown of the form of reciprocity (Achilles’ prize is in return for fighting) controlled by the leader (redistribution). At the centre of the Odyssey too is a crisis of redistributive reciprocity. The balance breaks down on the other side, as it were: although over the long period of the suitors’ feasting the normal arrangement would be for the nobles to entertain each other, reciprocally, that suitors should feast at the house of a chief is not necessarily unacceptable, and certainly not unparalleled. But in the special circumstances on Ithaca, namely prolonged uncertainty as to whether Odysseus lives compounded by Penelope’s indecision, the practice is unacceptably extended, resulting in an excessive, one-way transaction, the consumption of Odysseus’ wealth without compensation.

Redistribution is in crisis in that the normal role of the chief in giving a feast to the nobles is exploited, or even reversed – in the sense that his authority is subverted, rather than confirmed, by the feast.
Redistributive (centralised) reciprocity breaks down as a result of excessive appropriation by the redistributor (Iliad ) or by the community of nobles (Odyssey). In the Iliad the distribution is of booty, in the Odyssey of food and wine in feasting which passes into the distribution of booty. In both cases there is a sharp contrast with the peaceful, ordered communality manifested in the lovingly described distributional procedures of the animal sacrifice, so pleasing to deity.

In general traditional ritual provides stability, creating a consensual expectation of when, how, and by whom the ritual will be performed. It may represent control, predictability, and cohesion in an otherwise uncontrollable, unpredictable, and conflictual world. The consequent vital importance of ritual for society is expressed in the belief that its performance is ruthlessly demanded by the gods. In animal sacrifice, at least as it is described in Homer, the end point and (it seems) main purpose of the ritual is the equal distribution and communal eating of the meat.

Tension between individual appropriation and communal distribution in Homer occurs not within the animal sacrifice but rather in the narrative as a whole – both within the distribution of booty and between it and sacrificial distri- bution. This is because in the distribution of booty, in sharp contrast to sacrificial distribution, the heroic individualism that forms so much of the Homeric ethos has disturbed or even marginalised the principle of equal distribution.
The contrast can be pursued further. The procedure of sacrificial ritual, as of ritual in general, is defined. For instance, it is performed at certain regular intervals (e.g. annually), or as a regular accompaniment to certain actions (warfare, purification, wedding, etc.). The rights to perform a leading role or to receive an equal or special share are established by tradition (later frequently by inscribed regulation), as are the number and kind of animals to be slaughtered. In Homer the numbers are, when specified, a hundred, twelve, nine, or one.

The distribution of booty, by contrast, is irregular and unpredictable, dependent on the success of uncontrollable violence. In Homer the right to perform a leading role and to receive an equal share are, we have seen, uncertain and ambiguous. Animal sacrifice is perhaps the most formulaic of all Homeric actions (along with arming scenes), with the recurrence of whole sequences of identical lines. But the distribution of booty is neither ritualised, nor described at length, nor described formulaically; and the single exception to these generalisations – the occurrence in three different places of the same formulaic phrase ‘lest anybody should go away deprived of an equal share’ – refers, significantly, to the retention of the principle of universal equal distribution, a principle that is clearly contradicted by the distribution at the heart of the Iliad.

To conclude, the distribution of booty in Homer is haphazard, un-ritualised, potentially invisible, and ambiguously regulated; and the booty distributed is generally treasure, which may be of extremely variable value, of unpredictable quantity, used to embody interpersonal relationships, and highly invidualised. Sacrificial distribution in Homer is, by contrast, a publicly visible ritual, with traditionally regulated and accepted procedures, in which nobody is denied an equal share. The meat is consumed there and then. The number of victims is set, generally one hundred, twelve, nine, or one. We may moreover infer that the animals, which are never distinguished from each other, must all be pleasing to the deity and so do not fall below a certain standard. There is presumably typicality of quality as well as of quantity." [Seaford]

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"ἐδιζησάμην ἐμεωυτόν." [Heraclitus]

"All that exists is just and unjust and equally justified in both." [Aeschylus, Prometheus]

"The history of everyday is constituted by our habits. ... How have you lived today?" [N.]

