[...]of our own human identity but also of how much more there is, an assertion of our imperfect hunger for mystery. ‘without mystery life shrinks,’ wrote biologist Edward O. Wilson. ‘the completely known is a numbing void to all active minds.’”
(Meloy, Eating Stone p142-143)

...................................

Jacobsen on ancient mesopotamian

*religion = response*

[*]numinous: a unique experience of *confrontation with power* not of this world, confrontation with a ‘wholly other’
--> terrifying, demonic dread, awe, sublime majesty, fascinating, demanding unconditional allegiance, etc.
*positive human response [in thought (myth, theology) + in action (culd, worship)] ==> religion*

metaphor: human psychological reaction to the experience [of numinous] by means of analogy
-in metaphors all that is shared by the worshipers of an individual culture or cultural period in their common response to the numinous is summed and crystallized
-choice of central metaphor: wants to recapture and transmit, the primary meaning on which it builds, which underlines and determines the *total character of its response* = the total character of its religion
-major religious metaphors of the ancient mesopotamians have a double nature as pointing beyond themselves to things not of this world & yet being and remaining very much of the world

in attempting to interpret religious metaphors, one must seek to bring out as fully as possible its *powers to suggest and recall* the numinous
-to one generations is fresh and powerful may be to another seem old and trite
suggestiveness =/= representaive of its period --> literalness: attention to human purposes and values ==> [flase] sense that all has been explained and understood

human's recognition of dependency upon power not of this world --> religious expressino = transcendent hope and trust (=/= Nietzsche)


*(mesopotamian) numinous = immanence (in feature of confrontation) =/= all transcendence

mesopotamian experience of numinous power = revelation of *indwelling spirit* --> power at the center of something that caused it to be and thrive and flourish =/= Old Testament's numinous = transcendent {---> go to the experience of Moses with the burning bush: ‘God =/= bush’ --> **God happened as it were sojourn there موقتا but he is altogether transcendent, and there is nothing but a purely situational ephemeral relation with the bush}
--✕--> a mesopotamian would have experienced the burning bush differently: numinous power of the bush's being (not just “in” it) --> numinous = immanent =/= transcendent

power speaking to Moses in the desert disassociates itself from the bush and identifies itself as the god of Moses's father --> needs introduction =/= numinous power speaking to the mesopotamian Enkidu in Gilgamesh Epis does not choose to disassociate itself from it locus and so needs no introduction. --{"the sun god heard the word of his mouth; from afar, from the midst of heaven, he kept calling to him.” <-- the power is here seen as immanent in the visible sun, is what animates it and motivates it, *is the god who informs it*}

in Akkadian (the language in which epic of Gilgamesh is written): ‘the word for X = the numinous power in X’
•(word for) visible sun = sun god
•the sumerian word for sky, the visible blue dome overhead, which turns black and full of stars that make their wat across it at night = the name of the numinous power in the sky, its power and its will to be, the sky god

the form given to numinous encounter may adjust to the content revealed in it

*sometimes the form-giving imagination reads details and meaning into a form beyond what is given in simple observation* --> the numinous power in thunderstorm developed from the dark thundercloud into an enormous black eagle, but since the mighty roar of the thunder could not well be imagined as issuing from other than a lion's maw, this bird was given a lion's head

**form-giving imagination**
rings the changes on a basic meaningful form in a whole series of variations, each expressing the underlying numinous content in different ways
-series of suggestive variant images all expressive of its power to wax, to produce and yield


lord: a charismatic leader magically responsible for producing fertility and plenty for his subjects
...situationally determined nonhuman forms --✕--> victory of human form over nonhuman forms slowly and with difficulty (with the begining of third millennium from early Dynastic onward)


intransitive: fulfilled in the specific situation or phenomenon and did not reach out beyond it (~ characteristic boundness to some phenomena)
(ancient mesopotamian saw) numinous as immanent ==> name that power and attribut form to it in terms of the phenomena


[Jacobsen's well articulation to pose a question -->] *the characteristic of mesopotamian boundness to the externals of situation in which the numinous was encountered...* ==>
•intransitiveness
•differentiation ==> pluralistic aspect (--> polytheism) --> divine aspects that it recognized

plurality ==> ability to:
•distinguish
•evaluate
•choose

“No god went by, why are my muscles paralyzed” (Gilgamesh) --> ‘god = paralyzing fear’
uncannily good luck
sudden realization of having come to harm
numinous power experienced in sudden illness
*no allegiance was invented* ==> no cult developed

they are gloomy, their shadow dark,
no light is in their bodies,
ever they slink along covertly,
walk not upright,
from their claws drips bitter gall,
their footprints are (full of) evil venom.

