Blackpill The REAL Blackpill - The enemy is ISHTAR not human genes

[K9Otaku]

For the moment, most incels believe that the blackpill is about genes, bad foid genes which determine their bad behaviors.

This is WRONG. Genes are never bad. They just are. Genes evolved long before we had any notion of "right" or "wrong". They are a given that civilization must adapt to by suppressing certain (genetically determined) instincts and encouraging others.

All durable civilizations have suppressed human mate selection instincts because these instincts lead to a regression to hunter-gatherer behaviors. Ever since farming was invented, it has become impossible to follow our sexual instincts as is, both on the male and female side.

What we are fighting today with the BlackPill is more specific than our genes, it is a religious-cultural construct called ISHTAR WORSHIP, and which appeared almost exactly at the same time as civilization itself, 6000 years ago.

ISHTAR WORSHIP has been transformed over the ages to suit the tastes of the moment. Here are a few examples.

ISHTAR WORSHIP has always been combated by Abrahamic religions:

1. Judaism: denunciation of Ashrah and Ashtoreth cult
2. Christianity: Rejection of the "Whore of Babylon"
3. Islam. Rejection of Al-Manat, Al-Uzzah and Allat.

All 3: Monogamy (anti-Chad policy) and imposition of strict modesty norms on women. Paradoxically, Islam is the weakest here (it allows polygamy). But the idea is the same in all cases. All Abrahamic faiths reject the cult of the great foid. God is unambiguously masculine in all 3 cases.

The only possibility for the Blackpill to thrive and have an impact is to acknowledge this heritage. In other words, The Blackpill has to be the "Fourth Testament" (if we count the Quran as the third).

If, on the contrary, the BlackPill remains a past-time for social rejects who want to think of themselves as "edgy" and provoke reactions from the likes of IT, it will wither and die. Something else will take the place of the Blackpill as the heir of Monotheistic religion and the Blackpill will become a footnote in history as "a short-lived XXIst century subculture"

 

[Mecoja]

Modern gods are the women, any woman. All they have to do is to film themselves for few seconds and will get more worshipping than all religions did in the last 6k years. People will praise and defend any of them. People will "grind" for the bits of their attention. Even we worship the images of them (animes, video games, drawings, art) Many think its the money, its not, money is the man's mean to get to the women. We live in the sex driven society and women are the gatekeepers of sex, so men literally beg women for attention.

 

[Med Amine]

even if you enforce religion on soyceities women will still prefer genetically superior males over short ugly males.
lot of chrisitian and muslim women cheat on thier husbands with other males.
if you live in a soyceity that doesn't worship women and you end up with a wife while you're an ugly short male she's still not going to satsify you sexually and she's not going to show the same level of affection to you as if you was a genetically superior male.
genetics are still more important.
also even religion still benefit chads since the most good looking males will get the best positions in soyceity and be respected more by other males. they will get the highest number of girls in the end.

 

[zephyr]

'Whore of Babylon' Sounds like a Username addon for an IncelTear Reddit user

 

[fang]

WOULD.

 

[LesscoBlob]

For the moment, most incels believe that the blackpill is about genes, bad foid genes which determine their bad behaviors.

This is WRONG. Genes are never bad. They just are. Genes evolved long before we had any notion of "right" or "wrong". They are a given that civilization must adapt to by suppressing certain (genetically determined) instincts and encouraging others.

All durable civilizations have suppressed human mate selection instincts because these instincts lead to a regression to hunter-gatherer behaviors. Ever since farming was invented, it has become impossible to follow our sexual instincts as is, both on the male and female side.

What we are fighting today with the BlackPill is more specific than our genes, it is a religious-cultural construct called ISHTAR WORSHIP, and which appeared almost exactly at the same time as civilization itself, 6000 years ago.

ISHTAR WORSHIP has been transformed over the ages to suit the tastes of the moment. Here are a few examples.
View attachment 811453View attachment 811454View attachment 811455View attachment 811456View attachment 811457View attachment 811458

ISHTAR WORSHIP has always been combated by Abrahamic religions:

1. Judaism: denunciation of Ashrah and Ashtoreth cult
2. Christianity: Rejection of the "Whore of Babylon"
3. Islam. Rejection of Al-Manat, Al-Uzzah and Allat.

All 3: Monogamy (anti-Chad policy) and imposition of strict modesty norms on women. Paradoxically, Islam is the weakest here (it allows polygamy). But the idea is the same in all cases. All Abrahamic faiths reject the cult of the great foid. God is unambiguously masculine in all 3 cases.

The only possibility for the Blackpill to thrive and have an impact is to acknowledge this heritage. In other words, The Blackpill has to be the "Fourth Testament" (if we count the Quran as the third).

If, on the contrary, the BlackPill remains a past-time for social rejects who want to think of themselves as "edgy" and provoke reactions from the likes of IT, it will wither and die. Something else will take the place of the Blackpill as the heir of Monotheistic religion and the Blackpill will become a footnote in history as "a short-lived XXIst century subculture"

I've never thought of that. That's actually very interesting. I'll definitely research about Ishtar worship more.

 

[Soulflayer]

even if you enforce religion on soyceities women will still prefer genetically superior males over short ugly males.
lot of chrisitian and muslim women cheat on thier husbands with other males.
if you live in a soyceity that doesn't worship women and you end up with a wife while you're an ugly short male she's still not going to satsify you sexually and she's not going to show the same level of affection to you as if you was a genetically superior male.
genetics are still more important.
also even religion still benefit chads since the most good looking males will get the best positions in soyceity and be respected more by other males. they will get the highest number of girls in the end.

its not just looks, the age of the couple also matters. an ugly 30yo betabuxxer will have a shitty relationship while an ugly 12-16yo boy will have a good functional relationship

 

[AsiaCel]

That's why we need religions to resurge

 

[nice_try]

This faggot denying the blackpill again ...

This is WRONG. Genes are never bad. They just are. Genes evolved long before we had any notion of "right" or "wrong".

Read Darwin.
Genes ALWAYS have been good or bad (for survival).
That's why we have genetic recombination in nature, so that weak genes can perish and strong genes can carry on.

The worship of good looks / genetics isn't man-made and it's not a "religious-cultural construct".
It's basic biology, which is programmed into our primal minds, always has been.
We are looking for the most genetically gifted partner we can get.
For men that means they want a woman who is beautiful, because that signals fertility and a high chance of healthy offspring.
For women, they want a tall, strong, high testosterone man, because that signals he can fight off predators and care for her wellbeing.


It's basic biology.
It has NOTHING to do with a "religious-cultural construct".
This construct only exists in your autistic basement-dweller head.

 

[der_komische]

The worship of good looks / genetics isn't man-made and it's not a "religious-cultural construct".
It's basic biology, which is programmed into our primal minds, always has been.
We are looking for the most genetically gifted partner we can get.
For men that means they want a woman who is beautiful, because that signals fertility and a high chance of healthy offspring.
For women, they want a tall, strong, high testosterone man, because that signals he can fight off predators and care for her wellbeing.

 

[K9Otaku]

I've never thought of that. That's actually very interesting. I'll definitely research about Ishtar worship more.

It is one of the oldest and most stable religions ever. It always reappear with slight changes but at bottom it is always the same.

 

[K9Otaku]

That's why we need religions to resurge

Indeed

 

[LesscoBlob]

It is one of the oldest and most stable religions ever. It always reappear with slight changes but at bottom it is always the same.

Which means that foid worship is in fact true in a literal way.

 

[eatdinner]

You’re %100 right my friend. One of the biggest misconceptions of the Bible is that Mary, Jesus’s mother, was a virgin. This is a secret form of mother goddess or “Ishtar” worship.

To maintain society men and women both have to sacrifice for the greater good.

 

[K9Otaku]

Which means that foid worship is in fact true in a literal way.

Yes

 

[JayGoptri]

This faggot denying the blackpill again ...


Read Darwin.
Genes ALWAYS have been good or bad (for survival).
That's why we have genetic recombination in nature, so that weak genes can perish and strong genes can carry on.

The worship of good looks / genetics isn't man-made and it's not a "religious-cultural construct".
It's basic biology, which is programmed into our primal minds, always has been.
We are looking for the most genetically gifted partner we can get.
For men that means they want a woman who is beautiful, because that signals fertility and a high chance of healthy offspring.
For women, they want a tall, strong, high testosterone man, because that signals he can fight off predators and care for her wellbeing.


It's basic biology.
It has NOTHING to do with a "religious-cultural construct".
This construct only exists in your autistic basement-dweller head.

You're in wannabe Chad mode. Switch to unemployed Eurotrash boy and you'll maybe have a shot at understanding what the man is saying..

 

[nice_try]

You're in wannabe Chad mode. Switch to unemployed Euro trash boy and you'll understand what the man is saying..

Ad hominem.
error 404 - no arguments found.

 

[JayGoptri]

For the moment, most incels believe that the blackpill is about genes, bad foid genes which determine their bad behaviors.

This is WRONG. Genes are never bad. They just are. Genes evolved long before we had any notion of "right" or "wrong". They are a given that civilization must adapt to by suppressing certain (genetically determined) instincts and encouraging others.

All durable civilizations have suppressed human mate selection instincts because these instincts lead to a regression to hunter-gatherer behaviors. Ever since farming was invented, it has become impossible to follow our sexual instincts as is, both on the male and female side.

What we are fighting today with the BlackPill is more specific than our genes, it is a religious-cultural construct called ISHTAR WORSHIP, and which appeared almost exactly at the same time as civilization itself, 6000 years ago.

ISHTAR WORSHIP has been transformed over the ages to suit the tastes of the moment. Here are a few examples.
View attachment 811453View attachment 811454View attachment 811455View attachment 811456View attachment 811457View attachment 811458

ISHTAR WORSHIP has always been combated by Abrahamic religions:

1. Judaism: denunciation of Ashrah and Ashtoreth cult
2. Christianity: Rejection of the "Whore of Babylon"
3. Islam. Rejection of Al-Manat, Al-Uzzah and Allat.