*Become clean, my friends.*


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PostSubject: Re: Brahman Brahman EmptyWed Feb 05, 2014 12:57 pm

Quote :
""A large part of Sanskrit literature is esoteric. These correspondences, and the magic power they emanate, are called bráhman: this is the oldest sense of the term. They are not intellectual conceptions but experiences which have been lived through at the culmination of a state of mystic exaltation conceived as revelation. The soma is the catalyst of these latent forces. The designation kavi is given to the poet who can seize and express these correspondences, and to the god who sends him inspiration. The termvipra, literally ‘the quivering one,’  is also used. This suggests the mystical quivering described by the Kashmiri Spanda school. Traces of this mystical quivering can often be found in cult practice.1 The kavi of the classical period, the learned poet, transposes the old Vedic ambiguities to the aesthetic plane by means of double meanings and multiple senses; the classical vakrokti, 'tortuous speech' calls to mind the epithet vaṅkuḥ kaviḥ used of Rudra. This is the reason for the intricacies of Vedic style and vocabulary." [Renou]

Renou’s prime contribution is perhaps to have established the continuity between the tendency to enigma, ambiguity, and ambivalence of the Rigvedic verbal style and its prolongation in the ‘crooked speech’ (vakrokti, including śleṣa, dhvani and the various rhetorical devices)  of the classical poetry. The above recapitulation, though only one of numerous characteristic passages (some of which have been cited in this thesis), is especially significant because it links this verbal esotericism intimately to the esoteric dimension that plays so determining a role in all branches of Hindu civilization and culture and suggests that it is here that the hidden unity of these apparently disparate domains must be sought. Moreover, though the bráhman as the totality of the sacrificial and cosmological correspondences is especially monopolized by the brahmán-priest—who in the form of the purohita beside the king stands at the very center of the Hindu socio-religious universe—Renou nevertheless discovers its true source in a shamanistic type of spiritual realization that one associates with socially peripheral currents like the Pāśupatas (for Vrātyas, see Heesterman, “Vrātya and Sacrifice”). Caland’s remarks “on the ‘shamanic’ aspect of the primitive brahmán, secondarily aggregated to the śrauta cult, are not incompatible with the ‘bearer of the enigma’ that we seek to define here” (Renou, “Notes on Bráhman,” p.94, note). It would appear that the whole complex is best preserved in its integrity in the vidūṣaka [Jester]...

Just as the classical poet drew upon his inspiration (pratibhā), the Vedic sage (ṛṣi) had to rely, for his immediate synthetic vision of the totality of the bráhman-enigma, on his ready wit and intuition, which was conferred upon him chiefly by Agni “the god of inspiration par excellence…born in the nether world as a child of the Cosmic Waters” (Kuiper, Ancient Indian Cosmogony, p.182; cf. pp.182-84, 188-89, 83-85).

“Bráhman is none other than this form of thought-enigma consisting of posing a correlation, an explicative identification: the same that the Brāhmaṇas will designate by the terms nidāna or bandhu, and finally upaniṣad. The ‘bearer of the bráhman,’ when he is not the brahmán (masculine) himself (…) is the kavi, the poet of profound intuition who immensely surpasses the level of the usual laudators and narrators” [Renou, “Notes on Brahman,” p.88]." [Sunthar Visuvalingam, Abhinavagupta's Conception of Humour]


