[...]ed 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 + weather phenomena

wind: (***in its irreducible qualitative variety***) expression of cosmic spirit + محرک باعث a motive force to be accurately estimated

منجنیق ~= geometry هندسه *pneumatic engineering* : distinction between moving and moved components ==evoke==> motive forces
elaborated pneumatic machines
mechanical clocks
tension of strings

*wind ==> celestial influences*
(Cardano regarded) expansion and contraction of air as symmetrical phenomena, both consisting a source of motive forces
-in the universe the element air had the function of receiving and conveying fiery celestial influences on earth providing health and wellbeing fir living creatures

Telesion (1509-1588)
soul and spirit identified with each other as a very subtle material substance pervading all bodies and making them capable of sensing and reacting to rach other with pleasure or pain
*(man’s) immortal soul did not play any role in determining natural phenomena*

innate heat of living bodies

wind: humid vapours flowing through the air
thinness of wind vapours


16th century
expiration and inspiration of the lungs
Holy Spirit is expressed in the nature of winds
interest in wind and weather was kindled by reports reaching Europe from the East and West Indies about hitherto unknown meteorological phenomena عجایب


orderly majesty of God ==> encyclopedism about the universe + an analogue of a memory system

Jean Bodin
firm believer in and opponent of demonic magic
theater of the whole nature universe naturae theatrum
reason of wind (ratio ventorum):
•sun
•impulse (impulsus) of the angels or demons


sphere of sacrobosco
De sphaera mundi
(On the Sphere of the World, pre-Copernican astronomy)


...our sublunar world

gunpowder theory of thunder ⛈
compact earthly matter from underground whose expansion with expansion so fast that it moves large masses of air, like “salniter in fire or gunpowder which has caught fire”


visualization
making air visible
inverted glass experiment
linking thermal expansion & contraction of pure air to wind formation (Cardano)

(under the influence of) celestial fire ==> air (could become alive and active) acquiring motive force

on the transmutations of air

(typical of 16th century) steering the religious significance of the study of nature
spirit: a cosmic subtle substance, both recipient + vehicle of celestial influences ==allow==> elements to transmute into each other (+ meteorological phenomena)
(Drebbel’s favourite cosmic spirit:) fire = clearest of all elements ad top of the hierarchical order of elements (fire, air, water, earth), clarifying the other elements [such as Siavash]

(for Della Porta:) meteorological phenomena = transmutations of the air (in literal sense)
air becoming thinner or thicker ==rise==> winds, thunder, clouds, rain, snow, linking heaven + earth + bringing life to all animated creatures

(Della Porta conceived of) wind in vitalistic terms
...winds rising up from the mouth of the retort (boiling water)
how heat endowed air with motive force


(Drebbel presenting to the public) perpetuum mobile : expansion and contraction of air (which he claimed) demonstrated the force behind all movement and life

weatherglass (+ aeolipila) --demonstrated--> ****highly nontrivial natural phenomena**** (transformation of energy from heat into mechanical motion)

(ajayeb’s) theory about the origins of the wind

Galileo --> earth's rotatio[...]