All 3: Monogamy (anti-Chad policy) and imposition of strict modesty norms on women. Paradoxically, Islam is the weakest here (it allows polygamy). But the idea is the same in all cases. All Abrahamic faiths reject the cult of the great foid. God is unambiguously masculine in all 3 cases.

The only possibility for the Blackpill to thrive and have an impact is to acknowledge this heritage. In other words, The Blackpill has to be the "Fourth Testament" (if we count the Quran as the third).

If, on the contrary, the BlackPill remains a past-time for social rejects who want to think of themselves as "edgy" and provoke reactions from the likes of IT, it will wither and die. Something else will take the place of the Blackpill as the heir of Monotheistic religion and the Blackpill will become a footnote in history as "a short-lived XXIst century subculture"

The most modernized Cuckservative American version..

 

[JayGoptri]

Ad hominem.
error 404 - no arguments found.

This faggot denying the blackpill again ...


Read Darwin.
Genes ALWAYS have been good or bad (for survival).
That's why we have genetic recombination in nature, so that weak genes can perish and strong genes can carry on.

The worship of good looks / genetics isn't man-made and it's not a "religious-cultural construct".
It's basic biology, which is programmed into our primal minds, always has been.
We are looking for the most genetically gifted partner we can get.
For men that means they want a woman who is beautiful, because that signals fertility and a high chance of healthy offspring.
For women, they want a tall, strong, high testosterone man, because that signals he can fight off predators and care for her wellbeing.


It's basic biology.
It has NOTHING to do with a "religious-cultural construct".
This construct only exists in your autistic basement-dweller head.

Oh no my friend. More like - Landing page: Found !

You just didn't understand a word that was said. You got to bow out of these threads kiddo. It's not your style. There are anime discussions and dogwhisperer police squads going on out there atm...head-ON-oberDooode!

 

[PersonaPimp]

That's why we need religions to resurge

So why do u follow a ideology and symbol that represents everything OP said on the thread?

 

[Man]

1,000,000 BC - 2,000 AD
women knew their place

2,000 AD+ women are the pinnacle of total human existence because we invented bing bing phones and digitally exchange photos of ourselves.

 

[JayGoptri]

This faggot denying the blackpill again ...

Nobody is denying anything. He's telling you that this instinct/behavior was suppressed by culture and religious techniques FOR A GOOD REASON ! So you don't get the world we live in being so uneven with looks. It isn't programmed from the start to "BE that way" but it can easily be a path we go down and BECOME that way, which it has.

The worship of good looks / genetics isn't man-made and it's not a "religious-cultural construct".
It's basic biology, which is programmed into our primal minds, always has been.
We are looking for the most genetically gifted partner we can get.

Noone is denying we are attracted to good looking things. But we are not "programmed" to look for the most "genetically gifted" partner either. This isn't completely true !

 

[JayGoptri]

That's why we need religions to resurge

Yes but not the conventional ones. It's too difficult to defeat this head on. In the end the Ishtar religion came back, new methods of identification are required !

 

[K9Otaku]

Modern gods are the women, any woman.

Not exactly. Any woman can be an Ishtar priestess today, yes, but the real goddess behind all of them is ISHTAR (as an archetype, if you will)

 

[JayGoptri]

That's why we need religions to resurge

So why do u follow a ideology and symbol that represents everything OP said on the thread?

Good question...

But..it's "an ideology". GrammarCel

 

[PersonaPimp]

Good question...

But..it's "an ideology". GrammarCel

I'm braziliancel, sorry.

 

[nice_try]

Oh no my friend. More like - Landing page: Found !

You just didn't understand a word that was said. You got to bow out of these threads kiddo. It's not your style. There are anime discussions and dogwhisperer police squads going on out there atm...head-ON-oberDooode!

Still no arguments anywhere.

 

[lifefuel]

View: https://www.bitchute.com/video/DePXUKd2HYXD/

 

[NorthernWind]

If I'm not mistaken, in the Epic of Gilgamesh the sacred harlot* from the temple of Ishtar seduced the barbarian by showing her boobs and sleeping with him, thus turning him into a civilized man.
So the civilization is a reverse of natural roles. Female shows initiative first and sex shown as an entry into a civilized life.
We obviously live in the different world where man is obliged to approach first. 'Real man' is the one who hit on women like in a natural animal world.

*ancient prostitution was probably very different from that we have in modern world.

 

[Mecoja]

Not exactly. Any woman can be an Ishtar priestess today, yes, but the real goddess behind all of them is ISHTAR (as an archetype, if you will)

Look at any ethots, there are worshipped by masses. Pokimane is a good example, she's as average as one can be and she has millions of worshippers. Any foid is the idol of Ishtar and Ishtar is the Idea of a woman, like entire female sex are godly creatures.

 

[K9Otaku]

If I'm not mistaken, in the Epic of Gilgamesh the sacred harlot* from the temple of Ishtar seduced the barbarian by showing her boobs and sleeping with him, thus turning him into a civilized man.

That is Ishtar propaganda of course.

So the civilization is a reverse of natural roles. Female shows initiative first and sex shown as an entry into a civilized life.

Don't confuse propaganda with reality

 

[K9Otaku]

@TheProphetMuscle, Can you pin it?

 

[NorthernWind]

That is Ishtar propaganda of course.


Don't confuse propaganda with reality

Nigga, are you obsessed with said Ishtar? You see Ishtar worship everywhere.

 

[K9Otaku]

Nigga, are you obsessed with said Ishtar? You see Ishtar worship everywhere.

Do you know anything about all this?

 

[NorthernWind]

Do you know anything about all this?

About that?

 

[Intellau_Celistic]

That's why we need religions to resurge

 

[TheProphetMuscle]

@TheProphetMuscle, Can you pin it?

Yes

 

[K9Otaku]

Yes

Thanks

 

[FakeFakecel]

Read Darwin.

 

[nystagmuscel]

even if you enforce religion on soyceities women will still prefer genetically superior males over short ugly males.
lot of chrisitian and muslim women cheat on thier husbands with other males.
if you live in a soyceity that doesn't worship women and you end up with a wife while you're an ugly short male she's still not going to satsify you sexually and she's not going to show the same level of affection to you as if you was a genetically superior male.
genetics are still more important.
also even religion still benefit chads since the most good looking males will get the best positions in soyceity and be respected more by other males. they will get the highest number of girls in the end.

 

[nice_try]

Yes

Why do you keep pinning his braindamaged threads just because he's asking for it?

 

[AsiaCel]

So why do u follow a ideology and symbol that represents everything OP said on the thread?

My version of Nazism is incel supremacy and enslaves normies to the bottom

 

[K9Otaku]

My version of Nazism is incel supremacy and enslaves normies to the bottom

@PersonaDickcel is right, you know. Nazism is a derivative of ISHTAR religion, just as much as Feminazism is

 

[IncelKing]

JFL at this nonsense thread being pinned.

 

[K9Otaku]

@Moroccancel2- @Intellectual @lotus2345 @DenHaag @ElTruecel @solblue @TheProphetMuscle @Mortis @Ahnfeltia @LesscoBlob @Intellau_Celistic @Transcended Trucel @MarquisDeSade, I have decided to re-publish the book here, to make it more easily accessible. Here we go

---

Chapter 1 – Discovery

On July 17th 2021, I was on night shift duty at the Amundsen-Scott South Pole station ARA monitoring room. ARA stands for “Askaryan Radio Array”, the unimaginative name of yet another Neutrino detection experiment undertaken by a consortium of mostly American universities. More on this later. The ARA monitoring room is not actually a room. It is just an area inside a fairly large Science lab section of the Amundsen-Scott main building. There, RAs (Research Assistants), like myself, sit in front of a bank of computer monitors, day and night, waiting for something to go wrong with the ARA gear, a set of 37 radio-wave detectors sunk into pits drilled into the South Pole ice crust two kilometers apart from each other over an area as large as downtown San-Francisco. That night, something had indeed gone wrong. At 2:28 am., on one of the screens, a row had turned bright red, indicating that one of the Digitization Daughter Boards (DTD) was no longer responding to SNMP requests and probably needed to be swapped. Faced with the prospect of a lonely snowmobile ride in the dead of night, I did what people do in such circumstances: I yawned, cracked all my fingers one by one, finished my mug of cold coffee, and got onto my feet.

Grabbing a spare DTD from the tech bench, I headed for the main exit airlock, donned my heavy arctic clothing and opened the outside door. The cold was fierce; wind chill at about minus 50 degrees centigrade. The weather was calm. Any hint of a storm and I would have been spared the trip into the cold arctic night. But no. No wind. I had no excuse not to go. The equipment rack with the faulty board was about 8 kilometers away; A 15 minutes snowmobile ride. After driving for a while, I was in total darkness. The lights of the Amundsen-Scott base were no longer visible behind me and the sky was cloudy; there was no Moon nor stars. The powerful headlights of the snowmobile were digging a tunnel into the darkness ahead of me, showing the perfectly straight track leading to the ARA-B-12 equipment cabinet, my destination.

Trying not to fall asleep during this most monotonous of rides, I kept moving my head from side to side to avoid letting my gaze become fixated on the track ahead. Suddenly, however, it felt as if I had indeed fallen asleep and was dreaming. The rush of air in my face was no longer cold; so much so that I started to feel hot under my heavy anorak. I released the throttle, half expecting to wake up buried in the snow beside the track under the upturned snowmobile. But no, I was not asleep. My machine slowed down gently to a stop and I hopped off, inhaling the warm surrounding air in puzzlement. The temperature must have been 15°C or so and I was getting sweaty. Having removed my overcoat and gloves, I was standing there in the light hoodie I had been wearing a few moments ago inside the building. I did not feel cold at all ! Surprisingly, the snow on the track did not seem to be melting. It felt as cold as usual to the touch; well below freezing.

