VII: Explanation, interpretation
content
Prehistoric times
Esotericism, paranormal
Myths as explanation of the unknown by known
Religion
„Weltanschauung“ and „Weltbild“
Conspiracy theories
For theories see: chap. VIII: Theory - world of philosophy & world of science
see also: chap. IV: Pattern, prescription, plan
not to confound with: chap. XIII. Interpretation of a theory
Prehistoric times
Reflexion on the use of mental models of prehistoric men start wiith Edward Burnett Tylor’s „Primitive Culture“ (1871). He postulated that at the beginning of the natural development of religious ideas of mankind there was animism. „Survivals“ of this early stage of mental models are effective until our modern enlighted times as popular beliefs and superstition or spiritualism and esotericism.
In 1976 Volker Schurig published an interesting study on the development of consciousness ("Entstehung des Bewusstseins") since 10 million years. With regard to the phylogenetic roots of human cognition, motivation and morale the psychologists Norbert and Doris Bischof have collected a lot of knowledge (1978-93). Paleontologist Richard Erskine Leakey (1992) speculated on the „mental models“ of Australophithecus – „fairly chimpansee like“ - and early Homo sapiens – „more mature“.
„With the emerging of ‚Homo’ and the beginning of his life as hunter and gatherer the social game of chess became more fastidious. Now it meant a reproduction advantage, if one disposed of a matured mental model based on a sharpened consciousness" (Richard Erskine Leakey, in Germ. 1993, 306).
Equally strengthened in the course of time the following elements of consciousness:
· the egofeeling;
· the tendency to attribute feelings to others;
· the ability to learn better know the world; and
· the direct feeling of compassion.
However most important was the following: "After consciousness had crossed the threshold of self perception and consciousness of ones own death, in the mind of humans rose the big question: Why? ... Which sense has my life? What is the meaning of the world I live in? How has begun the universe?
... Consequently mythology and religion have always been a part of human history, and that will probably remain also in our age of the science" (307f). So far Leakey.
In his book on archetypes, the psychiatrist Anthony Stevens (1982, 81-84, 175, 227-233) sees the beginnings of this mental phenomenon in very early times, probably 3 million years ago.
According to the longstanding director of some Swiss zoos, Heini Hediger (1980), the use of fire and religion emerged at the same time. He states: „Encounter of early man with transcendency coincides with mastering the fire“ (1980, 271; viz. 18). That means: Since 1.5 million years women and men sitting around the fire are developing religious ideas. A similar early beginning of religious impulses is considered by anthropologist and psychiatrist Melvin J. Konner (1982; Germ. 1984, 65).
From some small bullets of loam dated 300,000 years BC archaeologist Marie E. P. König (in Richard Fester 1979, 112; similar 1980, 33-37) concluded that the first world model was a ball. From the inside it is seen as a vault, from the outside as a globe. „The universal concept of the world could correspond to the type ‚round’. To make seizable this idea the infinte space had to be made visible delimited.“ 200.000 years later the world model was refined: on some nummulites (small round plates) early man engraved a line cross – the four cardinal points. König says: „This is a system of ordering we know still today. It is the basis of our culture.“
For the arrangement of sculls or halve sculls, trepanation of sculls, orientation and tinting of graves and skeletons, adjuncts to graves, interment of bear sculls and the use of fire scientists offer different interpretations.
Since the skull of „Sinanthropus Pekinensis“ has been found around 1930 - dated ca. 500,000 BC – early cannibalism is much disputed. From the excavations near Shanidar (ca. 60,000 BC) researchers see „humanity“ of early man shown by signs of relief and piety (Ralph Solecki, 1971, 1972). In the same time famous archaeologist and ethnologist André Leroi-Gourhan (1964) sees the beginning of „scientific interest“, psychologist Leon Festinger (1983; in Germ. 1985, 54, 57) the beginning of target-oriented schooling.
bibliography:
model: special topics - Vorgeschichte
Prehistory: seen from top down: phenomenology of religion, ethnology
Prehistory: seen from botton up: biological evolution, archaeology
Man and animal: differences - animal intelligence, cognitive ethology
Esotericism, paranormal
Today most pepole subsume all that is not explainable by rational or scientific means unter „esotericism“ or „paranormal“. Others are convinced that there is a world besides the visible and tangible world or a parallel world to the „real“ world. In this other world there live the sols of the deceased, ghosts and spirits, ethereal entities, fairies and elves, demons and devils, angels and gods, sometimes also UFO and aliens. Its a world of magic and sorcery, miracles and mysteries, supernatural forces and energies, etc.
