Ancient Cosmologies

CURRENTLY UNDERGOING SOME SERIOUS REVISIONS - WILL RETURN (IN MUCH BETTER SHAPE) SOON!

Against an Orthodoxy of Platonic Theology: Why the Demiurge is not Nous
Jason G. Rheins

In this paper I argue against the thesis that in Plato’s dialogues the Divine Craftsman or Demiurge (dēmiourgos - δημιουργός) represents or is equivalent to Intellect (nous - νοῦς). This claim (abbreviated as ΔΝ throughout) has been central to interpretations of Plato’s theology since antiquity, and it has been nearly universally conceded among Platonists. It has continued to be taken for granted in modern scholarship. Despite their many disagreements about Plato’s theology and cosmology, all the major interpretive camps have accepted the ΔΝ. By explicitly rejecting the ΔΝ, I argue that we can resolve several persistent and long-standing dilemmas that have undermined attempts to reconstruct a coherent Platonic view about the gods or to give an adequate reading of Plato’s late dialogues, especially the Timaeus.
In §I, I briefly introduce the central debates concerning Plato’s views about the nature of the gods and explain how the concepts of immanent and transcendent hypostases can be used to clearly frame these issues. In §II I lay out three key theses endorsed by Plato that any adequate position must be able to embrace. They are: 1. Immanence of Intellect; 2. Distinctness of Demiurge from Soul; 3. Venerability of the World-soul. These Platonic theses are all textually well supported, so rejecting any one of them from a reconstruction of Plato’s theology is not a viable option. I outline and categorize the major views that modern scholars have taken in terms of their commitments with respect to these theses. I show that each camp fails to account for one of the three theses and that they seem jointly incompatible. However, it is only in conjunction with the ΔΝ that the theses become incompatible; without the ΔΝ all three can be endorsed in tandem coherently. Thus I show that it is their further commitment to the ΔΝ that undermines all the major positions.
One of the three theses in particular, what I call the “Immanence of Intellect” principle, has been especially controversial. In §III I present the evidence for the principle and address the most prominent text that has been used as a reason to reject it, Philebus 30a8-b7. This text has been widely misread; I correct the misreading and show that when properly construed the passage provides no evidence for rejecting or attenuating the Immanence of Intellect principle.
In §IV I present several other reasons why the ΔΝ has been embraced, and I reexamine the textual evidence that has been adduced in its support. For instance, interpreters have mistakenly made this assumption on the grounds that the Demiurge is called the best of causes in the Timaeus, while intellect seems to be the cause of all good and generated things in the Philebus. The latter part of that argument is doubly mistaken; intellect is neither presented as the maker of soul (which Plato came to regard as a generated thing in his late dialogues), nor as the cause of all things that come to be. It is only identified as belonging to and being an exemplar of the class of things that are causes/makers of generated things. In all but one instance, these texts fail to provide evidence for the ΔΝ thesis, and in some cases it will be shown that they do not refer to the Demiurge at all. One passage, however, Timaeus 47e5-48a5, does seem to refer to the Demiurge with the term ‘nous’. I will argue that while it refers to the Demiurge by means of the word “nous” and makes an association between the two, it is not a completely clear case of Plato actually identifying the Demiurge with nous. For the sake of argument, I will grant the passage as evidence for ΔΝ, but I will show that in spite of it, the full range of texts that must be considered do not support the ΔΝ thesis.
In §§V several arguments are presented that show that the Demiurge can be equated neither with intellect nor soul. Thus the body of evidence weighing against the ΔΝ, both within the Timaeus and in other works, dwarfs the one solid piece of evidence that stands in its favor.