It was then that I noticed the light. It looked like sunrise in the distance although of course it could not be sunrise, given the season, and it was not even in the right direction. Leaving the snowmobile behind on the track, I started walking towards the lit sky up a gentle slope. As I moved forward, everything slowly began to look as if the sun was indeed rising. But there was no sun. The snow around me just looked as it would have under a dim early morning sunlight. Turning back, I was startled when I realized that I could make out the snowmobile in the distance, although I had left it behind me in complete darkness, just a few moments ago. Rushing towards it, I suddenly found myself in the dark once more. Was it night again ? The snowmobile had become invisible. Turning around and looking up the slope, I saw the lit sky again. I ran towards it until I reached the same point as before and turned around. There it was. The snowmobile was clearly visible, sitting on the track 500 meters or so away from where I was standing. I started walking backwards, keeping the snowmobile in sight and my back to the light. As I did, the whole landscape in front of me was becoming more and more brightly lit. Soon enough, it looked as if I was standing in broad daylight. The snowmobile, now about 1 kilometer away, was perfectly visible and so was the track and every feature of the snowy and empty landscape. But it did not look as if the sun was shining either. Everything was bathed in the soft gray light of a cloudy day.

For the third time, I turned around and this is when I really got scared. I felt my face turn hot and my scalp creep as Adrenalin rushed through my veins. Before me, in a shallow depression extending as far as the eye could see, were buildings; rows after rows of buildings, neatly aligned along a grid of compacted snow tracks. But this was impossible ! I was not even 10 kilometers away from Amundsen-Scott, one of the most isolated places on Earth. Sobral, an Argentinian base, was over 1000 kilometers away and it was the closest installation to the South Pole station. As I looked more intently at the buildings, I noticed that they looked quite old fashioned. Many of them were Quonset huts, these semi-circular hangar-like structures used by the US military during World War II. Others looked like these standardized elongated low-slung bungalows that Seabees and Army engineers had built all over the world in the 1940s and 50s to house US personnel on overseas bases. All of them looked in perfect condition; almost brand new. I was looking at a full-fledged post World-War II US military base located right here at the South pole ! But there never was such a base. Amundsen-Scott was first established in 1956 and back then it was just a few Jamseway huts (arctic hardened versions of the Quonset hut) and a flagpole; not a nicely laid out permanent base like what I was now looking at.

As I walked towards the nearest building, my head was spinning with ideas of time-travel and inter-dimensional portals. However, unlike in movies, these ideas were not exciting. They were just scary. Was I going to be stuck here ? Was I going to die ? The first building I reached appeared empty, the door locked. As I walked further on the track that ran alongside it, I passed a number of Quonset Huts and what looked like a Liquefied gas tank. Then I reached a group of interconnected bungalow-like structures built on stilts 5 of 6 feet off the packed snow ground. They looked like they might be some sort of office. As I looked up the wooden staircase leading up to the front door, I froze as I saw the door open.

A man appeared, quite tall, a tad below 6 feet perhaps, sporting a shaggy red beard and wearing a light gray sweater and dark cargo pants. A wide grin shone through his beard. He looked more than a little nervous and awkward despite an obvious desire to look self-assured. “Hi. I was warned you would come. Your name is Aaron Cora, right ?”. His English was easily understandable, although marked by a thick Scandinavian accent. “My name is Finn. I am from the Troll station”. “But Troll is more than 2000 kilometers away from here !”, I blurted out. Troll station is one of Norway’s permanent Antarctic installations but whether he had come from there or not was certainly one of the least strange aspects of the whole situation. How on earth did he know my name, in the first place ? I briefly thought of asking him about that but he spoke before I could: “It is quite unclear where here is, he said. Come inside, I will tell you what I can about this place”.

I climbed the creaky wooden staircase and entered the building after Finn. Inside, it indeed looked like an office: four heavy steel desks, a few wooden swivel chairs, several large steel filing cabinets, all 1940s style like the buildings themselves. Everything looked as if it had been installed recently. There was even a faint smell of fresh paint. On one of the desks, a dozen dark gray binders were stacked in three piles. Another one was open, showing its contents of typewritten sheets of paper. Finn sat at the desk. I pulled a chair and sat in front of him. After a few seconds of silence, I asked:

— ME: How come the snow does not melt with this temperature ?.

— FINN: That I don’t know. What I do know is that this place is called “Station Philadelphia”, or at least, this is one of its names. According to the documents in these binders, it was created as a joint CIA-Atomic Energy Commission-Naval Intelligence facility in November 1946, as a follow-up to Operation Highjump, the US Navy’s post-War Antarctic expedition. Its location is unclear but it does not appear to have been built at the South pole, or near Troll for that matter. More probably, it was located closer to where McMurdo (the US main Antarctic supply base) is now, probably on the Ross ice shelf. It was not meant to last very long; probably no more than five years.

— ME: But where is it now ?

— FINN: No Idea. I am not even sure this is the original Station Philadelphia. According to the documents, the station, or what remained of it, was dismantled in 1958. The place we are at now appears to be some sort of replica.

— ME: Like a Museum exhibit ?

— FINN: Something like that, yes, except it was not set up by humans.

— ME: What ?! Are you talking about aliens now ?

It felt like a let-down. Aliens ! What a tired cliché, I thought. The tone of my voice must have given away the feeling I just had because Finn looked visibly embarrassed.

- FINN: I do not think the word “Aliens” is the right word exactly. At least, no mention of little green men appears in these documents, or anything of that kind. But the purpose of Station Philadelphia is said to have been the study of a technological device of non-human origin. This is the phrase these documents use; "non-human". Given how unreal this place looks, the brand new stuff, the temperature, etc. I think the term is appropriate. It seems indeed that some kind of Non-Human agency is at play here; Don’t you agree ?

— ME: “Yes, certainly”, I said sheepishly.

I felt guilty for having been such a snob about the idea of Aliens. After all, who was I to judge this whole thing as if it were a Hollywood script ? Only a few minutes ago, I had been scared out of my wits by the strangeness of it all. However, talking to another human being, and especially someone like Finn, obviously an early-career bottom feeder scientist like myself, had returned my brain to a sense of normalcy. I was starting to enjoy myself, actually. All this surely beats swapping an electronics board in some stupid ARA rack. I asked:

— ME: What kind of technological device are the documents talking about ?

— FINN: It was apparently a means to access the past. Not time travel exactly, but more like a remote-controlled camera and microphone which enabled people to witness and hear scenes from the past. The documents refer to the technology involved as "quantum archaeology", implying that it was somehow able to pick-up the remains of wave functions long after they have collapsed, in order to recover the traces of past events at the particulate level. This is why the AEC was involved. Many Manhattan Project people were sent here to try and understand the physics involved. Apparently they did not make much headway. In any case, understanding the device was not the main goal. Using it to fathom the roots of current events was. The cold war was on and the stakes were high. Some of the top people at the CIA and the White House figured that by having a greater insight into the past one might have an advantage in steering a course for the future. There was still something we might call a ruling class in those days and the core of its members’ education was still the classics, the humanities. As a result, the leading lights at station Philadelphia were not physicists but historians, philosophers, archaeologists ...

I must admit I was somewhat disappointed. The humanities had never been quite my thing and, although I am now ashamed to remember it, back then the idea of 1940s Harvard professors and Cambridge dons discussing history and philosophy evoked only boredom. Thus, I felt the urge to steer the conversation back to more immediate concerns.

— ME: Are we stuck here ?

— FINN: No, not at all, we can leave this place whenever we want. This is my third visit to station Philadelphia.

— ME: How long do you stay when you come here ?

— FINN: This time, about a month. On my first two visits, around a week each time.

— ME: But how do you explain your absences at Troll ?

— FINN: I do not have to. When we are here, time is stopped outside. When we leave, we reach the outside world barely a few seconds after we left it. And when we come back, it is the same. Time is stopped here, as far as we are concerned, when we are outside.

— ME: This is convenient, no doubt. But don’t you think this is a little too easy as well ? Are you sure we are not dreaming or, I don’t know, being used as guinea pigs in some mindfuck experiment ?

Finn glanced at me with a sad look on his face. He was clearly disappointed by my reaction.

— FINN: This is possible, of course, he replied after a few seconds of silence, but, so far, everything has been consistent when I come here. This place apparently obeys rules that are different from those we are used to but there are indeed rules and they appear to be consistent over time. The light is always as you see it outside. There is no night. The temperature does not change and yet the snow does not melt. There is this discontinuity in time that I just described. However, apart from that, everything works the same way here as in the outside world. Objects fall when you drop them. When you put something in a certain location, it stays there. And so on. This place does not seem less real than what we are used to.

— ME: What are you talking about ? All this sounds pretty unreal to me !

— FINN: Well, what does the word ‘real’ mean, anyway ?

Then, it was Finn’s turn to change the subject.

— FINN: Are you hungry ? he asked. We have been talking for quite some time and given the hour at which you arrived, it must be morning by now, at your clock. Care for some breakfast ?

— ME: Sure, I replied. Did you bring food from Troll ?

— FINN: No. There is plenty here. The building next door is a kind of mess hall. At the back, there is a pantry with abundant food stores in perfect condition. There is even an industrial fridge with fresh food; eggs, sausages, whole chicken ready to be roasted, and vegetables too. Whenever I take something from this fridge, it gets replenished when I leave. Upon my return, it is fully stocked again.

— ME: OK, let’s go enjoy the magic breakfast.

Finn got up and looked at me sideways. I felt bad for uttering this cheap joke. After all, this place was impressive, to say the least. Why did I feel the need to poop on it with my lame witticisms ? Of course, I could not answer this question, back then. But I was soon to discover the reason and indeed to learn more about such things than I cared to.

The breakfast was fantastic. Finn prepared eggs and bacon together with smörgås, a type of Norwegian cold-cut open sandwiches. The coffee was not bad either. While I was enjoying the food, Finn disappeared for a few minutes and came back with a folder he put on the mess-hall table next to my plate. It contained the following document:



— ME: So it is the German U-Boat that brought this device to Antarctica, right ?