Visuvalingam wrote:
"...This is only the bisociation-formula in disguise because it consists in the nonsensical juxtaposition of two incompatible senses around a common (bisociated) link term, whose incongruity is not resolved. The ritual enigma, like the dream-work which is also not funny, serves to correlate the most diverse domains, having little in common with each other to the profane mind, and it does this by rhetorical devices that permit the vocabulary drawn from any one domain to communicate simultaneously corresponding meanings in the other domains. Polysemy is exploited to the maximum (cf. Renou, cited in notes 4, 17 above), and deliberately cultivated. If the bráhman is nevertheless far from funny, this is because the ritual specialists, most of all the brahmán-priest, are perfectly aware of the esoteric coherence which holds together these diverse planes and see nothing incongruous in the key terms that serve to link and weave together these disparate domains. The attention and concentration of even the novice, who is as yet unable to grasp the hidden connections, is nevertheless focused on assimilating and contemplating these correspondences and this attitude, we know, renders impossible the automatic bisociative mechanisms responsible for hāsya. But to the profane exoteric gaze, the transposition of the ritual enigma will either give the impression of sheer nonsense (see asatpralāpa, #5 below) or of a network of bisociations, wherein the incongruity of the bisociated terms will give the whole riddle the character of a joke. By exploiting and exaggerating to the maximum the hāsya aspect by underlining the incongruities, it is always possible to retain the mechanisms of the ritual enigma and its esoteric equivalences, even if only in a diluted, fragmentary and discontinuous manner, within the ‘profanized’ drama, where it would otherwise have no place because of the far more linear coherence of the plot and dialogue. But whereas the degenerate comic riddles (like the ones analyzed by Schultz and Rothbart) , with which we are familiar, are based in a real and irreducible incongruity and survive only by virtue of the humorous pleasure they afford, the apparent incongruities of the nālikā could often have served simultaneously to vehicle, for the enlightened esoteric gaze, perfectly congruous correspondences known to the closed circle of poets and initiates." [ib.]


Visuvalingam wrote:
"A parallel can easily be adduced from the Irish branch of the Indo-European tradition of verbal esotericism, which not only explains why the hāsya-aspect is essential to the vidūṣaka’s enigmatic speech but also why so much of this hāsya seems to rely on puerile unsophisticated means like babbling nonsense, irrelevant abrupt remarks, and far-fetched analogies.

“The Irish candidate for a degree in poetry was put through a severe test, in which he had to show himself acquainted with the history, laws and antiquities of his country; able to recite by heart many poems and tales for purposes of social recreation; capable of composing an extemporary poem on any subject, and of completing correctly a verse, of which the first half had been uttered by some other poet—‘He is great in expounding, and he expounds and solves questions,’ we are told in Cormac’s Glossary. Some of these questions were probably in the form of riddles testing the candidate’s knowledge of ‘the secret language of the poets,’ a phrase which probably denotes an elaborately conventional poetic diction and goes back to a time when ‘mastery of metaphor’ was not an art but a science; not a happy gift of conveying nuances of meaning, but the mark of initiation into an esoteric code. This proficiency in poetic diction and antiquarian lore was probably the chief quality tested in the poetic wit-combats which are frequently mentioned in Irish literature, and sometimes had unfortunate results, as on the day when Fercheirtne and Nede competed for the Chair of Poetry in the presence of King Conchobar. Up to that time, we are told, the poets were also judges, but on this occasion the language of the two combatants was so obscure that neither Conchobar nor the chiefs could understand a word of what they were saying. This made them so irritated that they removed the privileges of judicature from the poets and threw it open to all who could qualify for it. Some readers of modern poetry and most students of the Skaldic literature of Iceland will tend to sympathize with Conchobar. The Irish poet is such a learned—even academic—personage that it seems absurd to associate him in any way with the court-fool, nevertheless there are a few facts which hint at a possible connection” (Welsford, Fool, pp.88-89).

If indeed the classical poets had sought to conserve the values and functions of the ancient kavi by projecting the mechanisms of the bráhman-enigma into the discourse of the vidūṣaka, the only way they could have avoided the fate of the Irish poets would have been by reintegrating this nonsensical impression it makes on the profane ear into the very economy of the drama." [ib.]