Di Guillaume Duprat, 2018. Curatela scientifica di Paolo Colona. Fin dall'alba dei tempi l'uomo osserva il cielo e tenta di capire come sia fatto l'universo. I filosofi lo immaginano rotondo o infinito, piccolo o gigantesco. Fisici e matematici elaborano complesse teorie, mentre gli astronomi inventano sofisticati strumenti per esplorarlo. 10 anni dopo il suo accattivante "Libro delle terre immaginate", Duprat ci invita a un meraviglioso viaggio visivo e scientifico nell'universo di ieri, di oggi e di domani, dal cosmo sferico dei pitagorici a quello eliocentrico di Copernico, dalla geniale intuizione del tempo come quarta dimensione di Einstein alle più recenti teorie derivate dalla meccanica quantistica. Più osserviamo l'universo, più ci sorprende e affascina. Di sicuro non finiremo mai di immaginarlo… e di rappresentarlo.
L'edizione italiana si avvale della consulenza di Paolo Colona per la revisione scientifica dell'opera.

The Grolier Codex (Codice Maya de Mexico, CMM) is discussed in the context of the archaeoastronomy of the ancient Americas on pages 98-99 of the March 1990 National Geographic Magazine article "America's Ancient Skywatchers" by John B. Carlson. One of four known ancient Maya books, the Grolier Codex depicts different manifestations of the planet Venus; the column of glyphs on the left of each panel records days in a 104-year Venus almanac. These plaster-coated bark-paper pages, carbon-dated to the 13th century, represent only half of the 20-page original. A numbered photographic arrangement of the Grolier Codex depictes the author's discovery that Codex pages 10 and 11 are actually two parts of the same "page 10".  Carlson clarifies the identities of Venus deities depicted in the Grolier Codex from a comparison of images from the Cacaxtla murals and links the images of the Grolier Codex with ancient Maya astronomically timed ritual warfare and sacrifice. (Grolier Codex photographs: Enrico Ferorelli; Other photos: Bob Sacha)

This article has been posted on Academia.edu as part of the Grolier Codex Project of the Center for Archaeoastronomy under the directorship of John B. Carlson, Ph.D.  The Grolier Codex Project seeks to further advance the study of the Maya Grolier Codex.

Without science, there had been difficulties in understanding the universe, nature, life, and humans and how they originated or created. Societies had tried to explain such cosmic phenomena by developing unique mythological stories.

In this study, the belief systems of ancient societies which settled on Anatolia and Aegean region, were discussed in general terms. The methods which they followed in order to explain the facts that govern the cosmos were defined.

The power struggle amongst the gods and their cosmic domination was explained; characterised by the gods of Ancient Greek myths Uranos, Kronos and Zeus, who seised power by overthrowing each other. The significance that had been put upon these gods was interpreted. To better understand the viewpoint of ancient societies, the Mesopotamian and Anatolian gods of Anu, Kumarbi and Teshub were analysed. The myths of these gods were examined comparatively.

This chapter deals with the Stoic notion of cosmic soul and discusses in detail one Stoic argument for the thesis that the cosmos is intelligent and its relation to the theory of 'seminal principles' (spermatikoi logoi). This argument-the 'Proof'-seeks to establish that the cosmos is intelligent not in the strong sense that the cosmos has the capacity for thinking, but in the weaker sense that it has the properties needed to give rise to beings that are capable of thinking. This does not mean that for the Stoics cosmic intelligence is limited to this kind of intelligence, but just that the latter is a component of the former. In this respect, cosmic intelligence bears an important similarity to human intelligence, which also involves both the capacity for thinking and the possession of the properties needed to give rise to beings capable of thinking.

The study presents the first critical edition of Grosseteste’s renewed treatise On light, where the English philosopher proposes an original cosmology based on the doctrine of light as first form of all bodies and on the idea of unequal infinities. The introduction to the edition provides a thorough account of the extant witnesses and establishes them in their stemmatic families. In so doing, it fills the lacunae of the edition published in 1912 by Ludwig Baur and addresses the central problem of the text, that is Grosseteste’s first meeting with Aristotle’s natural philosophy.

"Selected proceedings of the “First International Conference on Ethnoastronomy: Indigenous Astronomical and Cosmological Traditions of the World”held at the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C., 5-9 September 1983."

Available on Amazon.com  - see link in listing. Ships internationally from the USA.