— FINN: No, the Germans discovered it there. How they knew its location is not explained. The Ahnenerbe was an SS-funded research outfit that mostly performed zany "investigations" of occult stuff. Apparently, in this case, they had turned up something genuine. The British captureed the U-Boat and brought its crew back to the UK. But the device was not moved, apparently. It stayed in Antarctica where the German expedition had found it. The Philadelphia station was subsequently built around it.

— ME: What is "Bletchley Park" ?

— FINN: It was the code-breaking arm of the British intelligence apparatus during the War. A number of mathematicians, including Alan Turing, had been hired in 1939 to crack the code of the German Enigma machine. They were quite sucessful, throughout the war.

— ME: Why was the U-Boat crew interrogated there ?

— FINN: I don't know. Probably because the whole thing looked like something that needed deciphering, I guess. Also, Bletchley Park was one of the most highly secured places in the UK at the time.

— ME: So, the initial lead for all this came from the Brits, eh ? And before them the Germans ...

— FINN: It was like this for pretty much everything in that period. The British had invented Radar, the jet engine, the Enigma code-breaking techniques, and they were the first to tackle the Atomic Bomb development. World War II saw a huge technology transfer from the UK to the US.

— ME: What happened after that memo ? What did this ‘MOCKINGBIRD committee’ decide to do ?

Finn explained that, apparently, ‘MOCKINGBIRD’ was just a cover name for an informal group of advisers to Presidents Roosevelt and Truman. It included James Conant, the president of Harvard University, Vannevar Bush, who had overseen the setting up of the Manhattan Project and extensively interacted with the British Tizard Mission, William Donovan, the head of OSS (predecessor of the CIA) and maybe Bernard Baruch, a close confidante of Roosevelt. Meetings took place in the Oval Office. The decision to create a base in Antarctica was taken quite quickly after the DRUMBEAT report was received, probably in June or July 1945.

Apparently, Conant had argued forcefully for the inclusion into the Philadelphia project of most of the British team which had started to analyze the Ahnenerbe material. He insisted they should be treated on an equal footing with the OSS (later CIA), Manhattan project (later AEC) and Naval Intelligence contingents. The cover for the setting-up of station Philadelphia was to be Operation HIGHJUMP, a major fleet exercise cum scientific expedition to Antarctica which was to take place in early 1946. Eventually, HIGHJUMP was delayed by a few months due to the tying up of US Navy assets for the repatriation of GIs from Europe and the Pacific. As a result, the construction of station Philadelphia started in August of 1946. Its first phase was completed in October and it started operating the following month.

In the material read by Finn so far, there was no description of the device used. Apparently, a few months had been required to master its operation, although the details of how this learning process took place were not given either. After the initial discovery phase, time spent using the device was allocated to various “experiments”, conducted by different sections of the Philadelphia team. Each experiment was then documented in a series of reports. As one would expect, time allocation was a contentious issue and it crystallized the opposing points of view held by the various team members about what the objectives of the project should be. From the start, there was a sharp opposition between what Alan Turing called the “Boffins” and the “Sleuths” in his personal logbook. The “Sleuths” were officers from MI6, OSS and US Naval Intelligence. Their focus was on the recent past which, they felt, would yield valuable intelligence, notably on how the leadership of the USSR functioned. Also, a determined faction among them advocated for the digging up of embarrassing personal stories about members of the Soviet Politburo, with the intent to plant these tales as apparent anonymous reports to the NKVD/KGB. The goal was to increase the paranoia of the Soviet leadership and induce them to turn on each other. Naturally, this kind of idea infuriated the “Boffins”, the members of the Philadelphia team hailing from Academia, who could not fathom how anyone could dream of using the device for anything but solving the most fundamental problems of humanity. Fortunately, there were arbiters between the two groups: James Conant, Vannevar Bush and John Cockroft, who had replaced Henry Tizard as the main scientific liaison between the US and UK governments. These, A. Turing called “the adults”, in his logbook.

After a number of heated meetings held in early 1947, the “adults” managed to broker a compromise between the “Boffins” and the “Sleuths”. Overall, the “Sleuths” would get 60% of the total device time, with the “tabloids”, another of Turing's nicknames, getting 20% within that figure. The “Boffins”, for their part, had to do with 40%, but with a mandate that left them a lot of leeway: “Determine why the Communist ideology enjoys such high prestige and appeal within Western Culture”. The wording of the objective given to the “Boffins” was a master stroke on the part of the “adults”. On the face of it, this was a vindication of the Boffin’s yearning for something “fundamental”. But it was also a jab at the arrogance of Boffin culture. As a matter of fact, many of them actually did hold Communism, or at least its underlying philosophy, in high regard. This was well known and was a constant bone of contention with the sleuths when it came to security clearance matters and the like. Whith this compromise settlement, Conant, Bush and Cockroft, despite their own Boffin pedigree, had displayed Solomon-like wisdom and impartiality. They had managed to dampen the potentially excessive self-confidence of their peers, by attracting everyone’s attention to a potential flaw in their ethos, while directing their energies towards something that even the sleuths considered actually useful.

I looked at my watch and realized Finn and I had been talking for a whole day. After I had finished my breakfast, we had walked back to the office where Finn had been showing documents to me and explaining their contents for 10 hours straight. He was obviously completely absorbed in all this and I was starting to share his fascination. However, for the moment, I mostly felt exhaustion fall on me like a ton of bricks. After a quick bite at the mess hall, Finn led me to a dormitory building where the windows were closed with heavy curtains blocking the invariably bright outside light. I crashed onto one of the beds and fell asleep within a few seconds.

 

[K9Otaku]

Chapter 2 – Socrates

The following morning, I went to the mess-hall, fixed myself some breakfast and headed to the office. It was empty. Finn was nowhere to be found, probably sleeping. I sat at one of the desks and pulled a few binders from the filing cabinets. Finn had explained the filing system to me the previous day. Those binders whose label started with an X contained the experiment reports, those with an L, the personal logbooks, those with a C the general correspondence. I pulled binder X-47/01 which contained the documentation of the first experiment undertaken by the Boffins after the settlement of early 1947. While I was reading it, I also consulted binders L-47/01 to L-47/05 to get a sense of the context. All personnel at station Philadelphia were supposed to fill-in a personal logbook on a daily basis. It was understood that these documents were to remain sealed until their authors died or gave explicit permission to make them available. They were meant for posterity and team members were encouraged to use them to record their innermost feelings and thoughts.

The core of the Boffin team was composed of the following members:

- Alan Turing, mathematician (Bletchley Park/Cambridge)

- Ludwig Wittgenstein, philosopher (Cambridge)

- Joseph Brady, psychologist (Walter Reed Army Institute of Research)

- Wolfram von Soden, assyriologist (Friedrich Wilhelm University, Berlin)

- Willard Van Orman Quine, philosopher (Harvard)

- Thomas Kuhn, philosopher (Harvard)

- Adam Ulam, historian (Harvard)

- Arthur M. Schlesinger Sr., historian (Harvard)

- Julius R. Oppenheimer, physicist (Harvard/Cambridge/Manhattan Project)

- Satyendra Nath Bose, physicist (University of Calcutta)

There was no logic in the composition of this group other than personal acquaintance. Given the secrecy of the project, James Conant and John Cockroft had simply selected the people they knew best, and trusted most, in their respective countries. A few men had also been recommended by other members of the team like Wittgenstein (recommended by Turing) and Bose (by Oppenheimer). Von Soden was part of the team because he belonged to the captured crew of U-843 and had established a rapport with Turing and Wittgenstein while in captivity at Bletchley Park. A number of remarks, scattered among various logbooks, made it clear that most members in the team were convinced that Turing had hired Wittgenstein because he was in love with him. Kuhn, for his part, was a personal protégé of Conant.

Experiment No. 1 was an exploration of Classical Greece, with a special focus on Athens at the time of Socrates and Plato. As indicated in the X-47/01 binder, the rationale behind this choice was this: because Marxism was, from its origin, rooted in the Western philosophical tradition, it made sense to go back to the foundational events of this tradition, in ancient Greece. In order to understand and translate the ancient Greek Language which was picked up by the device, a team of several 30-something classics scholars from Cambridge and University College London had been assembled by John Cockroft on the advice of Sir Edward Howard Marsh, a close friend of Winston Churchill.

The reading of the personal logbooks revealed that, as the experiment progressed, most of the team members became increasingly distraught by what they were uncovering. All of them, including the scientists, had a strong foundation in the classics, as was the rule for every University-educated person at the time. This classical education naturally led them to assume that Athens, and especially the entourage of Plato and Socrates, was the pinnacle of virtue, wisdom and intellectual acumen. But this is not at all how things looked as direct observations of the past started pouring in. The picture that emerged was one of a hotbed of jealousy, envy, pettiness and resentment.

The social milieu in which Socrates and Plato interacted was mostly composed of wealthy upper-class Athenians. Within that milieu, many individuals were known by name to the Boffin team members because they were mentioned in the Platonic dialogues and other historical sources. Naturally, these individuals were observed in great detail during the course of the experiment. Almost all of them turned out to be motivated by the most obsessive form of social conceit. According to their worldview, mankind was divided into two categories, the men of no account (the kakoi in Greek) and the superior people (the agathoi). Most of the population of Athens, and indeed of all Greece, were kakoi, according to them, and, as such, worthy of nothing but scorn and condescension. Then there were the agathoi, the happy few. However, the criteria determining who was part of this select group were quite elusive. At the time of Socrates and Plato, the political constitution of Athens was democratic. All institutional differences between aristocrats and commoners had been abolished. Naturally, some families retained an aura of nobility but this aura was no longer anchored in any kind of legal definition. Hence many were the members of the aristocratic milieu who longed after a definition of social superiority that would not longer be dependent on the vagaries of political life. But what was it going to be ? Manners ? "Virtues" (whatever that meant) ? There was no general agreement. As a result, all the members of Socrates’ and Plato’s circle lived in perpetual terror of not being superior enough to be counted among the agathoi. What if someone suddenly exposed whatever secret flaws they might have and caused them to be called kakoi ?

