File spoon-archives/bhaskar.archive/bhaskar_2001/bhaskar.0105, message 40


From: DBBwanika-AT-netscape.net
Date: Thu, 31 May 2001 03:29:27 -0400
Subject: BHA: (fwd) In the word - mystic, naturalism or science? another view


a brief moment in time - critical moments in social construction
what is the social cube and the fate of scientific knowlegde.

epistemological errors revisted.
 

Bwanika
----------

For thousands of years of prehistoric and recorded history, Africa led humanity in the art of group cohesion and social organisation. The spiritual matrix devised by African societies provided the earliest
substance of social and psychological cohesion known to man. 

 These later impacted heavily on the societies of Western Asia and the Mediterranean world in particular, and were thereafter elaborated into distinct but ultimately related systems. Now referred to as ?religion?,
 these psycho-spiritual systems have profoundly affected humanity?s general way of being; its moral, social and transcendental ?software?. 

 Religious thought began where mankind began. Much like today?s societies, the first nations had a need for purposeful communal existence and spiritual sustenance.

 The distinction between that termed ?religion? and that termed ?spirituality? is a recent development, incompatible with the ancient archetype. It is ultimately an extension of the tendency to compartmentalise; a quest to satisfy the individual ego. In the final analysis, they converge; one pertains to the inner and the other to the outer form of the same reality. Both the personal and social dimensions of transcendence were deemed necessary to group cohesion.

 The early societies thus devised appropriate ?social contract?, reflected through moral laws, the notion of the sacred, festivals, rituals and explanations of their personal and collective experiences and the world
 around them. 

 It is the intergenerational transmission of these that informs our universal conception of that which we call ?religion?. 

 By whatever definition, religion is an exclusively human preoccupation, attended to by its participants, their rites, cosmology, cosmogony and theological precepts. 

 Subconsciously, we tend to identify that which is ?religious? through the presence of four basic factors: 

       Accounts of origin/social legends.

       Moral laws/symbolic rituals. 

       A college of priests.

Futuristic/divine knowledge, of that which is yet to come - ?divination?, ?prophesy?, ?revelation?,
       etc. 


 Naturalism

 It is possible to make sense of humanity?s earliest recorded thoughts in art, sculpture and writing only by comparison with its earliest archetypes, the earliest physical environment that shaped man?s consciousness from its most primitive origins to the stage of the modern man. 

 The early cultural systems and philosophies of Homo Sapiens were based on religious archetypes, established on the doctrine of gender polarity and founded on human responses to naturalism. 

 As such, we can accept that the thinking of pre-emigration African cultures in the ancient world would be profoundly influenced by their physical experience in the African nexus. 

 Early rock paintings and religious artefacts confirm that naturalism dominated human thought in the matriarchal era. 

 Nationalism was a by-product of patriarchy. In the evolution of culture, the ?political religions? were to supplant the nature-based (or ?pagan?) systems. 

 With the global expansion of political religions, usually through conquest, the latter was labelled ?paganism? and systematically applied as a pejorative term, denoting an inferior stage of thought. 

 However, for the first nations, ?religion? was one half of the dual matrix of culture, and it was devoid of politics. 

 Language was the fabric of thought and religion was its handmaiden. At the same time, religion was a language in itself - the stuff of communication between man and his originator. 

 Above all else, mankind?s earliest paradigm of social reality was founded on the development of the dual elements of the linguistic and religious dimensions. Today, both elements remain the most effective substance of cultural cohesion. In all human history, coherent societies generally fashion coherent cultural policies to develop the existing linguistic and religious traditions, while on the other hand incoherent societies always reflect haphazard religious and linguistic policies. And the same goes for the modern day.


 How then are we to understand the religious matrix as set forth by humanity?s first nations? How do these African-derived religious systems compare with the subsequent and familiar religious ideas in the world
 system, and how relevant are these African archetypes to the emancipation of African humanity in contemporary life?

 Western scholars

 Earlier studies by Western scholars on African thought were often puffed up with parochial prejudice which held that religion was an abstract concept, therefore, an idea imported to African societies. 

 African societies were deemed incapable of thought beyond superstition. When eventually colonial scholars began to attribute religious ideas to Africans, they labelled it ?animism?.

 To them, the animist would superstitiously view the presence of spirits in all encounters. Thanks to the English anthropologist, E.B Tylor, who introduced the term first in an 1866 article, and then in his Primitive
 Culture (1871). 

 African religious thought has ever since been identified as animism, which for Tylor was the first in three stages of religious development. Polytheism constitutes the second stage followed by monotheism, in line
 with an evolutionary scheme. 

 In the colonial order of things, the African naturally occupied the most primitive stage. Tylor?s students popularised their mentor?s work but went further to include the term ?ancestor worship?, introduced by the
 anthropologist Herbert Spencer, in his Principles of Sociology (1885). 

