The Ancient Elsewhere

Western ideas tend to encourage people to discover where they originated. Usually people believe that there must be some older and distinctive locale from which the real knowledge stems. For instance, tracing philosophy backwards in history inevitably lands you in Egypt. Tracing it back further still may put you in the uncomfortable academic position of proclamations of "Atlantis!" or the PIE (Proto-Indo-Europeans), who first looked up and named the sky-father. For some reason we assume that the knowledge must have come from somewhere, and that somewhere is always a different place, at a different time. This fundamentally begs the question where does information come from, and is it a quantity so elemental that it can neither be created nor destroyed?

Why do we do this? Why do we assume the information was created at a previous point in time and propagates forward to us in the current moment? In a recent conversation I had, I found myself doing almost by accident the exact reverse opposite of this. The conversation started by considering the early church heresy of gnosticism, and an impassioned plea to my conversational partner to abandon the notions of the early church in their stark and militant dismissal of these ideas which predated the proto-orthodoxy of the Christian church by centuries. Out of the minds of Egypt, Syria, and Asia Minor, a compost of Jewish mysticism, early Christianity, Persian Dualism, and Platonism produced the vegetation of gnosticism. Gnosis, not pure information, but a deep-seated revelatory and saving knowledge that wakes one up from a world of illusions and deceit is the promise of gnosticism. In the many belief systems which bear the collective title of gnosticism it is generally assumed to be the case that the material world the physical bodies, the celestial spheres, all which is made of matter and energy is nothing but a prison built by a lesser god (or in some traditions a malformed entity created by one of the pleroma - the Greek oneness of deity), who mistaking himself for the god of all reality produced the physical world, and within it a spark of the divine was imbued. In gnostic thought, salvation comes from the remembrance of this, and it achieved through the impartation of wisdom, mostly by Our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ.

These gnostic thoughts, and indeed the full gnostic cosmology did not arrive from a vacuum, as stated before, they arose from the compost of the ideas in the regions around them, and they realized this. Plato's thoughts were reflected in a darker hue, past what he likely would have tolerated. His two worlds, the shadows on the cave wall, and the perfect forms that cast them were viewed as the world to which the divine spark the soul belongs, and the imperfect shadows cast on the physical world. Plato thought this world was a pale copy of the world of forms, but not evil as the gnostics saw. If Plato could have watched it happen, I think he would have recognized his own furniture in a house he found unbearable to live in, the cosmic horror version of a philosophy he meant to be, of all things, hopeful.

Both Plato and the gnostics locate the true world as a reality extant elsewhere. A reality behind the senses, above the world. To orthodox Christians this world is the world before the fall. Those same Christians when burning the books of the gnostics, branding their teaching heretical, killing them, they were fighting over where the true knowledge lives, and who gets to hold the keys to its gate, a fight over the source of information and knowledge, a violent fight, where ideas were stamped out and deemed illegal by one group. The bishops' mediated knowledge gave them the power to say: come through me, through our sacraments, and our institution. In contrast the gnostics offered unmediated knowledge, telling us we already contain the spark, and we don't need priests or institutions, we are the stewards of our own spark, and we should be the ones to let it glow through our realization. The supression was about power and control, perhaps the one rare case of genuine care for the fellow man, but look at the evidence. If a Christian cared about the soul of their fellow man, they would do everything in their power to help them to come to the light. That is not the flavor of persecution that was employed by the early church of heretics. Heretics were killed for preaching any knowledge contrary to what the church deemed. A knowledge you can reach on your own is not a knowledge that an administrator can sell you, and therefore it is not a knowledge which the church believes should be professed. I have watched smaller versions of this my whole life, the person who gets control of a system and immediately starts forcing everyone into their format, because diversity of practice threatens the thing they are guarding. (like forcing academics to input their resume into a specific systems format) The early Church was that instinct at civilizational scale.

Why does everything always go back to Egypt? Their symbols are everywhere, the Eye of Ra, the Eye of Horus, everywhere I look. I want to be honest that some of this is just cultural sediment; I was obsessed with a card game as a kid whose creator had actually traveled to Egypt to get the mythology right. But the deeper answer is that Egypt has been doing this to people for thousands of years. It was ancient when the Greeks were young. Pythagoras and Plato were said to have studied there. Its temples had secret chambers and its priests were imagined as keepers of hidden wisdom, and so it became the permanent address we mail our need for depth. When we want an idea to feel true, we trace it to somewhere old enough to feel sacred and safe.

Maybe if we trace the origin back beyond Egypt, the PIE, you stop finding a place, and find instead a shape. Convergent evolution of thought and ideas bring similar cultural structures where there was no interconnects. The upper, middle, and underworld are universal, running up through all three is the ancient symbol of the world tree. The Yggdrasil, the axis mundi, the Bodhi tree, the Kabbalist's Tree of Life, the Tree of the fruit of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. The underworld roots in the dead, our ancestral past, the living trunk spanning the current moment, the collective minds of the living on Earth, and its branches stretch towards the heavens of potential futures. Every culture watches the world tree grow. Maybe it comes from no central source at all, maybe it is just the shape the human consciousness makes when it tries to hold everything before it at once.