History of esotericims can start with cannibalism and scull cult of early man or with the magicians and shamans of cave men. Early civilizations knew a variety of demonologies, augury and divination. The profession of sorcer and sorceress are documented since the 2nd millenium BC.
see in German:
Was ist Esoterik? (till 1700)
Woher kommt die moderne Esoterik? (1700-2000)
bibliography:
Esotericism: various themes and fields
Begriffsklärungen im Umfeld von Esoterik, Okkultismus
Myths as explanation of the unknown by known
Since the early high cultures we have, then, myths as explanation of the unknown by the known. Ernst Topitsch (1958) calls them forms of thinking or mental pictures. He distinguishes the following kinds of models as explanations of the world (Topitsch, e. g. 1972, 10f., 16 ff. et passim; see also F. Wagner 1970, 24ff.):
· biomorph, including therio- and anthropomorph
· intentional, i. e. technomorph and soziomorph.
Later Toptisch added the „ecstatic-kathartic“ kind as also important model and described it thoroughly. These models circle around ecstatic of magicians and mysteries of purification – for the world and later: the soul -, particularly under the motive of desertion and reascenting.
The French physicist Pierre Auger (1965, 12) drew a parallel between scientific models and myths:
“Are the latter not also models, whose purpose is to make intelligible great natural phenomena or biological and social facts? Models constituted from known elements, immediately accepted and understood, like our mechanical models, home-made – as Claude Lévi-Strauss would say – from familiar notions so as to form complexes which are isomorphic with those complexes which have to be explained and integrated with thought. Myths also evolve either into theory and abstraction or into materialization and particularization, according to requirements.“
Most of these models concern origin, development and structure of the universe as a whole, but there are also model for sections of it (M. Jammer 1965, 167):
“In general the first models were concretions of ideas or behavior which were important for the primitive religions or which received sense from traditional myths. One of the best known examples from Old Egypt is the so-called dead person's ship which was buried with the defunct to make easier to her souls crossing the Nile. It was not only a miniature imitation ..., but it was a concretion of a complex of abstract ideas with a mechanism of his own: it was one of the first mechanical (or better, hydrodynamic) models of a non-mechanical process.”
A similar visual representation is the sun chariot of Trundholm (approx. 1400 BC), a vehicle on which stands a gold-fitted disk pulled by a horse. In Egypt the sun God Ra crosses the sky sea on a daily and a night vessel. This conception had an effect still to to Anaximenes (see Fritz Krafft 1971, S. 133 f.).
Detailed descriptions of old mythologies are given by scholars in Cambridge, England (collected by Carmen Blacker, Michael Loewe 1975). Broad overviews are by Mircea Eliade (1959; 1974), Pierre Grimal (1963), Alexander Eliot (1976; 1990; 1993) and Roy Geoffrey Willis (1993).
For more details see in German:
Ägyptische und mesopotamische Schöpfungsmythen und biblische Schöpfungsberichte
Indische und chinesische Schöpfungsmythen
How the Old Egyptians saw the universe.
Carmen Blacker, Michael Loewe: Ancient Cosmologies. London: Allen & Unwin 1975; German: Weltformeln der Frühzeit. Düsseldorf: Diederichs 1977, 136a; details in the article by J. M. Plumley: Die Alten Ägypter, 15f.
Scientific research on mythical world views started in the Enlightenment with Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle and his essay on the origins of the fables (1684; reprinted 1724). The Jesuit Joseph François Lafiteau. Founded comparaitve ethnology with his study „Les moeurs des sauvages Amériquains“ (1724). In the same publication he initiated also the ethnographic research of religions. A year later Giambattista Vico introduced the cyclical concept of the life of cultures and peoples. He saw peoples developing through three stages: sacred, heroic and humane. After that peoples decline to barbarity.
Vicos cycle theory has been adopted and altered e. g. by Adam Ferguson (1767) and Auguste Comte (1822).
The French historian and translator Abbé Banier, also a Jesuit, gave a rational explication of Greek myth already in two volumes in 1711. Later he revised a huge collection of Jean-Frédéric Bernard on „Cérémonies et coutumes religieuses de tous les peoples du monde“ (1723-24) and published them in 1741 in seven volumes.
In the eyes of later scholars the ideas on mythology of the German Romantics – Friedrich Schlegel, 1800; Joseph von Görres, 1810; Georg Friedrich Creuzer, 1810-23; Karl Otfried Müller, 1825 – are not very fruitful. The famous poet and translator Johann Heinrich Voss was more important with his „Mythologische Briefe (1794) and his „Antisymbolik“ (1824-26), the latter written in opposition to Creuzer.
New approaches were provided after 1850 by Herbert Spencer, Friedrich Max Müller and Johann Jakob Bachofen.
see:
table: Auf der Suche nach dem Anfang der Religion
bibliography
prehistory: seen from top down: phenomenology of religion, ethnology
Religion
12 world religions
In contrast to animism and pagan religions, esotericism and myths, the so-called „world religions“ tend to see themselves as rational and based on facts.
The father of the Abrahamic religions, patriarch Abraham, is assumed to have lived around 1800 BC. First monotheism was practiced in Egypt around 1400 BC. Two hundred years later Moses led the Israelites out of Egypt.