Although Marcion is often said to have rejected matter as inherently evil, Marcionite sacramental practice and asceticism suggest a more complex and specific set of attitudes to material things and practices. Later heresiologists analyzed Marcion’s rather negative cosmogony and saw inconsistency, but Marcionite Christianity was less concerned with the origins of things than with their significance in light of the new creative work of the loving Stranger god. What Marcion despised was arguably the order (kosmos) of creation, rather than the mere fact of it. If the higher god saves human beings, who are part of the Creator’s work and without affinity to that “Stranger,” then by analogy the use of water in baptism or bread in the eucharist may be understood as the ritual reconfiguration of matter into the new order willed by its “new master and proprietor.”

From the forthcoming collection: *Revisiting Aristotle's Fragments. New Essays on the Fragments of Aristotle's Lost Works*, ed. A-P. Mesquita, Brill, 2020.
In this paper I argue that several passages containing arguments from design that have been collected as fragments of Aristotle's lost dialogue *De Philosophia* are spurious. In the process, I highlight many of the common features and non-Aristotelian influences present in these passages.

The author refers to my article "Stephen Hawking, the Foolish Wise, the Extraterrestrials, and Today´s Criminal Elites´ Main Fear", republishing long excerpts from it; he also mentions several of my publications about Assyrian - Babylonian, Egyptian, Hittite and Hebrew cosmologies. Furthermore, he expands on points I included in a seminar about the cosmological beliefs and ideas propagated by Thule Gesellschaft.
https://greeksoftheorient.wordpress.com/2017/08/03/%CE%B1%CE%BD%CF%84%CE%B1%CF%81%CE%BA%CF%84%CE%B9%CE%BA%CE%AE-%CE%BD%CF%8C%CF%84%CE%B9%CE%BF%CF%82-%CF%80%CF%8C%CE%BB%CE%BF%CF%82-%CE%BD%CE%B1%CE%B6%CE%B9%CF%83%CF%84%CE%B9%CE%BA%CE%AE-%CE%B3%CE%B5/

This paper traces the links between the cultures of the Dogon, Igbo and Beta Israel, mythologically tied to the Sirius star system and all emerging from Nubia and ancient pre-dynastic Egypt. Their spiritual purposes are reflected in the Egyptian teachings, to bring Heaven and Earth together. We may think of it today as balancing the divine and human elements of our being in a cooperative, harmonious expression of love and light-both within us and with those around us .

The priestly origins of these groups ultimately trace back to the oldest astronomically aligned structure yet discovered anywhere on Earth, the astro-ceremonial site of Nabta Playa. Established in the Stone Age in what is now the western Egyptian Sahara desert, it is likely situated in what the Igbo of Nigeria consider their first cradleland.

Africa's astronomical heritage is not locked in silent stones; it exists in still-living and exceedingly rich, pre-scientific myths of the constellations, tools for expressing hidden knowledge and power. By using ancient stellar symbolism, claims of heavenly authority can be substantiated. The actions of the direct heirs appear in line with the ancient Egyptian tenet of linked dualities.
The Dogon of Mali and the Igbo of Nigeria present their knowledge overtly but coded in the form of dramatic masked dance rituals. The Beta Israel of Ethiopia covertly and at odds with Old Testament biblical narrative, screen their Sirius ritual with Torah liturgy.

Note: The author focuses on tracing the Sirius star system for continuity in writing this paper, but is aware that the placement of Nabta Playa menhirs were set to track other star systems movements and helical risings as well. Details can be found in Thomas Brophy's, The Origin Map.

This study explores the multifaceted Maya Deluge Myth, from its pre-Columbian origins to current fantasies about a great world-destroying flood at the 13 Baktun period ending of the Maya Long Count on 21 (or 23) December 2012. No such flood is prophesied in any Maya records for this date, and the famous scene on Dresden Codex page 74 is discussed in its context as a symbolic depiction of the annual world-renewing downpours at the onset of the rainy season in springtime in the Maya world. The presiding gods of warfare and blood sacrifice were the agents of fertility and the regeneration of nature, and not the agents for the destruction of the Maya in a world-ending deluge. The misinterpretation of Dresden page 74 has propagated, unchallenged, for over a century of Maya scholarship and found its way into “new age,” fringe, and popular culture. This research helps to set the record straight along with providing a history of the meme.

