Skip to main content

Mythico-Ritual Planes

 In anthropological terms, we can speak of four great narrative periods according to the symbolic complexity of communications: the Anima Mundi plane, that of the King-God, that of Universal Law, and that of Human Law. 

The mythical plane of the anima mundi, which begins with the Middle-Upper Paleolithic, is made up of the narratives of the so-called cold societies, linked to hunter-gatherer economies. In the Neolithic, the narrative plane of the King-God arises with the narratives of the harvest and the myths of the city. For its part, the plane of Universal Law, which begins with the progressive independence of the law with respect to the figure of the King-God, arises after the 16th century BC, approximately after the Hycso interregnum in Egypt, and is made up of the narratives of the state religions that reify an objective order of the universe, from which the transcendentalist narratives of the first philosophy will be derived. Finally, the narrative plane of Human Law, which begins towards the 6th century BC, is made up of the humanist narratives of science and anthropological philosophy. This mythical evolution is not a linear phenomenon, since the new plane absorbs the old one, although not all the elements of the old one remain. Several planes can coexist at the same time in different places, human cultures have evolved without spatial homogeneity.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Limen et Continuum

  Existence is Encounter. Meeting at the limen. In the limen, the masks disappear, that is, the basic intuitions of identities, such as the identity that I feel and think in relation to the tree that I see in front of me. The identity of the tree is a projection of mine: the unity of my process of perceiving the tree generates a mask in me, the ghost of a limited unity separated from everything else. The simplest form of intuitive understanding of masks and limen is given to us by numbers. Numbers intuitively express the liminal tension that is Existence. A little etymological note. Rythmos in Greek means flow. Arythmos (number) is what does not flow, what remains solidified. Numbers express the liminoid, and flow, rhythm, expresses the liminal. A rhythm becomes liminoid when we can trace patterns in it, that is, when we can construct masks of identities. Mathematics has spoken of flow using the Latin word “continuum”, the continuous. All modern science, since Leibni...

Metalanguages are formal metaphors

  In a logic class, the professor tells his students: "Yesterday, while talking with my Sufi gardener about happiness, we ended up talking about metalanguages, because he said that orchids are 'chambers where light plays between amorous encounters.' I told him: 'You have to be a poet to talk about poetry.' He replied: 'You just have to be human.'" In what way can we say that my gardener is proposing that every metalanguage is a formalized metaphor for its object language and what would be the metaphor for arithmetical addition? Furthermore” -he asks-how does this little narrative show that Kurt Gödel was a Platonist? One student answers: “The gardener uses orchids as a metaphor for biological reproduction, and from this he makes a second-order metaphor at the human level, calling reproduction a loving encounter. The gardener is a Sufi; in Sufi ontology, the word 'encounter' is used as equivalent to 'existence,' a double meaning (Wujud)....

Rhapsodies of Anima Mundi: Fear of Death

In the nascent dawn of consciousness, when the human spirit still danced in rhythmic harmony with the grand, elemental pulse of nature, the enigma of cessation—that profound silence we name death—arose as the most formidable of shadows. Yet, it was not then perceived as an absolute, terminal end in the stark, isolated sense we often conceive today. For those early societies, intimately imbricated in the vast and primordial canvas of the Anima Mundi, death was seamlessly woven into the very ur-tapestry of existence as a continuity, a fluid dissolution into the great soul of the world, or a joyous return to a collective paradise, utterly devoid of the strict, solitary individuation that modernity has, unwittingly, imposed upon us. This is not merely the clinical apprehension of biological cessation, but rather a primordial panic before the void, a visceral anguish in the face of the "I's" dissolution and the potential loss of all that imbues life with meaning. Confronted...