Visuvalingam wrote:
"Yet, it is in the vidūṣaka, whose hāsya function depends greatly on incongruous speech (vikṛta-vāk), that we can expect to find the most faithful prolongation, conservation and even elaboration of the profound ritual and metaphysical motivation that subtends the whole scheme. Fragmented and dispersed into the elements of the vīthī, the diverse moments, modes and aesthetic possibilities of the ancient bráhman would have been recombined, in a discontinuous mode by the classicalkavi, in the ‘jokes’ (narma) of the brahma-bandhu through a wholly different medium (the ‘profanized’ drama), before an audience of laics, and in a profoundly transformed cultural milieu where the ideology of the brahmanical sacrifice in its integral form was accessible only to the privileged few. To the exoteric vision the clown appears to bring together wholly unconnected elements and domains in his utterances (the enigma), he is unable to see the differences between things, and is led astray by false and ridiculous analogies. This is why he is necessarily a fool (mūrkha) speaking nonsense (asambaddha-pralāpa), and hence his assimilation to a madman (compare Foucault, 1970, p.49). But to the esoteric vision, which is not different from that of the vidūṣaka himself, that restores the hidden coherence to the jumble of meaningless signs, the vidūṣaka must necessarily appear as generously endowed with ‘ready wit’ or ‘mental quickness’ (tadātva-pratibhā, BP p.289, lines 4-5; also vedavin narmavedī; cf. Bhat, p.104). This explains how the Nāṭya Śāstra could prescribe the vidūṣaka, who is always addressed as a ‘fool’ in the plays proper, to be ready-witted, for in him the exoteric surface and the esoteric coherence of the enigma are superposed on each other. But this superposition is rendered possible only through his humor (hāsya-aspect), which at the same time serves the aesthetic function of the drama. The hāsya function disguises the ritual one, and the ritual function is exploited for the purposes of hāsya." [ib.]
 
[cf. here Zarathustra as the "madman" who teaches the ER saying "all truth is 'Crooked', time itself is a circle...", and why TSZ is a 'book for everyone and no one'...


Visuvalingam wrote:
"Renou’s linking of the Rig-Vedic epithet of Rudra as ‘crooked poet’ (vaṅkuḥ kaviḥ) with on the one hand the brahmán-enigma conceived of as a shamanistic-type revelation and on the other hand the vakrokti of the classical Sanskrit poets has been taken up by T.Y. Elizarenkova and V.N. Toporov, Vedic Vaṅku, who rally around Sāyana’s interpretation of the word vaṅku: ‘Sāyana’s glosses are either vakra- ‘crooked, curved, bent, tortuous, twisted, wry, oblique’ (derived from the same root vañc- ‘to remove crookedly’) or kuṭila ‘bent, crooked, curved, etc.; dishonest, fraudulent’.” (p.100). They conclude with some observations that greatly contribute to our understanding of the intimate bond between the vidūṣaka and his ‘crooked staff’ (kuṭilaka): “Many typological parallels can be mentioned in connection with the idea ‘crooked’, ‘twisting’ as applied to the poet-priest (…). It would suffice here to remember one of the most striking examples. The name of the ancient Lithuanian poet-priests was either Krivis Krivaitis or Krivis-krivaitis from the adjective krivas ‘crooked’ (…). The attribute of such a priest was crooked club krivulis (it is worth mentioning that up to now in some places in Lithuania there remains still a custom that peasants are called to a meeting by a special herald with a stick krivulis)…. This motif, in turn, leads us to the problem of the ‘indirect’ modus of the archaic poetical speech of the ancient Indo-European poets, like the Old-Indian kavi or the Latinvates” (ibid., p.104). Not only does this explain the constant allusions, mostly by himself, to the vidūṣaka's being as crooked as his kuṭilaka which he holds in his lefthand (Parikh, pp.31-33), but it also explains why the donor of the kuṭilaka had to be Brahmā (compare Kuiper, VV pp.145-46), for the latter is the mythical projection of the brahmán-priest, bearer of the bráhman-enigma. This “weapon of Brahmā wielded by the vidūṣaka” (Abhinavabhāratī I, p.27) is possessed of that magical power invested in the bráhman-enigma, and if its crookedness is also repeatedly equated to the ‘perversity’ of his own heart, this is because the ultimate key to the bráhmanis hidden in the transgressive dimension (sato bandhum asati niravindan; hence the ‘great brahmin’ mahābrāhmaṇa), to which his ‘crooked’ speech often alludes. The sage Aṣṭāvakra’s mastery of the cosmological enigmas, which enables him to defeat Bandin in the riddle-contest (brahmodya), must likewise be attributed to his congenital crookedness (he was ‘bent in eight’ places, hence his name). Cursed to be crooked for speaking from his mother’s womb, it is to this ‘perverse’ capacity that his prowess must be attributed.
These notations of ‘perversity’ expressed symbolically through physical crookedness (the vidūṣaka is also prescribed to be hunch-backed kubja or “funny-backboned” hāsyānuka-vibhūṣita, and sometimes assumes such a posture in the classical plays; cf. NS KM XXIV.106; KSS XXXV.57; BP p.289; Bhat p.48, Parikh p.22) are also because the embryonic regression to the source of the bráhman is conceived as a mode of transgression; hence the inauspicious evil character of the dīkṣita in Varuṇa’s realm (cf. Kuiper, CC, Ancient Indian Cosmogony, p.116)." [ib.]