The Platonic cosmogony and zoogony of the Timaeus is distinctive in that the actions of the Demiurge and the lesser gods are modelled on a wide variety of skills, some obeying mathematical principles, some being modelled on more empirical crafts. Focused on Tim. 30c-34a, this paper examines the reasons provided by Timaeus to account for some key properties attributed to the body of the World Animal (uniqueness, completeness, composition out of four elements, sphericity), and considers in detail Timaeus’ arguments to account for the actual composition of the World Body out of four elements unified by the mathematical bond of analogia. It is suggested that these arguments belong to a broader Platonic reflection on how to bind multiple parts into unified and coherent wholes. This broader Platonic reflection is here labelled ‘desmology,’ a word coined on the Greek noun desmos (‘bond’) frequently used in the Timaeus to refer to cosmogonical and zoogonical processes. This paper also argues that making sense of how Plato uses desmos and other cognate terms in the Timaeus is key to understand to what extent the cosmo-zoogony of the Timaeus as a whole actually fulfills Socrates’ strong teleological requirement for natural science expressed in the Phaedo (99b-c), as he criticizes earlier Presocratic accounts.

I propose that Manilius’ fundamental view is that the stars represent order and the earth chaos, a conviction partly expressed through Stoic doctrine and partly through poetic tropes. He frequently uses the imagery of the four elements to divide the superior realm of air and fire from the inferior realm of water and earth. Significant themes contributing toward this include Gigantomachy, cosmic vapours, the planets, and the figure of the Whale (Cetus) in the Andromeda story near the close of the poem.

This is a specimen of a new comprehensive volume on Plato's Timaeus. The volume includes: a substantial introductory essay by Franco Ferrari; a new critical edition, based on seven primary witnesses, a complete review of ad litteram quotations of the dialogue and a new assessment of ancient corrections of "A", a running commentary with technical notes and tables.

In this paper, the author shall deal with the Hungarian variants of dualistic world creation myths. The aim of this paper is to shed some light on the nature of the connection between the Central‐East European Hungarian and South‐East European Romanian and Bulgarian myth variants. The Hungarian pieces are the westernmost variants of the dualistic creation myth‐group. Geographically, they stand close to the Romanian variants, but the serious motivational differences between the Romanian and Hungarian variants show that the descent of the two oral narrative groups are distinct. Both the Hungarian and the Romanian variants show similarities with the Bulgarian world creation myths, however, geographically they do not relate tightly. This is why a possible explanation of these correlations is, that the Hungarian and the Bulgarian myths have common Central Eurasian, South‐Eastern Siberian origins, upon which starting from the sixth to the seventh centuries the super strata of various gnostic influences have settled.

This article addresses a historical transformation in Finno-Karelian mythology of kalevalaic poetry (which provided the basis for the national epic Kalevala).  The transformation is addressed in long-term perspective, focusing on the discontinuities from a Finno-Ugric heritage.  It addresses several strata of development in terms of 'ethnocultural substrata' (see Papers on Theory, Method and Tools).  These include stratified developments evident in the lexicon of the mythology; evidence of a Circum-Baltic narrative cycle connected with the spread of iron-working technology; and concentrates on the revolution in the mythology associated with a language-based technology of incantations, which included conceptual models of the body incompatible with inherited shamanism.  Discussion centers on the mythological cycle associated with the mysterious object called sammas/sampo, looking at the historical backgrounds of the material and its transformation in the emergence of this mythological cycle.  These transformations are considered in relation to the restructuring of the mythology and its relationship to the new category of ritual specialist associated with the technology of incantations.

This paper overlaps with "Shamans, Christians, and Things in between", which is oriented to medievalists and especially Germanic scholars and discusses processes and implications of synthesis of the tradition and its spread over a large geographical area, displacing other forms of Finnic mythology and also the Sámi mythology of linguistically assimilated populations.  This paper also overlaps with "Evolution, Revolution and Ethnocultural Substrata", which concentrates on the Uralic sky-gods in long-term perspective and what happened to the inherited models in Finnic cultures.