Driven by this well concealed but perennial anxiety, well-to-do Athenians were constantly engaged in the most vicious forms of gossip targeted at each other. As the proverb says: the best form of defense is the offense. However, they were also simultaneously, and secretly, worshiping the very people they were bad-mouthing. All of them were possessed of a burning desire to be invited to the parties (symposia, i.e. drinking feasts) thrown by the most fashionable people of the day while secretly plotting to topple them from their elevated position. In many ways, upper-class Athens in the late Vth century looked like a giant High School, with its cliques, its heavy-drinking parties, its excomunications and its betrayals

Athens political life was constantly marred by bizarre plots and egregious accusations against successful generals or administrators. What the Boffin team’s observations was revealing day after day was that the motivation for these flare-ups was generally nothing more than the resentment of people who had not been invited to a party they craved to attend, or other perceived slights of the same nature. At times, like during the so-called “30 tyrants” episode of 404-403 BC, the universal feelings of resentment reached such an intensity that they exploded into an orgy of political murders, expropriations and general lawlessness. All the 30 tyrants were members of the upper class and most of their victims were too. Most of the 30 were part of Socrates and Plato’s circle or knew people who were.

As a general rule, the role of Socrates within Athenian elite circles was that of a kind of court jester whose main task was to dampen the anxiety of his fashionable hosts by giving them reasons to believe that they were indeed genuine agathoi. Socrates was not of noble birth. As the son of a stonemason, he would not normally have been invited to the social gatherings of the elite. But his silver tongue had earned him a following among certain members of the upper class. He was not a “teacher” in the traditional sense, but rather a hanger on, a flatterer.

One day, in June 1947, Turing and Oppenheimer were observing Socrates in an animated discussion with Agathon, the main character of one of Plato’s dialogues. The object of the discussion was a feast that was to take place at Agathon's house the next day and at which Socrates was to be present. As they were reading the typed translation of the exchange, Oppenheimer and Turing were horrified to discover that Socrates charged a fee for his services and that he and the party's host were haggling over the price. Socrates was a paid entertainer; a sort of late-night talk-show host for the upper crust.

From this point onward, the experiment focused almost exclusively on what Socrates was actually saying, and on Plato’s understanding of it. One day, in August 1947, the following exchange was recorded:

- SOCRATES: Truth is the mark of the agathoi. While the kakoi stumble in obscurity, relying as they do on the deceitful senses, the agathoi are guided by the unchanging purity of the heavenly forms. The only genuine gnosis (knowledge) lies in the grasping of these pure forms and only this gnosis makes one worthy to be counted among the agathoi.

- PLATO: The forms you speak of, Socrates, are those that are made manifest by the tale you told us the other day about people being chained inside a cave. Is it not ?

- SOCRATES: Indeed, this is what they are, my young friend.

- PLATO: And the Truth is only to be found in these forms. Am I correct ?

- SOCRATES: That is so. Gnosis (knowledge) of the Truth lies in the perfectly exact apprehension of these forms within one’s soul. This is what sets apart the souls of the agathoi from those of the kakoi.

This exchange was crucial because it never appeared in any of the known Platonic dialogues. It revealed that Socrates had fashioned a theory of Truth which turned it into a form of luxury good for elite consumption. Naturally, Plato’s and Socrates’ social circle embraced this theory with an immense sense of relief. At last there was a way to be reassured that one was indeed part of the agathoi. Since the pure forms were eternal, just like the soul, One’s membership in this most exclusive of clubs was guaranteed for ever ! What a genius idea. Bravo Socrates ! Bravo ! Of course, this did not solve anything, really. As soon as Socrates views on truth and knowledge started to spread, people began to bicker about what exactly these pure forms might be and how one could have access to them. The bitterness and the vitriolic gossip were back with a vengeance. Yet, Socrates’ theory did not lose its appeal. It was simply too good, too tempting, to be given up.

From September 1947 onward, the Socrates experiment had winded down. Over the next few months, a detailed report was written. Most of it was signed collectively by the team but it also included some annexes penned by individual members. Here are excerpts from two of these:

Everyone knows that there is no such thing as Truth or Knowledge. At least since Kant has this been evident. Only charlatans like Hegel and his merry little band of followers have been shameless enough to continue pretending otherwise. Who on Earth could still be fooled by such baloney ? Well, to be honest, I was. The very word “truth” is so tantalizing ! I can still feel it pull at my brain like a giant magnet. I was a deceitful priest of the Truth too, in my time. Now, with what we have seen, will we be cured ?​

Ludwig Wittgenstein, 9 October 1947​

It has been noticed already by a number of commentators that Plato’s political thought has uncomfortable similarities with totalitarianism. In the dialog titled “the Republic”, Plato presents what he considers to be the ideal system of government: a small group of unelected but “enlightened” philosophers enjoying absolute power and ruling selflessly for the benefit of the community. It is hard to miss the parallel with the idea that the Communist Party must be the “vanguard of the Proletariat”. Did Marxism consciously emulate Plato ? Not explicitly, and probably not consciously. But the similarities just noted can hardly be a coincidence, given the quasi-religious devotion to “Philosophy” which permeates most forms of left-wing thinking.​

Communists have always fancied themselves as thinkers; practical philosophers armed with the infallible intellectual tools of Marx’s scientific materialism. Of course, they loudly dismiss Platonic forms as the worst kind of childishly idealistic thinking (in their mouths, and under their pen, this term is the worst possible insult). However, by endorsing Hegel’s vision of Science approaching absolute truth ever more closely as “progress” marches on, they subscribe to a doctrine which possesses exactly the same psychological implications as the old Platonic system: the potential to create an elite of the Spirit.​

While Socrates appears to have worked exclusively for the benefit of Athens’ elite, Marxism targets the alienated European educated lower-middle class. Being a member of this stratum in contemporary society implies the humble acceptance of one’s own existence as a minute cog in one or the other of the modern titanic bureaucratic machines (financial institutions, large corporations, government, etc.) While those with strong spiritual roots may be content with such a destiny, rebellion is the lot of the countless educated young men of middling social standing who are now adrift in a world increasingly vacated by the dogma of Christianity (and Judaism).​

Some have already pointed out that Communism may be a form of snobbery; a way for the educated young men just mentioned, to take revenge on those they envy. Karl Marx, the Prometheus/Socrates of our time, offers them the opportunity to become members of a new elite club destined (supposedly) to take the lead in the new social order. Marx, like Socrates, offers knowledge as the means to join the elect. The certainties of dialectic materialism, like the Platonic forms, are reckoned to give access to the absolute truth. And what is “absolute truth” (in the guise of Hegelian “absolute knowing”) if not the most potent source of psychological self-righteous legitimation ?​

Outwardly reviling what one in fact adores is a common trait of all types of snobbery. Like the upper-class Athenians we have seen pouring vitriol on prominent members of their own milieu only to run to their feasts, if invited, Communists loudly disparage the “Bourgeois” ruling class of the Western World only to imitate it as soon as they get the chance. Many have noted the Bourgeois turn of the Soviet regime from the 1930s onward. Neoclassical skyscrapers, comfortable “apparatchik” apartment blocks and the most unimaginative kind of academic painting style (under the name of “Socialist Realism”) have replaced the modernist aesthetic of the early years after the revolution. The successful Communist Party of Russia has given birth to a new bourgeois class, with the same tastes as the old one, while simultaneously maintaining its anti-bourgeois rhetoric.​

Two contexts where snobbery is the driving factor; two cases where the promise of absolute truth is made out to be the ticket to an exclusive elite club. Is this the last word on what makes Communism appealing to the modern man ? Certainly not. But it probably indicates a fruitful direction for future research.​

Adam Ulam, 17 October 1947​

Ulam was a young PhD graduate in History from Harvard. As a Polish Jew, he had had direct experience of the two main forms of XXth century totalitarianism and was already considered, in the late 40s, as one of the foremost authorities on the history of the Socialist movement and of the Soviet Union. During his time at Station Philadelphia, he had struck up an unlikely friendship with a 40 year old OSS/CIA operative from Wisconsin, Lamar Gunderson, who had been a G-man before he enlisted and joined the "Company" during the War. Gunderson had told Ulam that he had conducted surveillance of Communist sympathizers during his time in the FBI. Upon learning this, Ulam showed him some of the Socrates experiment material, as well as his own conclusions regarding a possible parallel with Communism. Having read this material, Gunderson submitted a short piece of his own, which was added to the final report:

During my time in the FBI, conducting surveillance on Communist sympathizer organizations, I was always struck by the resemblance between these tiny Marxist outfits and ladies clubs. Ladies are always gossiping about other ladies in their town. Yet, when one of these very ladies throws some party, others run to it, if they are invited. But if they are not, they are so mortally wounded in their pride that they are ready to launch themselves into the most devious plots one can imagine to exact their revenge. Most of the material we were collecting on these Communist front organizations, through eavesdropping or mail interception, was of a similar nature. Their members spent nearly all their time denouncing each other in the most vicious terms yet they never failed to attend each other’s pompously named “conferences”, “workshops” or “sessions”. Did anything concrete ever came of all this ? Generally, no ! But this did not seem to bother them. Despite their constant calls to “action”, it was obvious that their internal bickering was the real point of their existence.​

Lamar Gunderson, 12 November 1947​

As I was finishing the report on the Socrates experiment, Finn showed up.

— ME: Hey ! How are you ? Were you sleeping ?

— FINN: Yes, for a while, Finn replied, then I spent a few days at Troll.

— ME: A few days ?! ...

— FINN: I told you that time stops when we leave this place, remember ? From your perspective, my trip to Troll lasted less than half an hour, the time it takes to reach the edge of Station Philadelphia on foot and to come back. From my perspective, it lasted 3 days. I brought some fresh clothes and a few items I thought might come in handy, like my laptop.

— ME: Oh, OK, yeah, it makes sense. I have been reading the Socrates experiment material that you showed me yesterday, but there are things that I don’t get.

— FINN: Like what ?

— ME: Well, first of all, where is their so-called "device" now ? Is it here somewhere ?