The German philosopher Karl Jaspers labeled the years 800-200 BC as „Achsenzeit“ (axial age) because they were seminal for religion as well als for philosophy and early science. With respect of religions Judaism and Hindusim flourished. Founders of new religious movements were Zoroaster, Parshvanath and Mahavir, Buddha, Lao Tse and Confucius. Younger were Christianity (Jesus Christ died ca. 33 AD) and Islam (Mohammed died 632), Sikhism (Nanak died in 1538) and Baha’i (Baha’u’llah died in 1892). The Japanese mythology for Shinto (who is sometimes said to have been flourished in the 7th century BC) was codified in the 7th century AD.
In addition to these „classic“ religions there are another dozen, including Vodou (18th century), Cheondoism (1812), Tenrikyo (1838), Kardecism (1857/90) and later Umbanda (1908), Cao Dai (1925), Soka Gakkai (1930), I-Kuan Tao (1930), Juche (1955).
Enlightenment fosters philosophical and psychological research
It was also in the Age of Enlightenment when philosophical and psychological research on religion got a new color.
It started with David Hume (1755, 1779). Jean Jacques Rousseau in his „Emile“ (1762) saw the roots of religion in sentiment. Baron Holbach (1772) regarded the belief of immortality and of an supernatural God both as „illusions“. The first is useful, the latter contradictory and useless.
Around 1800 Johann Gottlieb Fichte defined religion as the belief of a moral world order („sittliche Weltordung“; „ordo ordonans“) beeing itself God.
In the same years Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling, Friedrich Ernst Daniel Schleiermacher and Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi introduced and discussed the concept of „Anschauung“ for religion, often mixed with sentiment.
Ludwig Feuerbach (1841, 1845) saw religion in the light of answering mens wishes. Still more pragmatic religion is seen by Maurice Blondel (1893), William James (1902) and F. C: S. Schiller (1911).
According to Jean Marie Guyau (1887) religion is an „explanation of the world by analogy of the social life of men“.
Rudolf Eucken (1901) sees religion characterised by the fact that she holds against the real world another world or „Sein“, which provides a „new and superior order of things“.
see in German:
Die Entwicklung des frühen Christentums
bibliography:
„Weltanschauung“ and „Weltbild“
„Weltanschauung“ and „Weltbild“ are specific German termini technici. The translations in English and French are mostly not very adequate.
Weltanschauung
English: philosophy (of life), outlook on life; (Ideologie) ideology
French: conception du monde
Weltbild
English: world view
French: vision du monde
The concept of the two kinds of view is also from the enlightenment. It was the theologician and satirist Johann Gottfried Zeidler who around 1700 mocked on metaphysics and physics as „Über-Naturlehre“ and „Natur-Lehre“; he holds them for a maidservant of theology resp. to the art Goddess Minerva.
Towards 1800 philosophers, theologicians and teachers began to use the concepts of „Weltlehre“, „Weltansicht“, „Naturanschauung“, etc.
In general, „Weltanschauung“ was used in a wider sense – especially metaphycsical - as „Weltbild“. In particuar the latter was used since 1900 for the views of physicists and astronomers. Paradoxically some of Albert Einstein’s thoughts which are published under the title „The World as I See It“ (in German: „Mein Weltbild, 1934) is much more personal and human than physical.
On the other side there was a shift in the 1930s of the more philosophical or vital „Weltanschauung“ to the scientific „Weltbild“ following the substitution of philosophical considerations by scientifc ones. In particular the natural sciences envisioned themselves as „new“ or „modern“ Weltbild.
see in German:
bibliography:
Conspiracy theories
A special kind of myths are conspiracy theories. Mostly people who spread them are convinced they are true. Thererfore these constructions are not drafts or hypotheses but explanations held to be true.
Such “theories” we find already in Antiquity. Various writers have - partial - recorded the Hatairia in Greece (since 630 BC) or the conjuration of Catilina in Rome (66 and 63 BC). In the first centuries AD the Roman authorities held various associations and “collegia” as centers of political and social agitation.
The Gnostics as well as the early christians were suspected of practicing a secret cult and persecuted. Once Christendom was established (313 AD) the tables were turned: Pagans and Jews were persecuted. The first heretic was executed 385.
According to Otto Gerhard Oexle (1981) since 500 in the realm of the Francs and since 800 in England „guilds“ were established, i. .e sweard unions (conjuratio). All of them were suspicious to the church for vice, sexual excesses and conspiration and therefore banned and persecuted.
Sinc then permanently some groups or unions were charged with conspiration, e .g. Waldensians (1173), Jews (around 1350 made responsible for the Black Death), Jesuits (1543), Huguenots (1560), Freemasons (1717), the short linivng “Illuminati” (1776-1785), Jacobins (1789), Bolschewiki (1903), etc.
One of the authors of the modern fiction trilogy “Illuminatus” (1975), Robert Anton Wilson, has compiled al little encyclopedia of contemporary conspiracy theories: “Everything is under Control” (1998). See also Barry Coward and Julian Swann (2004).
bibligraphy
Analysen und Darstellungen zum Thema Geheimbünde
Dr. phil. Roland Müller, Switzerland / Copyright © by Mueller Science 2001-2016 / All rights reserved
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