Follow the two (2) URL links to view this 2 page web based article (published May 3, 2015). Co-edited with Ian Mursell for Mexicolore (http://www.mexicolore.co.uk/) - who added many additional illustrations - based in part on an abbreviated version published in the "Smoking Mirror" Vol. 21, No. 4, December 2013, Pre-Columbian Society of Washington, DC.

http://www.mexicolore.co.uk/maya/ballgame/the-chacmool-and-the-ballgame-part-1

http://www.mexicolore.co.uk/maya/ballgame/the-chacmool-and-the-ballgame-part-2

The author proposes answers to questions which have puzzled scholars since the 19th century concerning the enigmatic recumbent Mesoamerican figure known as the "chacmool", so named by French adventurer and photographer Augustus Le Plongeon.  While most scholars are convinced that chacmools were a genuine innovation for a specific type of sacrificial altar for the placement of an offering bowl, several key questions have remained: (1) What was the culture and place of origin of this remarkable sculptural innovation? (2) Who were these male figures?  (3) What is the origin and meaning of the challenging recumbent pose for these human figures with the unblinking, enigmatic gaze? (4) What were they, and what were they called, or described with a phrase, in any Mesoamerican language? Based on recent archaeological discoveries, the author presents a new interpretation of the "chacmool" as the elite "hip ulama" ball game ballplayer stylistically rendered in a serene and formalized ritual “por abajo” stance, well after the game is over, to play the final role as the recipient of the sacrifices. With this new interpretation the author hopes to open the door to finding the indigenous name or description of the "chacmool".

I was asked for a response to the following video https://youtu.be/zP95OlSG0NI “The Cosmic Hoax” by S. Greer. I want to note that to understand this video, in its totality, is that it can be summed up as having the following hypotheses:
That aliens are real and have been studied by the government for over 100 years
UFOs began as their visits to us and became secret US government programs
ET’s mean us well and are concerned for our behavior and future; ie they desire companionship
ET’s are part of our same dimension only
ET’s are not desiring conflict with us
The CIA and/or other government agencies have promulgated a false hoax narrative of ET threat in order to gin up need for the Military Industrial Complex to create more and more space weaponry
The MIC is addicted to fear, power, and greed (control) of the world population so they pretend to be agnostic or ignorant of alien cover-up “facts” and send disinformation specialists to engage in a form of psychological warfare (psyops) with the public and alien researchers/enthusiasts worldwide.

Book Proposal for: Bound by Goodness, Ruled by Reason: Plato's Theology and the Foundations of his Cosmology

Theology constitutes both the core content of Plato’s cosmology and a key metaphysical foundation for Platonic cosmology as such. To put it another way, when Plato seeks to describe the most essential structures and functions of the sensible world he gives an account of gods; when Plato seeks to explain how it is possible for there to be perpetually beautiful, rational, and living divinities in a sensible world of otherwise constant and unstable generation and destruction, there too his answer looks to god. This book attempts to develop and detail an accurate and coherent account of Plato’s theology and to identify the several philosophical problems Plato devised it to address. It carefully reconstructs his views about the various kinds of entities identified by him as gods, their relationships to one another and the universe as a whole, and the roles they serve in his overall worldview. Such a study is very much needed, for while interest in Plato’s theology has been steadily growing, no full-length, systematic treatment of the subject has been written in English. This is the first book of its kind to give a thorough treatment of all the relevant texts from across Plato’s corpus; to examine all the relevant features or “parts” of his theology: the World-soul and other cosmic souls, “Nous” (i.e. reason or intellect), the Demiurge (Craftsman), the Form of the GOOD; and to attempts to organize the interpretation of all of these into a new, coherent narrative situating Plato’s theology centrally within his late thought.
Moreover, while several good books and articles have been written on the subject, nearly all the work that has been done on Plato’s theology for the last 80 years has recapitulated or offered only minor variations on one of the same three or four inadequate interpretative schemes, all of which were developed before the Second World War. Thus progress on the topic has been at a standstill for more than three quarters of a century. This book offers to break this deadlock and to offer a novel interpretation by resolving the central dilemma over Plato’s theology that has made fully coherent and well-motivated interpretations impossible. To do so, it rejects the identification of the Craftsman god (Demiurge) of his Timaeus and other dialogues with “Nous” (reason or intellect)—an identification that is the common, shared assumption of all of the unsuccessful contemporary interpretations as well as of nearly every historical interpretation of Plato’s theology in the long history of its reception. While I am proposing to do away with an interpretive orthodoxy, the result is a clearer view of the Demiurge, Nous, and their respective key roles in Plato’s late metaphysics and cosmology.