(from [more primitive?]) dread --to--> fascination

the shivers and chills (of death)
that fritter the sun of things,
spawn of the god of heavens,
spawned on an evil spirit,
the death warrants, beloved sons of the storm god,
born of the queen of the netherworld,
who were torn out of heaven and hurled from the earth as castoffs,
are creatures of hell, all

we are not determined, we are engendered


numinous as immanent --> external habituation: inviting (or magically enforcing) the presence of the power within

efforts of such habituation:
•cult dramatic
•fashioning or appropriate divine images
•religious literature
•temples

*cult drama: the form fills with its content*
literally re-present god, presenting his external form, (bring about the god's presence through ritual representation of him) --> beneficent results for the community [--> still works today]
•sacred marriage
•yearly lamentations
•battle drama (primeval contest for world order against the forces of chaos)
fashioning of images (of the god) --> to achive lasting presence

poetry: means of invoking the presence of powers [--> we are doing this still?! bad poetry]
creative power of the word underlines all mesopotamian (religious) literature
•works of praise
•works of lament (specialized lamentation-priest @Sana, Ali )
*lament: influencing and swaying the divine heart by reminding the god of past happiness, rather than by magically recreating that past*


(mesopotamian:) *temple = house*
(implication between) the divine owner and his house --> emotional closeness of a human owner and his home + the *closeness of essence* (of being) --amounting--> to embodiment =/= habituation
--> house = temple = representation of the power that is meant to fill it

(similar to human dwelling) ***house = temple = the place where the owner could be found (or felt)***
--> that god (the owner) was present and available

the god's retainers --> because the temple was god's home, was not only near and approachable, he was involved with the fortunes of the community and commited ti maintaining it --> *mesopotamian temple was profoundly awesome* (it carried awesome aura, awesome or angry nimbus هاله)
-the temple was covered with loveliness
-the god's private apartment shrouded in darkness : the dark room (no eye is to see)
--> specific closeness of essence + the power inhabiting it

authoritative revelation
know what was “the proper thing”

house mountain
house rising sun
house causing light
he who issues forth from the thriving...


ancient =? ancient to us ~=? ancient to them

there is no living cultural tradition that connects us with mesopotamia

immediate unanalyzed total reactions (?)

false meanings jar, stop, and lead no further

older elements (seemingly unchanged) come to mean something quite different, have been interpreted to fit into a new system of meanings

religious metaphors:
•spiritual core in phenomena
•rulers
•parents


[and then later] dark age closed down on mesopotamia
many divine wills to the willful whim of a single despot
*major gods became natural gods* (identified with narrow national political aspirations)
--> barbarization of the idea of divinity

...................................

(how to take seriously) water's materiality --> how to think with water (or *how water means*):
•water can bring human conceptual life along with it from local to global concerns
•[can help us to] go beyond qualities that express some timeless properties

(my point: the experience of fire is as inseparable from that of stone)
[Alberti suggests] *to think in terms of the properties of the phenomenon ‘rock/water’ as engendered by specific, embodied practices in this place* (=/= grappling with the question of the agentive capacities or properties of the rock or water)

***there are many waters (fires, jinns, divs, stones, shadows), not only many meanings of water (fires, jinns, divs, stones, shadows)***

}--> Alberti's brilliant response to Strang's bad idea of universal notions of properties (which is a very common tendency towards relationality among artists --> Strang: “common material properties of things, and the shared cognitive and phenomenological processes through which people interact with them, generate recurrent ideas and patterns of engagement in diverse cultural and historical contexts”)

to bear on the form and content of an argument about water as:
•material
•social
--> describing relations (human and nonhuman) established through water
*what water can do: flow*

agentive or affective capacities of materials --> (bad philosophy of flux) flow as a overgeneralized model for materiality =/= expanding relations water engenders through its properties in particular locations or rivers

*humans are able to shift conceptual scales through reflexivity*

(Alberti asking within archaeology:) how to reconcile materials and meaning without introducing a representationalist logic where meaning is applied to matter by a thinking subject? how to show their co-existence without resorting to determinism?

now everyone is busy and talking about *relationality* than about *meaning* (=/= my work has alwayes been about both, how to take risks in meaning, my lecture-performances = adventures of meaning)
-we cannot mearly talk about relationality {quasi-universal experience of properties ==> commonalities of meanings across time and culture}, the question of meaning remains --Alberti--> how are we to think about non-arbitrary categories, meanings and values without recourse to universal properties? how different meanings can adhere to the same substances?