— FINN: No, I don't think so. During my second stay here I explored all the buildings of Station Philadeliphia. I found all sorts of things; science labs, workshops, dormitories, more offices with filing cabinets full of binders plus all the infrastructure needed to make the base habitable, like electricity, heating and so on. But I did not see anything that could possibly be "the device". One of the buildings has a large central space, two stories in height, where it might have been housed, but the place is empty.

— ME: Bummer ...

— FINN: Actually, reading the contents of the binders is probably more interesting than using the device ourselves. Neither of us speaks ancient Greek or any other ancient language and we are not professional historians or philosophers. At Station Philadelphia in the 40s they had gathered all the talents and the skills needed to make the best use of the device.

— ME: I guess ... Yet, it would have been fun to see the face of Socrates and catch him picking his nose or something like that.

— FINN: Sure, but we would have grown tired of doing that sort of thing pretty quickly, don't you think ? By reading the binders we have direct access to material that was never published or known to anyone but the protagonists themselves, like this dialogue between Socrates and a young Plato where they discuss how gnosis separates the agathoi from the rest. The comments by Wittgenstein, Ulam, etc. are also original material that you can't find anywhere else. Being able to read all this is pretty amazing.

— ME: Sure. Yet some of the comments are quite weird. This Gunderson guy, for example, I don’t see what his sexist remarks about ladies clubs have to do with Socrates, or Truth and the rest. What is his point ?

— FINN: Well, regarding the sexist remarks, you have to take into account the atmosphere of the era. The kind of things Gunderson says were absolutely standard fare at the time. His piece serves to highlight that the ideas of truth and knowledge may be motivated by a form of snobbery.

— ME: But what does it have to do with women ?

— FINN: The desire to belong to an exclusive social scene has always been more in evidence among women than men, especially in a country like the US where egalitarianism is supposed to be the norm. In pre-War America, no form of outward snobbery was considered acceptable among men. However, it was more or less tolerated among women, provided it was not completely for real, hence Gunderson’s allusion to Women’s clubs. In European countries, the kind of behavior Gunderson describes was much more overt and was not at all limited to women, although it often tended to revolve around them because of their role in running a salon or throwing parties. Have you read anything by Marcel Proust ?

— ME: No. But all this makes me think about High School, with the cliques, the Jocks, the Cheerleaders and all the rest. Is this what it is ?

— FINN: Yes, it is indeed comparable.

— ME: OK, but I still do not see what all this has to to with truth and knowledge. The social milieu of Socrates and Plato might have been full of the worst kind of snobs, but why would that imply that their ideas about truth and knowledge should be false ?

— FINN: Because Socrates audience and his theory are not two independent phenomena. What the Socrates experiment revealed is that the account of truth and knowledge transmitted to us by Plato was not the result of some disinterested quest for wisdom, as we usually tend to think, but was in fact tailor-made to please the audience of someone who turned out to be more of a talk-show host than a philosopher.

— ME: Say again.

— FINN: The members of the Athenian upper class wanted to think of themselves as a cut above the rest. But they were being assailed by doubt because, in a democratic society like Athens, there were no universally recognized cultural norms which could be used to justify elitist pretensions (there was no "nobility" per se). Then Socrates comes along and delivers to them exactly what they crave: a theory of knowledge rooted in an account of truth understood as an absolute and therefore independent of culture and human opinion. Since, in antiquity, only members of upper class had access to higher education in the form of private tutoring by philosophers, the goal is achieved. Since they are the only ones who have access to the kind of Truth with a big “T” that Socrates is talking about, well-to-do Athenians now had a way to justify their own feelings of superiority, at least in their own eyes.

— ME: But why would non-elite Athenians accept this claim ?

— FINN: That is not the point. We are not talking about a political or even a social strategy here. What Socrates is delivering to the Athenian upper class is nothing but a psychological remedy, a way to assuage its anxiety about itself.

— ME: But why would that make the theory incorrect ?

— FINN: Well, do you think that a theory solely designed to be a kind of Valium against upper class social angst has much chance to give an accurate picture of what we want to say when we use the words “truth” or “knowledge” in situations which matter, like science or engineering ?

— ME: I suppose not. But then what are knowledge and truth if they are not what Plato says ? Does all this mean that there is no such thing as objective truth ?

— FINN: This is exactly what the Philadelphia station Boffins were asking themselves when they had finished with the Socrates experiment. The idea of objective truth was a hot topic at the time. Almost no one, except a few people like Wittgenstein or Kuhn, was ready to let go of it completely. As a result, you will see that the whole team was frantically trying to get a grip on this question as they were considering what the next steps after the Socrates experiment should be. Most of the relevant material is in binder X-47/02 and X-47/03. There are also interesting things in the correspondence binders.

— ME: OK, I will read them, I said, yawning and stretching my arms and legs. But not now. I feel filthy. I have not showered nor changed clothes since I arrived here. I think I will go back to Amundsen-Scott and return here with what I need for a longer stay.

— FINN: Very well, see you in ½ an hour.

 

[K9Otaku]

Chapter 3 – Eridu (part 1 of 2)

When I came back, Finn was sitting at the same place in the office. “25 minutes! You walk fast”, he said. From my perspective, I had been absent for two days. When I had exited the station Philadelphia area, I had found the snowmobile where I had left it, in pitch darkness. Fortunately, I had borrowed a flashlight from Finn before I left. I had gone on performing the maintenance task I was supposed to and headed back to Amundsen-Scott. According to the clocks there, I had been out for an hour and a half. While at the station, I pondered whether I should talk about what had happened to anyone, but I quickly decided against it. Nobody would have believed me and I would have been shipped back on the next sanitary flight, headed for a psych ward. I was exhausted, now that the Adrenalin had worn off, and slept for 15 hours straight. I was no longer on night duty so I could take it easy for a little while. When I felt rested, I packed a bag and waited for an opportunity to sneak out. Peter, my fellow RA from the University of Wisconsin, was supposed to be on duty that night but was apparently not feeling like it, so I offered to take his place. After midnight, I logged a bogus maintenance entry into the computer and headed out. Now, there I was, back into the bubble that was station Philadelphia.

After a little small talk with Finn, I started reading binder X-47/02. The first document it contained was the minutes of a debate that had occurred after the end of the Socrates experiment about the direction the next experiments should take. Although these minutes were written in formal language, it was obvious that the debate had been quite heated. One side of it was led by Wittgenstein, Kuhn and Ulam. According to them, the Socrates experiment had demonstrated quite clearly that the idea of objective truth is poisonous, in and of itself. They held that the team should now concentrate on the late XVIIIth century, to observe how this idea had been resurrected by Hegel and his followers, despite Kant’s conclusive remarks on the impossibility of knowing the “things in themselves”. This, they thought, would show how this resurrection had led to the philosophical seduction that Communism represents today. The other side of the debate, led by Quine, Oppenheimer and Turing, argued that the jury was still out on the idea of truth and that the team should instead focus on the XVIIth century in order to observe how the debate between Empiricism and Rationalism had played out. Wittgenstein is recorded as saying:

Why are we philosophers so addicted to navel-gazing ? We know well enough how the debate between Empiricists and Rationalists unfolded. We know that Kant eventually ended it in favor of Empiricism, although he slightly disguised his position by clothing it in rationalist jargon in order to facilitate its adoption. The problem of philosophy is that it can all too easily veer off from reality and degenerate into mental Onanism. We should look at what goes on in society at large in order to pinpoint how philosophy sometimes influences it, for better or worse, not at how philosophers bicker between themselves.​

I suspected that the word “Onanism” meant “masturbation”, but I was not absolutely sure. A quick peek into the dictionary confirmed it. From the contents of his personal logbook, it was evident that Alan Turing felt personally insulted by Wittgenstein’s remarks. He found terms like “Navel-gazing” and “Onanism” to be crude and unnecessarily abrasive. However, he did not publicly express his misgivings about the form in which Wittgenstein’s arguments were couched and he simply stuck to his guns, maintaining his preference for a focus on the XVIIth century. The debate was at an impasse and dragged on for another week or so without much progress. The two sides were now entrenched on their positions.

Then, Wolfram von Soden, who had been mostly silent until then, proposed an alternative. “We should go back to Eridu, in 4000 BC., the place where it all started”. He was talking about the ancient city located along the Euphrates in Southern Iraq. This location was mentioned in a number of Sumerian sources as the place where the Mesopotamian civilization, the oldest in the world, had started. The site was then under excavation by Iraqi archaeologist Fuad Safar and von Soden had heard of some interesting finds through his contacts in the Assyriological community. His argument was that, by focusing on what he called “recent” history (for an Assyriologist, anything after 500 BC. is “recent”), the team was allowing its vision to be obscured by the clutter of cultural surface phenomena generated by long-term accretion. Focusing instead on a very old and technically “brand new” civilization (Eridu being the first city ever, its culture was indeed the first to deserve the label “civilization”) he thought that there would be far fewer layers of accumulated cultural elaboration to sift through and that the picture would thus be easier to discern. This was a suggestion that was acceptable to both sides and so it was easily adopted. Experiment No. 2 was named "the Eridu Experiment".

Von Soden was tasked with the composition of the specialist sub-team which would perform the translation of the Sumerian language that would be heard through the device. This would not be an easy task. In the late 1940s, Classical Sumerian was still not completely understood and what was spoken at Eridu in 4000 BC., nearly 1500 years before the earliest written attestations of Classical Sumerian, would undoubtedly be a substantially different dialect. At his request, Benno Landsberger, von Soden’s erstwhile mentor, was whisked away from his East Berlin apartment by MI6 operatives, in the wee hours of a foggy day in November 1947, and brought straight to McMurdo station and then to station Philadelphia on a specially charted USAF YB-36, the only plane then able to complete the flight from Berlin without refueling. Upon his arrival, the old Assyriology professor started berating his former student for making him endure such an exhausting trip at his age. However, when he was made aware of what was going on at station Philadelphia, his mood changed instantly. The two German scholars then drafted a list of ten other specialists of ancient Sumerian that they thought were best suited for the task at hand. Less than a week later, the team was ready to start work on the Eridu Experiment.