Table of Contents
PART I – FOREGROUND AND BACKGROUND
Chapter 1. Introduction to Plato’s Theology: Themes, Questions, and Methods
Chapter 2. The Ancient Quarrel: Traditional Greek religion and its philosophical critics
PART II – IMMANENT THEOLOGY
Chapter 3. The Goals of Plato’s Public Theology
Chapter 4. The Implementation Problem and the Panpsychic Solution
Chapter 5. The World, the World-soul, and other cosmic gods
PART III – TRANSCENDENT THEOLOGY
Chapter 6. The Demiurge is the GOOD
Chapter 7. The Demiurge is not Nous
Chapter 8.  Pre-panpsychic Intellect?: Cosmic Intellect and the World-soul in the Philebus
PART IV – INTERSTITIALS AND INTERCESSORIES
Chapter 9. Culture-Heroes, Daemons, and the Gods of Tradition
Conclusion

[For an updated version of this thesis, see Frederik A. Bakker, Epicurean Meteorology: Sources, Method, Scope and Organization, Leiden/Boston: Brill, 2016]
The three studies that make up this work each deal with another facet or subdiscipline of Epicurean cosmology. The first study is devoted to Epicurus’ method of multiple explanations, the second study compares the meteorological sections of Epicurus' Letter to Pythocles and Lucretius' De rerum natura with other ancient meteorological accounts as regards the range and order of subjects, and the third study investigates what shape the Epicureans assigned to the earth.

Bronze Age art or modern cosmetics?
In recent years there is a steady flow of new archaeological discoveries concerning the prehistory of Stonehenge and its surroundings. The range of new insights brought about by major collaborative research projects incorporating the latest technological developments paints a whole new picture. These results imply that the ritual landscape around the spectacular central monument most probably holds at least as many clues towards the latter´s original meaning as the megalithic remains themselves.
The present paper deals with a hitherto somewhat marginalized object from one of the richest burials of the European Early Bronze Age: the copper-alloy axe from "Bush Barrow", a burial-mound situated about 1,1 km SSW of Stonehenge. Three subcircular features on one flat of the object remain unmentioned in published form to date. A personal encounter with the axe in the Wiltshire Museum sparked the desire to get to the bottom of these "holes", i.e. to determine whether they definitely result from modern sampling, or whether they might actually belong to the axe´s phase of use. This undertaking turned into something of an adventure. Against this background, the observations introduced here represent but a preliminary step toward another modest piece in the larger Stonehenge jigsaw. Further pieces will be contributed by a forthcoming study of axe-carvings and their contexts at Kilmartin, Argyll, and at Stonehenge.

Many scholars hold that the Letter to the Hebrews portrays heaven as God's true tabernacle, the original from which the Mosaic tabernacle was derived. Recently Philip Church, building on work by Lincoln Hurst, has argued that the heavenly tabernacle instead represents God's eschatological dwelling with his people, and that the Mosaic tabernacle (and the temple that followed it) was a prior sketch and foreshadowing of this yet-future reality. They advance a number of important arguments which have not been systematically addressed by those who read the true tabernacle as primarily heavenly in a spatial and 'vertical' sense. This article examines and rebuts the arguments of Hurst and Church. First, the case for the 'eschatological dwelling' position is outlined; then I make two wider points regarding the cosmological presuppositions that underlie this view; next, the meaning of the key terminology in Hebrews 8-9, especially ὑπόδειγμα, is examined; finally, Hebrews' perspective on the heavenly tabernacle is articulated with an eye to both cosmology and eschatology. Only by integrating spatial and temporal categories can a satisfactory account of God's heavenly dwelling be offered.