materials (water, parasite, etc.) lend themselves to conceptual innovation

often things are willed away (not by a more agentive segment of the population [<-- paranoiac understanding], but) due to the attraction of other kinds of work elsewhere

(how not to) think of the entire phenomenon as one in which properties become determinate (~ scheme transfer) --✕--> properties are imminent in embodied human engagement with that world [~ Baradian: there is no such thing as a property that belongs to an independent object]
•body may be the first tool
•properties (or potentials [ajayeb style?]) cannot be listed

X as agent presents us, as shadow shows...

...................................

winds
روح ruh, spirit =/= wind: thermal expansion of air ~ air’s tendency to rarefy and expand under the influence of heat
(recognition of) thermal expansion of air ==> motor of global atmospheric circulation

explaining winds --Borrelli-->
•how rational thought could grasp
•how divine power descended to earth

pneumatic machines
gears, weights, levers, pulleys

****premodern natural phenomena
--more--> exploring and classifying *varieties* of things =/=
--less--> common *causes* of things

varieties =/= causes


cause ==>? highly complex phenomena
  |           |  
[-O-] ==> {t|/?#$^%V!~)&^} <-- premodern science and art today stays here (---> go to Stewart’s attunement to phenomena)


[*]navigation: negotiation between the direction one ‘witches’ to travel & the direction that is ‘possible’ to travel --> wind sense:
temperature
humidity
intensity
regularity
smell
knowledge of astronomy + geography


wind rose --> (connection between:) celestial + astronomical order + terrestrial variety (of land + living creature)

estimate the speed of the ship
throw a log with a rope attached to it overboard, and measure how much rope went overboard within a given period of time

Pliny the Elder --> historia naturalis

Seneca --> naturales quaestiones
air has a natural power of moving itself [==> agency باد]
}<== Seneca’s stoic worldview: conceived the cosmic principle of all life and movement (pneuma) as a subtle substance pervading everything and giving rise, among other things, to all weather phenomena
air = expression of pneuma (alive & live-giving)
all weather = manifestations as transmutations of air
(late medieval encyclopedia -->) *weather = a kind of alchemy of air*
(late medieval wind diagrams -->) wind: cosmic divine powers blowing from the celestial sphere onto earth

Aristotle + Albertus Magnus ==> explanation of the nature and origin of winds in Renaissance meteorological works
air and were then dragged along by the circular movement of the celestial spheres so that they ended up moving horizontally

hot and dry exhalations

aeolipila: a hollow metal sphere (shaped like the face of Aeolus) with a single tiny hole in it

air possessed a force (“vis”) that heat could awaken

16th century --increase--> interest in systematic explanation of meteorological phenomena

#workshop on wind poetry
epic battle, systems moving air, agency,

feature of Renaissance thought --> the idea of *a middle instance (neither fully corporal nor fully incorporeal) intervening between matter and soul* [+ fire as intermediator] ~ spiritus, pneum, quintessence ~ fire or air

...in schematic abstract structure of body-spirit-soul, spirit is somewhere in between

spirit: air-like substance
air: preferred vehicle of spirit (conveyed the breath if life + *used by demonic spirits as a means to produce material effects*)

*spirit: celestial origin to the “innate heat” (calidum innatum) of living creatures

effects of solar heat on air : act of vitalization

pneuma of the stoics + astral body of Neoplatonic philosophy + medical spirits of Galenic medicine }==>
•Renaissance
•(christian notion of) Holy Ghost
•the idea of close connection between wind and divine power (in Bible)

(in alchemical view) spirits were somehow connected ti air <== quintessences were often separated from raw substances in the form of vapours


ajayebnameh ~= natural magic
*kinds of natural motions*
1. avoidance of avacum: from the form of a portion of air, when it does not want to be either expanded further or separated (from other matter). horror vacui --kinetic--> motion was regarded as due to a property of a specific part of the machine
2. resistance to excessive compression: the form of basic matter should not become less that what is right for it
3. the tendency of heavy things to descend and of light things to rise

air = vital spirit that joins things together, resounding spirit if the world instrument

Paraceksian theory of aerial niter
(an active principle) aerial version of earthly gunpowder - responsible for life, combustion, thunder, lightning, (some) illnesses
--> connecting the activity of air + life + wea[...]