 This added to the nomenclature with which to describe the ?less evolved? portions of mankind. The new idea rested on the consideration that ?the savage mind?, as Levi Claude delighted in referring to it, was
 incapable of imagination and can therefore not think in the abstract. 

 The ?savage? not only venerates his ancestors as a ritual of respect and affirmation of spiritual connectedness, he worships them as the ultimate reality of existence, since he is incapable of conceptualising the idea of ?spirit? or ?God?. 

 The privilege of such abstract thought belonged to more evolved cultures, who have long abandoned naturism for rationalism. Such were the stupendous scale of prestigious ignorance that presented colonial ideological solidarity as scholarship.

 To establish his cultural superiority, it remained necessary for the colonial scholar to devise a separate set of references for the cultural ?other?, with a view to establishing the metaphysics of inferiority for them. 

 The nomenclature devised to discuss African religious thought was thus established as superstition, animism, ancestor worship, polytheism, fetishism and idolatry. 

 Cultural journey

 Be that as it may, it is now firmly established that humanity?s cultural journey began in the rift valley regions of East Africa. 

 To date, Ethiopia, in particular, continues to furnish us with the earliest specimens of skeletal evidence of man?s uninterrupted habitation of earth. 

 A serious study of the archaeological material of prehistoric African cultures suffices to inform us that human experience in the rift valley area impacted heavily on subsequent social developments in the more
 fertile Nile regions. 

 The technical and spiritual traditions that gained elaboration in the Nile Valley reflect the apex of earlier traditions, which then culminated in written form in Ancient Egypt in particular. 

 Ancient religious prototypes did not begin in Ancient Egypt, they gained elaboration and refinement there. It is common knowledge that a lot of what was eventually committed to writing by the Ancient Egyptians were several thousand years older than its culture.

 Of particular significance to Ancient Egypt?s particular genius, was its tendency to documentation, syncretism and systematisation of knowledge. As in all cultures, oral traditions preceded the practice of writing. 

 Religious writings

 A brief survey of the written sources of mankind?s collective religious heritage would give context to our discussion. The oldest religious writings known to humanity are the collection of astro-religious literature, known to Egyptologists as the Ancient Egyptian Pyramid Texts (Raymond O Faulkner, 1969/1998), elaborately chiselled on the interior walls of the 5th and 6th Dynasty pyramid complex and variously dated
 between 2700 and 2100 BC.

 Of importance likewise are the collection of funerary inscriptions written on the coffins of the Middle Kingdom (2040-1786) and known as Coffin Texts (see Raymond Faulkner, 1973).

 In addition to these are the body of writings called by the Ancient Egyptians Pert-Em-Hru, which may be properly translated as Chapters of Coming Into Light or Coming Forth By Day. As versions of the work
 were often found in the coffins of the buried, the collection became known to local Arab grave diggers  under the cynical name Kitab al-Mayyitun, meaning Book Of The Dead. 

 This formed the name by which Egyptologists have since referred to the body of work, (see Book Of The Dead, Raymond Faulkner, 1996; James P. Allen 1987; or Sir E.A Wallis Budge, 1895/1994). 

 Next came the Vedic texts of the sub-continent of India. The texts of the Rig-Veda were the first extensive composition in any Indo-European Language. 

 It partially adapted the Shaivism of the Dravidian cultures, who have since been positively confirmed by  DNA as migrants from the continent of Africa. The Vedas of the Hindus were first committed to writing between 1200 and 900 BC.

 These were followed in the Near-East by the variety of Hebrew teachings now known to Christianity as Old Testament texts, written down in fragments between 900 and 150BC. 

 The two major religious systems indigenous to China are Taoism and Confucianism. Buddhism was imported from India and happened to have flourished during the same era. Although, they stem from much older
 traditions, Taoism?s sacred text is the Tao Te Ching by Lao Tze and Confucianism?s primary work is The Analects of Confucius. 

 The two were committed to writing mostly after the death of their respective founders in the 6th century BC. In the third and second century BC, the Hebrew writings were translated into Greek (known as
 Septaugint). 

 New material was joined to the collection, with versions of what became the canonical gospels of the Christian New Testament. These were refined by the 4th century AD, when Christians received their first coherent, but not final, versions of the scriptures. The books of the Koran were first put to writing in the 7th century AD. 

 African religious writings

 The written literatures of Ancient Egypt provide us with typically African settings and pattern of thought. Its array of symbols are drawn from plants and animals found solely in the natural African environment and
 employed in the construction of a consonantally-based system of writing.