A brief examination of differing exegetical approaches to Genesis 1, and the development of their main arguments, inevitably leads to the conclusion that the biblical creation account is best understood in its proper polemical/idolatrous context (as a direct response to it) rather than in a modern-day scientific description of events.

In De caelo II.12 Aristotle considers the following problem. If the sphere of the fixed stars shows only one (kind of) movement it would be reasonable to expect that the number of movements of the other celestial bodies would proportionally increase with the increasing distance from the outermost sphere. However, the contrary happens: while the planets, which are placed between the outermost sphere and sun and moon, exhibit many and various movements, the
sun and the moon perform only a few movements. In dealing with this problem Aristotle surprises his readers with an alarming comparison: when playing dice, he says, it is most difficult to make ten thousand successful throws in a series,
while it is comparatively easy to make one or two of them. So the reader is faced with the image of a game of dice at a crucial point in Aristotle’s account of superlunary movement, which, apart from that, is supposed to be the embodiment of
well-orderedness and regularity.
The paper works out the whole comparison to which the mentioning of the game of dice belongs. It offers a reading of the corresponding passages that avoids the perplexing consequence that certain celestial bodies move just like dice.

Riassunto. Quella delle Pleiadi è una costellazione che per la sua particolare conformazione e per l'ambiguo numero degli astri che la compongono ha prodotto molti miti nei popoli indoeuropei antichi; nel mondo culturale indiano si trovano numerosi spunti utili per ricostruire quello che potrebbe configurarsi come il mitologema indoeuropeo delle Pleiadi: il termine sanscrito Kṛttikāḥ potrebbe connettersi infatti con la figura del setaccio con cui i popoli baltici ed euroasiatici si riferivano a queste stelle.

Following the acceptance of the earth’s sphericity its surface was divided into two hemispheres and four habitable landmasses, one of which was named ‘the antipodes’. The bipartition into hemispheres was accomplished either by the equator or a meridian. The latter division was most often conceived in terms of the alternation of daylight and night and resulted in the creation of a ‘lower hemisphere’. It is impossible to identify the inventor of the quadripartite division, but the name of Crates of Mallos was as a rule associated with this scheme throughout antiquity and the medieval period. Both divisions were often imperfectly understood by the authors who presented these concepts, which generated certain ambiguities in the understanding of the geographical features designated by the terms ‘lower hemisphere’ and ‘antipodes’. Some Greek and Roman authors speculated on the possibility of reaching the overseas landmasses, which was empirically verified by the
explorers of the Age of Discoveries. The antipodean region with a daylight-night alternation contrary to that in the oikoumenê was sometimes conceived in eschatological terms. Alternatively, the localisation of the traditional world of the dead accessible by sailing was reconceptualised in terms of the new geographical and cosmological insights formulated by the application of the geometry of the sphere
to the earth globe.

"One of the more spectacular expressions of prehistoric rock art in all of North America is the petroglyph concentration in the Coso Range of eastern California. These glyphs have played a prominent role in attempts to understand forager religious iconography. Four decades ago, Heizer and Baumhoff (1962) concluded that Great Basin petroglyphs were associated with hunting large game and were intended to supernaturally increase success in the hunt. Similarly, in their seminal work Grant et al. (1968) concluded that the mountain sheep drawings of the Coso region bolstered the “hunting magic” hypothesis. However, this hypothesis has become increasingly marginalized by a prevailing view that considers most rock art as an expression of individual shamanistic endeavor (cf. Lewis-Williams and Dowson, 1988; Whitley, 1994; Whitley and Loendorf, 1994). This article explores comparative ethnologic and archaeological evidence supporting the hunting magic hypothesis. I place this explanatory framework in a larger context based on a contemporary understanding of comparative religion and the complexity of forager symbolism. The article argues that the preponderance of Coso images are conventionalized iconography associated with a sheep cult ceremonial complex. This is inconsistent with models interpreting the Coso drawings as metaphoric images correlated with individual shamanic vision quests.
"