Initially, the progress was slow. The Sumerian decipherment team first had to “calibrate” its understanding of spoken Sumerian by establishing a baseline around the middle of the 3rd millennium BC., the earliest date for which known written sources were reasonably abundant. To that end, several scribal schools from Larsa and Nippur were observed for a number of weeks. Thereafter, the team worked backwards, in increments of 100 to 150 years in order update its understanding of spoken Sumerian as it evolved through time. Around mid-December 1947, this process was advanced enough to start observing the city of Eridu during its foundational period, around 4000 BC.

Until about 4200 BC., Eridu is nothing more than a large village, with a population of around six to seven hundred inhabitants. In the following centuries, it will experience a period of sustained growth and reach a population of around 15 000 in 3700 BC. However, in 4200 BC., nothing distinguishes it from the many other Neolithic villages dotting lower Mesopotamia and the rest of the Fertile Crescent. Like other such villages, Eridu is ruled by the members of a family of hereditary chiefs known as the Alulim. This extended family provides protection services to the village and to a few neighboring hamlets in exchange for a fee. This fee is called a “gift” in Sumerian, but it has all the hallmarks of a tax. Since there is no monetary unit, its amount is specified in kind. This amount is quite meticulously determined according to the size of each family’s land holdings and the crops they grow. Its collection is performed by a group of 15 to 20 clerks who are servants of the Alulim family. These clerks use a system of accounting in which various kinds of agricultural goods are represented by fired clay tokens of different shapes (A cone for a measure of grain, a cylinder for a jar of oil, etc.). Three or four of the accountants/tax-collectors are called En in Sumerian, a word which, at this point in time, means “foreman” or “supervisor”. The hub of Eridu’s tax system, similar in all respects to what is found at the time in many other Middle-Eastern villages, is the Alulim household. It receives agricultural goods from around 150 family units totaling around 1000 people. It pays out daily or weekly food rations to around 20 families, mostly those of the Alulim dependents who are tasked with providing the necessary muscle to protect the village against raiders and marauders. In times of famine, the reserves kept in the Alulim granaries may also be used to provide emergency rations to the neediest residents.

Once they had fine-tuned their mastery of 4th Millennium spoken Sumerian, the Philadelphia team started to look for a break in the history of Eridu; a foundational event which might explain the exceptional journey that the place was about to embark on. While in 4200 BC. Eridu was ruled by a village chief, in 3700 BC, at its peak, it was headed by a committee of elders who were also the chief priests of Enki, the city’s main god. How was the transition effected from chiefdom to theocratic Republic ? This was the question which the team was trying to answer first.

In January 1948, a breakthrough was made. The team observed that, in 4172 BC., the Alulim chief who was then in power, died. However, none of the customary funeral ceremonies were observed in the following days. What had happened ? The team then started following the behavior of the En, the chief servants and accountants of the Alulim family, before and after the death of the chief. After a few attempts, they located the four En sitting on the floor of a room at the back of the Alulim granaries and talking together. The meeting was taking place on the morning of the chief’s death. This is the transcript of the exchange, as it was recorded by von Soden's translators:

— EN No. 1: The master is not dead.

— EN No. 2: But he is in his bed and not breathing.

— EN No. 1: He is not dead. He will live for ever.

[At this point there is a long pause: 2 minutes and 27 seconds during which nobody talks and they all remain motionless]

— EN No. 2: He is not dead. He will live for ever.

— EN No. 3: He is not dead. He will live for ever.

— EN No. 4: He is not dead. He will live for ever.

The Alulim chief who had just died was exceptionally old; well over 90. As a result, none of his immediate family members were alive. He had also been bedridden for the last 7 years, and the four En were the only people who saw him on a daily basis. They washed him, fed him, asked him for instructions and took care of his every need. The En were also older men, in their 60s and 70s. The Alulim generally acquired their servants as a compensation for unpaid debts. When a family was unable to deliver the specified “gift” to the Alulim granary, it was customary to give a child instead, generally between the ages of 6 and 12. These children were then fed and educated by the older servants of the Alulim household and would eventually become servants themselves. The oldest and most capable of them would then become En whenever one of these died.

What the four En seated in this backroom in Eridu had achieved was a bloodless and silent revolution. They had transitioned the political regime of the village from a chiefdom to a republic without making a sound. For a few weeks after the event, nothing out of the ordinary happened. Nobody had noticed any change as the four En went about their daily business. One day after the old chief had died, his body was buried under the rammed earth floor of his bedroom and a stylized plaster effigy of him was fashioned by one of the En, as was customary in such circumstances. However, it was not shown to anyone just yet.

A month and a half after the chief had died, a new event was observed. The four En had gathered all the Alulim servants in the ancestor room. Normally, this room would have contained plaster effigies of all the previous Alulim chiefs and of some of their relatives and wives. However, before the meeting, the En had carted away all the older effigies into a storage room and replaced them with a single one: the new plaster statue of the recently deceased chief. When all the servants had entered the ancestor room and been seated on the floor, this is what transpired, according to the Eridu experiment report:

— EN No. 1: The master is alive. Behold him. (gesturing towards the plaster effigy)

— EN No. 2: Every day, we bathe him and clothe him and feed him.

— EN No. 3: He is happy with our service and your service.

— EN No. 4: Serve him faithfully and he will reward you like he always did.

— EN No. 1: Behold, he will not die. He will live for ever. This will be for ever and ever.

[pause for 3 minutes and 17 seconds. Nobody speaks or moves]

— SERVANT No. 1: The master is alive.

— SERVANT No. 2: He will live for ever.

— ALL SERVANTS TOGETHER: The master is alive. He will live for ever.

Had the servants realized that a political change had taken place and were they assenting to it ? Did they believe that the Alulim chief was actually alive inside his plaster effigy ? The latter belief was quite widespread and this is why plaster effigies of ancestors were kept by leading families. However, it was impossible to know what the servants thought of what had just happened. The Philadelphia station device could record sound and image but it could not read minds. However, the agreement among the Alulim servants to support the new order of things seems to have been fairly strong as the daily routine of the household went on unchanged.

However, not everything went so smoothly and there was one serious challenge. A few months after the death of the old chief, one of his great-nephews showed up at the house and asked to see him. He was turned away by one of the En who told him that his great uncle did not want to see him. A few days later, he showed up again, accompanied this time by one of the village’s shamans. Both men demanded to be let in the ancestor room so that the shaman could perform the seasonal propitiating rituals meant to coax the Alulim ancestors into cooperating with a local spirit called the Abzu (the embodiment of the lake on the shore of which Eridu stood). The punctual performance of these rituals was considered vital for the welfare of the village, the growth of crops, the fertility of women and beasts, etc. The En refused to let the Shaman and the Alulim relative inside, and a shouting match ensued. Some of the villagers gathered to see what was happening but nothing came of the confrontation. After a few hours of back and forth invective, everybody dispersed.

The challenge from the Shaman was a serious one. If left unchecked it could fracture the village and lead to disaster for the En. As a result, they decided to act swiftly and decisively. The En were the ones who paid out the daily food ration to the village warriors. Therefore, they were quite confident that they could count on their support. In the evening, the four En invited the oldest Shaman of the village, ostensibly to conduct the delayed Abzu ceremony. Once he had entered the house, the En and a few junior servants seized him, tied him up and dragged him to the ancestor room. There, after having repeated the mantra: “The master is alive. He will live for ever”, the oldest of the En addressed the Shaman thus:

— EN No. 1: Will you serve the master? If you do, you will be En together with us in this house.

— SHAMAN: ABZU is stronger than your master.

— EN No. 1: The master fought with the ABZU and he bested him. Now the ABZU is the master’s servant with us. Do you want to serve the master as the ABZU now does?

[Pause: 1 minute 49 seconds]

— SHAMAN: I will serve the master as the ABZU does. I will be En alongside you.

That night, the En’s gamble regarding the the village guards' support proved correct. On the En’s orders, the warriors rounded up the two other shamans who lived in the village, together with their households, beat them up, and escorted them to a point 10 km upstream of the village on the bank of the Euphrates. There they were freed with stern warnings not to come back. They never did and were never heard of again. A few days later, The En organized a feast to which all the village was invited. The people gorged on goat meat and fish, guzzled down beer and danced the usual dances around the bonfires. There was much anticipation as the reason for the feast had not yet been announced. At one point, as the revelry was starting to die down, the four En came forward and motioned the crowd to be silent and sit down. Then, before the whole seated village, the older shaman emerged from the Alulim house, wearing his full ceremonial regalia. He recited the following composition:

ABZU was the son of Heaven (An) and Earth (Ki)
ABZU was Fresh Water and he married Salt Water (TIAMAT)
ABZU and TIAMAT had many sons and Daughters

They were Rambunctious and made noise as they played
ABZU was annoyed at the noise and he complained to TIAMAT
“With the noise I cannot sleep. Make the noise stop
Then Tiamat told her secret lover KINGU:

“Kill the children who annoy father ABZU. I want it.
But ALULIM caught wind of this through his friend ISIMUD
He challenged ABZU to a fight. But ABZU was afraid
Living in the water for so long he was weak

So he ran away and so did KINGU and TIAMAT
Then ALULIM caught ABZU and he bound him tight
Now ABZU is the servant of ALULIM
And the En of the house keep him bound

So that the water will never leave Eridu

— EN No. 1: Long live the master ALULIM

— EN No. 2: He has bested ABZU to keep the waters

— EN No. 3: The master is lord over many waters

— EN No. 4: He will live forever

— THE FOUR EN AND THE SHAMAN TOGETHER: The master ALULIM is lord over many waters. He will live for ever.

The villagers had never heard such outlandish praise being lavished on the village chief before. However, praising the chief was routine in Neolithic village culture. As a result, most of the residents of Eridu probably thought that the En and the Shaman had just decided on this occasion to be a little more sycophantic than usual. They were certainly far from realizing that their leadership had just effected one of the most significant political/religious reforms of all time.