 The gaps separating Ancient Egypt from recent African societies are often rendered negligible through the resilience of cultural memory. Hence, the various writing systems of living African cultures follow a similar
 pattern of development in their common employment of the glyph system, as can be seen in scripts of the Mende (Sierra Leone), Loma (Liberia), Bamum (Cameroon), Nsibidi (Efik/Ibo) and Mum. 

 The Sona (Zambia and Angola), Gicandi of the Gikuyu and Adinkra system of the Akan (Ghana and Cote  d?Ivoire) were undoubtedly inspired by a parallel mentality. 

 African glyphs commonly employ pictograms and view human, plants, animal and general objects of the environment in symbolic terms. 

 In some cases, they reflect shared symbols with the more familiar Ancient Egyptian glyphs, (see T. Obenga in UNESCO?s General history of Africa, 1981, Vol.1, pp79, 140, 259, unabridged version, and Bruce
 Willis? Adinkra Dictionary, 1998). 

 These symbolic languages are at once interpretations of physical life forms employed to give meaning to spiritual life. Unfortunately, when Western scholars turned their attention to studying the development of
 thought in African societies, their primary approach was to proceed with an investigation of foreign efforts in Africa. 

 Old sentiments

 Gazing at African cultures through safari lenses, scholars of Joseph Williams? generation could not imagine that the culture of the Hebrews might very well have borrowed from other sources, much less from
 African sources.

 Researchers of the 19th and much of the 20th century were often incapable of inverting their perspective, much less abandoning entrenched prejudice.

 Joseph Williams? Hebrewisms Of West Africa (1928) is, as an example, replete with endless evidence of the cultural impact of the African data on Jewish life, as transmitted through Hebrew presence in Ancient
 Egypt.

 The author?s error was to have seen the process in reverse, as scholars now concede, (see Chiek Anta Diop, African Origins, 1974, also Civilisation or Barbarism, 1991; and Martin Bernal, Black Athena. Vols
 1&2, 1978/92).

 African religious archetypes set forth a common matrix of human origins, founded basically on the idea of life emerging from the primordial waters. 

 For the Ancient Egyptians of Yunu (Heliopolis), the waters were held to locate the ultimate genesis, the source from which came forth life. The idea has also survived in the politically charged religious systems,
 transmitted through the Hebrews.

 Having been embued with Ancient Egyptian culture, the Hebrew accounts would echo the earlier, pre-Ancient Egyptian and Egyptian model in several aspects. In fact no less than seven scholars of the ancient world would insist that the Israelites of the ancient world were of African descent or ?Ethiopians? and ?Egyptians?.

 Certainly, both the Ethiopians and Egyptians of the most ancient world were black peoples. In fact Aristotle?s description was that they were ?too black?, while other Greek writers report on their ?woolly  hair? (see UNESCO, General History Of Africa, Vol2, pp36 - 40, 1981, unabridged version).

 One of the earliest accounts of the identity of Moses was that relayed by the 3rd century BC Egyptian  priest - Manetho who wrote his History of Egypt based on Ancient Egyptian archives. Manetho informs us  that Moses was a rebel Egyptian priest, (see Manetho in Loeb Classical Series, Harvard University 1980). 

 Both, Strabo, the Greek scholar of the 1st century, and Eusebius, the Roman church historian and bishop  of Caesaria in the 4th century, also held the view that ?Moses was an Egyptian priest? who rebelled.

 The 2nd century Greek philosopher, Celsus, summarised the same view as follows: ?The Jews were a tribe of Egyptians who revolted from the established religion.? 

 On the other hand, the Jewish historian, Flavius Josephus (37-97AD), insisted that the Jewish nations  were ?a nation of Western Ethiopians?. 

 This second view was also shared by Cornelius Tacitus, who is widely acknowledged as the greatest of all Roman historians, (see Loeb Classical Library series or Charles S Finch, Echoes Of The Old Dark Land,
 1991). 

 However it may be, the Hebrew patriarch (Moses) would bear an Ancient Egyptian name and reflect  Ancient Egyptian culture, groomed as he was from childhood to the age of 40 in Ancient Egyptian  sensibilities, and founded on privileged education as a prince in the Ancient Egyptian royal family.

 There is no contact without impact. And the ?Books of Moses? certainly affirm a 400-year contact  between Ancient Egyptian and Israelite cultures, in which we are assured that ?Moses was learned in all  the wisdom of the [Ancient] Egyptians? (Acts 7:22). 

 It follows that Moses, a fully-grown adult by the time he began his mission, would teach what he knows  from his cultural background and education level. All of which took place in Ancient Egypt, according to
 the Biblical account. 

 Moses? Ten Commandments are certainly borrowed from his priestly education, as it is reflected in  Chapter 125 of the Ancient Egyptian Declarations of Innocence, (see Egyptian Book of the Dead, referred
 to above). 
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____________




Bwanika


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