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Brahman Empty
PostSubject: Re: Brahman Brahman EmptyMon Apr 14, 2014 3:57 pm

Lyssa wrote:
Satyr wrote:

Explain why the Greeks explored and settled around the Mediterranean, some accounts have them venturing up towards England, and how alter Europeans explore and settle all over the world, when in the east, despite the huge populations, they go nowhere.

I suspect one of the reasons for this is the divergence that occurred in the attitudes of the Greco-Romans/the West in general and the Indo-Iranians/the East, in the cultural and philological evolution of the figure of the 'Guest'.

"The primitive notion conveyed by hostis is that of equality by compensation: a hostis is one who repays my gift with a counter-gift. Thus, like its Gothic counterpart, gasts, Latin hostis at one period denoted the guest. The classical meaning “enemy” must have developed when reciprocal relations between clans were succeeded by the exclusive relations of civitas to civitas (cf. Gr. xénos ‘guest’ > ‘stranger’)." [E.Benveniste]

While the Host who originally denoted the Guest, a visiting divinity, gradually turned into the Enemy, in the West; in the East, as Heesterman points out in the first post here, the conflict culture where the Host was once Enemy, a rival contender for the goods of the sacrifice, gradually devolved into a 'friendly'/pacified participatory Guest.

So, you have an Enemy-outlook in the West that sets out to conquer outwardly, while in the East, you have a Gift-outlook that draws in the Other as a divine guest, shifting the focus to an inner self-conquest.



Mauss wrote:
"The taonga and all strictly personal posses- sions have a hau, a spiritual power. You give me taonga, I give it to another, the latter gives me taonga back, since he is forced to do so by the hau of my gift; and I am obliged to give this one to you since I must return to you what is in fact the product of the hau of your taonga.''
Interpreted thus not only does the meaning become clear, but it is found to emerge as one of the leitmotifs of Maori custom. The obligation attached to a gift itself is not inert. Even when abandoned by the giver, it still forms a part of him. Through it he has a hold over the recipient, just as he had, while its owner, a hold over anyone who stole it.^* For the taonga is animated with the hau of its forest, its soil, its homeland, and the hau pursues him who holds it."
It pursues not only the first recipient of it or the second or the third, but every individual to whom the taonga is transmitted.

