Re: Ancient Greeks saw gods in a daydream
May 29, 2020
Prof. Greg Anderson
Department of History
Ohio State University
Dear professor Anderson,
friends made me aware of your book and TED-talk - and I was very pleased to hear your initiative: to understand history, we must realize they not only understood the world differently, but the world was different for them. Me too wrote an article for the deputees of the Slovak parliament, showing the Athenian democracy to have a quite different meaning, because of different context in values and worldview.
I am a former research fellow of the Slovak academy of sciences, now leading a non-profit foundation on integral studies. For 30 years I am doing an original research and dealing with the question, in what way gods have been "real" and why the ancients spoke as if they saw them. It seems, our insights could complement each other and be beneficial to talk about.
I undertook a systematic research of waves of creativity in history worldwide - in arts sciences, politics and especially all references to apparitions of gods/angels/ancestors and the like in connection with creative feats or historical turns in society. I am processing these data by statistical methods and looking for regular patterns and connections.
There was a system of how and when gods appeared, that was to a certain extent explicitly stated and shared by several civilizations (ancient Egyptians, Babylonians, Chinese...). For instance the system of "time spirits" - gods inspiring cultural epochs in a cyclical way. Based on independent data from hundreds of studies I showed that this system corresponds to real cycles of creativity in history. Attached is one example from medicine: creativity in medicine is cyclical and synchronous in the West and Far East and the culminations have been known as epochs of Hermes/Mercury/or archangel Raphael (who are patronizing medicine).
In my work, for the first time, reports of apparitions of deities are shown to be systematically connected to empirically measurable cultural variables. With prof. Mikulecky, we proposed that these patterns of archetypal experience ("gods") come from the long past evolution of life on Earth and their cyclical synchronization worldwide is coordinated by a 500-year solar activity cycle (meanwhile this cycle has been discovered and confirmed indeed).
But now the important point: it would seem that, maybe, the notion of "gods" arose as a symbolical abstraction of social events only. For instance, there was a cyclical worsening of climate, famine, political destabilization and war - and that is why Egyptians or Babylonians speak about cyclical presence and recurrence of their war-gods (Seth, Nergal) in those times. Also true, but it is often the other way around: an intuition rose from the collective unconscious and initiated, caused social events, so far as to change the whole cultural epoch.
The form of peoples' consciousness 3000 years ago differed from ours today. Gods were not deliberate abstract ideas experienced within human head. They were experienced unintentionally and outwith as nearly-sensory-perceptions. Today, one would say hallucinations, but that is not the proper word. Hallucinations today are arbitrary and mark insanity. Those visions have been produced by proper intelligence, unconsciously, and projected outward similar to visual/auditory experience, especially in critical situations where novel solutions were needed. That was normal (majority) way of functioning of a healthy mind.
It was a kind of day-dream running parallel to waking state (that was akin a perception, but they knew this to be different from physical perceptions). And they knew, they'd better heed such experience and not ignore it. I could make evident, for instance, how different gods appeared in the right or left visual (or auditory) fields in consequence of the lateralization of brain functions. Such integration of religious studies with neuroscience - as far as I know - has been proposed only by Julian Jaynes, a psychologist at Princeton, and I am continuing his work.
Today, the same archetypes/gods go on to influence our behavior, only it is happening subconsciously. As my history research shows, the same cycles of inspiration and creativity - formerly ascribed to gods/archangels - continue in modern times. Yet we do not experience it as outward apparitions (if, exceptionally only), but rather as our "own ideas".
I am working on the third volume of my book "Angelology of history", which is but available in Czech and Slovak only. I hope to find ways to bring it into discussion in english-speaking world also.
I wish a lot of inspiration and good health to continue your work, with best regards,
Emil Pales, Bratislava, Slovakia, www.sophia.sk