Time and cosmology are strongly interconnected in the Platonic corpus. The way Plato’s characters discuss these topics has puzzled and divided readers from the very beginning, giving rise to rich and diverse interpretations. Do Plato’s dialogues argue for an eternal cosmos or one with a punctual beginning? What is the nature of time, and how should we understand its relation to eternity, change, and transition? How should we understand the relation between God, the cosmos, and time? The present volume assembles an international team of ancient philosophy scholars to engage with Plato’s texts, and their ancient and modern interpretations, and to answer these and other closely related questions. The overall purpose of the volume is to push forward the study and understanding of Plato’s conception of time and the cosmos as a way of finding fresh insight into the interpretation of his philosophy and his reception in antiquity. I begin with an introduction to these topics in Plato and the Platonic tradition broadly understood, before explaining the motivation and overall structure of the volume. I conclude by offering a concise description of the contents of each chapter.

The Judaean-Roman historian Flavius Josephus (ca. 37 CE – ca. 100 CE) is among the thinkers of the early Imperial Age who provides a colourful description of the Jerusalem Temple and its predecessor, the wilderness Tent. Josephus’ elaborate descriptions of the Temple’s symbolism assign cosmological meaning to the structure of the cult site, its appurtenances, the associated services, and the priests’ attire. Those narratives found in Judaean War 5.207-237 and Judaean Antiquities 3.108-187 have not received as much notice as other areas of Josephan scholarship have over the past decades. The aim of this thesis, therefore, is to elucidate the Temple-as-cosmos idea in the writings of Josephus. To this end, I approach Josephus’ narrative on the cosmological symbolism of the Jerusalem Temple and its prototype the Tent through historical investigation. I interpret his narratives in detail, considering the conventions of the time and milieu in which Josephus writes to determine the meaning of his language.

The thesis shows that the cosmological reading of the Temple/Tent by Josephus should be understood in light of the powerful Judaean deity he sought to depict. Josephus seeks to convince his Roman readership that the Judaean god is not only a national and local deity, but the Most High God, the supreme ruler of the entire universe, who once established the Temple/Tent as the centre from where he exercised authority over the world and its peoples. Making use of philosophical elements, Josephus indicates that the arrangement of the cult site, its personnel, ritual practices, and implements embodied the universe as created and maintained by God. Seen from this perspective, we observe Josephus in dialogue with a well-established Roman Imperial tradition of symbolic depiction of buildings as images of the cosmos. Additionally, Josephus demonstrates in his Judaean Antiquities that the Temple arrangement conforms to Judaean Law, which in its turn codifies the cosmic law created by God.

With scant regard for conventional paradigms we look squarely at the evidence and derive a space-time framework accounting for quantum non-locality and retro-causality. On this basis we gather insight into the origins of time, space and mass. We derive the mass-transformation formula according to Special Relativity and provide a spatial context for the internal symmetries of the Standard Model. To provide a philosophical context we derive the central structure of the esoteric cosmological model from first principles while demonstrating its consistency with the framework. As a result of this unification, consciousness enters physics.

I argue that Aristotle's science of the soul only covers sublunary living things. Aristotle cannot properly ascribe ψυχή to unmoved movers since they do not have any capacities that are distinct from their activities or any matter to be structured. Heavenly bodies do not have souls in the way that mortal living things do, because their matter is not subject to alteration or generation. These beings do not fit into the hierarchy of soul powers that Aristotle relies on to provide unity to ψυχή. Their living consists in their activities, not in having a capacity for activity.

Aristotle exploited prior speculations about the kosmos—claims about the elements, the shape of the earth, the heavenly motions, and the causes of things—in order to support his own claims, which he considered the telos of those earlier works. But a mass of evidence exists that those earlier thinkers were speculating within, or on the margins of, a radically distinct framework, which has left traces throughout early Greek thought and even within Aristotle’s works. Rethinking that evidence reveals features of a model that had no tendency to evolve in the direction of Aristotle’s model, and that I designate as the “Kozy Kosmos.” In this model, the flat earth is bounded at its rim and beneath by watery chaos, with a sacred mountain, pillar, or tree at its center, and overlain by a rotating sky, whose changes are causally connected with changes on earth. This mytho-historical model is anthropocentric, constructed of contiguous and cohering parts, divinely ordered, and threatened by chaos.