The hau wants to return to the place of its birth, to its sanctuary of forest and clan and to its owner. The taonga or its hau itself a kind of individual constrains a series of users to return some kind of taonga of their own, some property or merchandise or labour, by means of feasts, entertainments or gifts of equivalent or superior value. Such a return will give its donor authority and power over the original donor, who now becomes the latest recipient. That seems to be the motivating force behind the obligatory circulation of wealth, tribute and gifts in Samoa and New Zealand.

Hence it follows that to give something is to give a part of oneself Secondly, we are led to a better understanding of gift exchange and total presta- tion, including the potlatch. It follows clearly from what we have seen that in this system of ideas one gives away what is in reality a part of one's nature and substance, while to receive something is to receive a part of someone's spiritual essence. To keep this thing is dangerous, not only because it is illicit to do so, but also because it comes morally, physically and spiritually from a person. Whatever it is, food, possessions, women, children or ritual, it retains a magical and religious hold over the recipient. The thing given is not inert. It is alive and often personified, and strives to bring to its original clan and homeland some equivalent to take its place.

It is in the nature of food to be shared; to fail to give others a part is to 'kill its essence', to destroy it for oneself and for others. Such is the interpretation at once materialistic and idealistic, that Brahminism gave to hospitality.
'He who eats without knowledge kills his food, and his food kills him.' Avarice interrupts the action of food which, when properly treated, is always productive of more.

It is the veritable persona which is at stake, and it can be lost in the potlatch just as it can be lost in the game of gift-giving, in war, or through some error in ritual. In all these societies one is anxious to give; there is no occasion of importance (even outside the solemn winter gatherings) when one is not obliged to invite friends to share the produce of the chase or the forest which the gods or totems have sent; to redistribute everything received at a potlatch...

The gift is thus soijiething that jnust be given, that must be received. and that is, at the same time, dangerous to accept. The gift itself constitutes an irrevocable link especially when it is a gift of food. The recipient depends upon the temper of the donor, in fact each depends upon the other. Thus a man does not eat with his enemy.

The French word gage is connected with wadium (cf wage). Huvelin shows that the Germanic wadium provides a means of understanding the contractual bond and compares it with the Roman nexum. In fact, in the manner in which Huvelin interprets it, the pledge accepted allows the contracting parties in Germanic law to react on each other, because one possesses something of the other who, having once owned it, might well have put a spell on it; but we can suggest a more direct interpretation.
Huvelin has already noted that the thing is something ordinary, personal or of little value; and he rightly compares this with the theme of the 'life-token'. The pledge thus given is in fact imbued with the personality of the partner who
gave it. The fact that it is in the hands of the recipient moves its donor to fulfil his part of the contract and buy himself back by buying the thing. Thus the nexum is in the thing used as a pledge and not only in the magical acts or terms of the contract, the words, oaths, ritual and handshakes exchanged; it is present not only in the acts of magical significance, the tallies of which each partner keeps a share, or the joint meals where each partakes of the other's substance; it is present in the thing as well.

First the pledge not only creates obligations and acts as a binding force but it also engages the honour, authority and mana of the man who hands it over. He remains in an inferior position so long as he is not freed from his
'engagement-wager'. For the words Wette and wetten, translations of wadium, imply wager as much as pledge. It is the price of an agreement and the recognition of a challenge, even more than a means of constraining the debtor. As long as the contract is not terminated it is a wager lost, and thus the contractor loses more than he bargained for
In English, 'to throw down the gage' is the equivalent of 'to throw down the gauntlet'. The fact is that the pledge as a thing given spells danger for the two parties concerned.
The danger represented by the thing given or transmitted is possibly nowhere better expressed than in very ancient
Germanic languages. This explains the double meaning of the word Gift as gift and poison.

