Skip to main content

Rise of the functional person within the King-God plane

 The second mythical plane, which we can call the King-God corresponds to the complete social development of the temple cities and their subsequent transformation into city-states, such as Ur, Uruk, Kish, Eshunna, Memphis, or Heliopolis. The limits of this mythical plane are more easily understood from a mythopoetic point of view than from historical urban examples, since the passage to the next mythical plane, that of universal law, such as the one that opens in Babylon and continues in Luoyang or in Rome is more visible in economic and primitive narratives, especially the latter, than in aspects of urban or imperial configuration. The economic specialization implicit in the figure of the shaman germinated in the different social people that it effectively synthesized. This mythical plane could be called the “functional person plane”, thereby emphasizing the explosion of new economic persons brought about by urban complexification, although the functional person designation may be misleading because the social persons of the previous mythical plane also have a functional origin, are the result of economic activities. However, the specific difference given by the Anima person, from which an epistemological superclass was derived that gave synthetic unity to the narrative of the identity of the human and the world, was possible not by an economic action, but by the construction of primitive determination that made the linguistic person of the ancestor a social person. 

The conceptual unity that allowed the Anima person gave the conditions of possibility for the development of complex social structures, the totems, which, in turn, under the pressure of new economic actions, underwent a transformation in the direction of the creation of a functional or caste person. In the caste, the psychological elements of the identity of the totem are incorporated, as well as the general implicit idea of ​​a division of the vital actions according to the abilities and according to the needs. The totem is an intuitive understanding of the force of the variety within the group. The complexity reached by human societies is due to a process of interaction of economic and primitive determinations that have a mimetic relationship with each other and with the environment. For their part, narratives of primitive determination develop inertia of resistance to change, the weight of the past, which can result, in contrast to the economic actions that serve as a reference, mythical-ritual ideological structures whose representations about the world and the human are contradictory with the vital processes.

Social stratification came about from the unequal distribution of the surplus generated by the division of labor. In Karl Marx's terms, this primitive accumulation was nothing other than the historical process of divorce between the producer and the means of production, which implies that at some point they were “married”, and gives a wrong image of the actors of cold societies. The social person who produces in archaic societies is not the same person who later, in agricultural cultures, is deprived of the means of production in whose process he is involved. The producers in the mythical plane of the Anima Mundi are the people of the economic genre, hunters, gatherers, or small seasonal planters (tasks carried out by men and women). The fundamental production of these groups is food and human beings, and both their production and the subjects themselves belong to the clan, the phratry, or the tribe; in fact, that is the basis of solidarity of the totem, solidarity that extends beyond the human race, which makes even the hunter-gatherer production subsumed under the Anima Mundi law. However, in the planting communities, we witness a rupture of solidarity due to the predominant effective action of some social persons over others, a rupture of identity (to which the same totems gave rise) that made a large community function as a multiple organism. In times of technique as basic as that of the Neolithic, production capacity depended fundamentally on labor, so that the differences in wealth between communities were directly proportional to the population. 

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...

What is Mythopoetics?

  The narrative grew in the process of being told, as myths always do. The Blog has become more labyrinthine over the years. It contains my Mythopoetics book and a few other things. For those who access these texts without knowing anything about Mythopoetics, I am going to post the introduction of the first part, so you can decide if you want to spend your precious time thinking about the identity narratives that we humans have developed over the years. throughout our eventful existence as a species. "Mythological narratives are the only intellectual activity that has been continuously practiced by human beings, a fact that makes them a unique tool for thinking synthetically our evolution as homo-sapiens. In this sense, they are the first valuation settings that humans have made about themselves and their environment, and as such, they have conditioned the ones that have come afterwards, both in form and content. Their communicative function places them at the basis o...

An Epistemological Perspective of Individuation

For the ancient Romans, "Terminus" was the god of boundaries, represented as large stones used to divide and delimit fields. Festivals were held, called Terminalia, in which the stones that "generated" human space were sanctified. Our word "term" is the heir of that god, or better, it is that god incorporated into an everyday space, in our Lebenswelt or world of life. A philosophical term, whatever its semantic content, is the conceptual mark that we make by establishing a referential sign, it is the action of determining, of generating a reference in a mental space, a reference with which we make a sign correspond, or if we deal with a physical space, the correspondence with an object, be it a milestone, a stone, or an indicator sign. Since its beginnings, philosophy has used binary semantic terms as thinking tools, something that analytical psychology has also made good use of. One of the longest-running binary semantic terms for psychology...