The theme of the fateful gift, the present or possession that turns into poison, is fundamental in Germanic folklore. The Rhine Gold is fatal to the man who wins it, the Cup of Hagen is disastrous to the hero who drinks of it; numerous tales and legends of this kind, Germanic and Celtic, still haunt our imaginations. We may quote the
stanza in which the hero of the Edda, Hreidmar, replies to the curses of Loki

'Thou hast given presents
But thou hast not given presents of love.
Thou hast not given of a benevolent heart;
Thou hadst already been deprived of thy life,
Had I but known the danger sooner.'

Numerous other French customs show how it is necessary to detach the thing sold from the man who sells it: a thing may be slapped, the sheep may be whipped when sold, and so on.

Originally, we contend, things had a personality and a virtue of their own. Things are not the inert objects which the laws of Justinian and ourselves imply. They are a part of the family: the Roman familia
comprises the res as well as the personae. It is defined in the Digest, and we note that the farther back we go into Antiquity the more the familia denotes the res of which it consists even to the family's food and means of livelihood." [The Gift]


Snyder wrote:
"The commons is the contract a people make with their local natural system. The word has an instructive history: it is formed of ko, "together," with (Greek) moin, "held in common." But the Indo-European root met means basically to "move, to go, to change." This had an archaic special meaning of "exchange of goods and services within a society as regulated by custom or law." I think it might well refer back to the principle of gift economies: "the gift must always move." The root comes into Latin as munus, "service performed for the community" and hence "municipality." [The Practice of the Wild]



Beneveniste wrote:
"For all comparative philologists, Indo-European *peku means “live-stock” or, in a narrow sense, “sheep.” The meaning of “wealth” (e.g. Lat. pecūnia) is consequently regarded as secondary and this is explained as the result of a semantic extension of the term which originally referred to the main type of wealth, i.e. live-stock.

For Old English, it is sufficient to consult the Concise Anglo-Saxon Dictionary by J. R. Clark Hall and Meritt to see that féoh in the sense of “cattle, herd,” traditionally put at the head of the article, is attested only in a few examples, which incidentally would now require careful reconsideration, while the great majority of the examples are found among the headings “movable goods, property” and especially “money, riches, treasure.” We may say, then, that in Old English féoh was applied first and foremost to riches in general or to movable goods and only in the second instance, and then very rarely, to that form of movable property which consists of live-stock. In Beowulf it means solely “riches” or “treasure” and in Aelfric the expression wi liegendum fēo ‘for ready money’ confirms the antiquity of the sense. Finally, there are only three compounds where féoh means “animals” as against about thirty where it means “money, riches.”

Our first conclusion is that *peku signifies “movable personal possession.” That this possession may in fact take the form of live-stock is a separate datum which concerns social structure and the forms of production. It is only in virtue of this frequent association between the term *peku and the material reality of animal husbandry that, by a generalization which took place outside the class of producers, *peku came to mean “live-stock” (the first specialization), then specifically “small live-stock” (the second specialization), and finally “sheep” (the third and last specialization)." [Indo-European Language and Society]

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Brahman Empty
PostSubject: Re: Brahman Brahman EmptyThu Jul 14, 2016 12:05 pm

Heesterman at the beginning of this thread, explained the shift in the meaning of Brahman through sacrifice originally denoting an agonistic model with a rival contender [personifying death] to interiorizing violence through the Agnihotra [becoming death itself]…
The rival contender was eliminated, and interiorized via the figure of the world-renouncer or the self-sacrificer, etc.

Serres shows the exact same displacement in the West, the elimination of agon, beginning with Descartes' mind-alone interiorization, and the beginning of false enlightenment rationalism, and the ushering in of nihilistic Modernity.

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"ἐδιζησάμην ἐμεωυτόν." [Heraclitus]

"All that exists is just and unjust and equally justified in both." [Aeschylus, Prometheus]

"The history of everyday is constituted by our habits. ... How have you lived today?" [N.]

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PostSubject: Re: Brahman Brahman Empty

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