The undying Alulim master that the En and the Shaman had just created was destined to become the first full-fledged god in human history. Before this event, there were ancestors and spirits, which could be wooed by shamans for certain practical purposes, but there were no real gods. Spirits were generally associated to animals or to natural forces. However they were not imagined as having a human form. Ancestors, for their part, were not powerful enough to be considered gods in the full sense either. There were too many of them, for one thing. By contrast, the undying Alulim master which had just appeared at Eridu had all the characteristics that later gods would henceforth generally possess. He was anthropomorphic, he was a leader (“lord”), he lived forever and was powerful enough to bend the forces of nature (here water) to his will. It is doubtful that the En had initially planned to make their undying master such a powerful being. It is only because they had had to find a way to co-opt the senior Shaman into their scheme that they had opted to include the water imagery of the spirit ABZU into the persona of their newly minted fictitious master. This very imagery was destined to a long and successful future, eventually finding its way into the Bible. The Eridu report quoted the following verses as proof of this:

Ps. 29:3 The voice of the LORD is over the waters; the God of glory thunders, the LORD, over many waters.​

Ps. 77:16 When the waters saw you, O God, when the waters saw you, they were afraid; indeed, the deep trembled.​

Hab. 3:15 You trampled the sea with your horses, the surging of mighty waters.​

For the next 50 years, the life of Eridu would not change much. The population increased a little, reaching 1000 by the 4120s BC. As the En died, they were replaced by younger servants chosen by the surviving En, just like it had been done before the old Alulim master had died. As new generations reach En-hood, it seems that the belief that the undying master was indeed alive and well inside his plaster effigy gradually strengthened among the servants of the house and the village at large. The En themselves, seemed to display increasing levels of devotion. Every morning, they dusted off the statue, clothed it with fresh linen garments and adorned it with flowers. Then they deposited offerings of food in front of the statue during rituals which were becoming more and more elaborate as time passed.

In 4118 BC., an unusually ambitious En, whose charisma had propelled him into a position of primus inter pares, managed to convince his colleagues that it was time to rebuild the House on a grander scale. Villagers were drafted, in exchange for a reduced tax payment, and started tearing down the old structure. Then, they began stacking up bricks and hoisting timber to erect the new one. The improved House had an impressive 22 meter-wide facade ornamented with narrow vertical recesses and painted patterns. The rooms inside it were arranged around a courtyard, at the back of which a larger room, with an elevated ceiling, housed the plaster effigy of the master. When the construction was complete, a lavish feast was offered for the benefit of the whole village during which the usual large quantities of goat meat, fish and beer were consumed. After the feast was over, the bones and other leftovers were buried in a pit dug in the middle of the new House’s courtyard as a memento of the master’s largesse. This interment of feasting leftovers would subsequently become a regular custom.

Around this period, the name Alulim was phased out of use as a result of progressive tabooization. Instead, the nickname “Enki” (“supervisor of the Earth”) became the most widely used way to refer to Eridu’s undying master. Among the En, a clearly defined chief-En function began to develop. The man occupying this position was henceforth called the “Ensi”, the “supervisor of the plowland”. He acted as the president of the En council, Eridu’s governing body. From this point onward, Eridu's metamorphosis into a theocratic rebublic was complete. Its center was still called "the House" but it was no longer what we would call a house. It had become a temple.

From 4100 BC. onward, Eridu enjoys a growth in population of approximately 2% a year. This is sufficient to offset the effects of natural catastrophes which hit the town every 10 to 20 years (plagues, crop failures, floods, etc) and yet yield a sufficient growth margin to allow the town's population to steadily increase until it reaches its peak of 15 000 at the end of the 3700s.

The old chiefdom system worked well enough, at Eridu like elsewhere, but it had one well known and quite obvious drawback: dynastic instability brought on by family squabbles. By contrast, the new collegial House system headed by the En council was now impervious to this kind of upheaval. As individuals, the En were anonymous and had no family, apart from the House itself. They were replaced based on merit whenever one of them died. Therefore, there was no cause for infighting at the top anymore. The life of village was no longer disrupted at regular intervals, as it had been when it was governed by a flesh and blood village head. As a result, the House provided a level of stability and predictability never achieved before.

I have called the House a "temple" above. However, this term is not completely accurate because the House does retain many of the attributes of an ordinary household. In particular, it participates in trade. As such, The House provides a steady and reliable outlet for manufactured goods, which it buys at stable rates. This encourages craft specialization. In ordinary Neolithic villages, there are people who tend to make pots or tools more often than average, but there are no true full-time craftsmen. Everyone is still first and foremost a farmer. In Eridu, from the 4100s BC. onward, true craftsmen start to appear, i.e. people who specialize in a single craft (woodworking, basket weaving, pottery, etc.) and pass on their skills to their children. The excess goods produced by these newly specialized workshops are bought by the House which then trades them for agricultural goods from increasingly far-away villages. These goods are in turn used to feed more craftsmen. As a result, Eridu soon becomes able to support a far greater population than its own agricultural production would allow. It is on its way to becoming a true city, i.e. a population center whose manpower’s efforts are no longer primarily directed towards agriculture but instead towards the production of manufactured goods for the beneffit of a wide area around it.

Increased specialization brings about increased quality, due to better skills, and also results in higher productivity. The principles of Adam Smith’s pin workshop are already at work in fith millennium BC. Eridu. These principles are the main driver of Eridu’s successful transformation into the sole producer of manufactured goods within a 50 to 100km radius. The transformation also brings with it the added benefit of pushing farmers within this area to stop producing manufactured goods themselves and focus solely on agriculture, thus increasing their own productivity. Superior craftsmanship skills and rising prosperity also encourages innovation. Around 4060 BC., the first potter's wheels are used in Eridu. Two decades later, the first wheeled vehicles appear. From around 4100 BC. onward, the House had already been contracting specialized donkey drivers to carry the goods it sells to distant villages and bring back the agricultural produce it obtains in exchange. From around the 4040s, these donkey drivers use wheeled carts to carry goods along the level paths of the lower Mesopotamian plain. This increasingly long-distance commerce brings Eridu’s donkey drivers in contact with traders from the Iranian plateau who introduce them to copper objects. The way copper metallurgy is subsequently integrated into Eridu’s thriving economy is a perfect illustration of what makes it truly unique at this point in time.

Initially, the copper objects brought from Iran are crude affairs. They come from a group of villages located in the area of modern-day Shiraz, around 500 km west of Eridu, a mountainous region where copper deposits are plentiful and easily accessible. The small-scale copper smelting industry which has developed in this area over the previous centuries mostly manufactures small objects used primarily for ornamental purposes. These objects are carried to the valley of the Tigris and Euphrates by local village travelers, changing hands more than 10 times before they reach their destination. Once Eridu becomes involved in the copper trade, it quickly and completely transforms the way this economic sector operates. Within 10 years, Eridu’s donkey drivers routinely make the 500 km trip straight to the copper mining and smelting regions on a monthly basis, bringing back copper ingots to the city. This cuts out the middlemen and makes transport more efficient, reducing the cost of smelted copper dramatically. In Eridu, the ingots are worked by a growingly specialized group of craftsmen who quickly develop far better skills than the Shirazi villagers ever had. Soon, increasingly sophisticated objects become available in quantity and at a reasonable price, thus bringing the red metal into the realm of everyday use: scrapers, knives, saws, nails, etc. Success in innovation is not only about doing something new, is it about doing it efficiently. The House of Enki, because of the security it provides in guaranteeing economic transactions, makes this possible. Innovation critically depends on increased levels of confidence; i.e. on trust.

Eridu’s booming copper metallurgy has another consequence: its warriors, now armed with copper weapons, enjoy an undisputed ascendancy over more than 200 villages in the vicinity of Eridu. Around 3700 BC. the population of the city reaches the already mentioned figure of 15 000. Moreover, throughout the villages which have become included in its sphere of influence, the House of Enki is now directly involved in the lives of over 100 000 people. It is not (strictly speaking) a “state” or at least, it does not think of itself that way. As the En and the people of Eridu see it, it is a house; the house of master Enki, who, on account of his superior powers has made his house bigger and more successful than any other. The En council now has 10 to 12 members, while the rest of the House servants number over 500. In order to protect Eridu itself, and the villages within its area of influence, it pays out daily food rations to over 700 warriors. The old tax system is still in place. It contributes to the stability of the House as an economic clearing house by giving it a fixed baseline income.

Beyond copper and wheeled vehicles, Eridu’s craftsmen have made rapid progress in leather working, textile, pottery glazing, wood-working, brick making, dye production, and many other crafts. The clerk servants of the House have developed a rudimentary system of proto-writing consisting of marks incised on the dried leaves of giant reeds (Arundo Donax). These leaves are cut into rectangular strips of 30 by 4 to 5 cm which are more fragile than the old clay tokens but far lighter, and much easier to handle and store. Each transaction that the House underwrites is recorded on such strips which are then tied together with a string running through a hole at one end of each strip. In most cases, a copy of the transaction strip is handed over to the other party for future reconciliation. For example, one strip may say the equivalent of “So and so, from such and such village, received on this date 5 jars of olive oil. In exchange, he will deliver 10 baskets of raw wool after the rainy season”. On the agreed date, the farmer who comes to the House to deliver the 10 baskets of wool, will then hand over his copy of the strip to the clerk. The latter will now find the original strip in the House’s archives. Finally, he will mark both the strip and it’s copy with a sign meaning “transaction completed”.

The final report of the Eridu Experiment in binder X-47/02, which I had just finished reading, contained many annexes featuring a lot of additional data. There were tables giving production figures of various manufactured and agricultural goods, population charts for Eridu proper and its dependent villages, illustrations of manufactured goods and their evolution over time, plans of the House buildings, and so on. The House of Enki was rebuilt five times between 4100 and 3700 BC., reaching a final size of nearly 2 hectares. Drawings of all five iterations were included in the report's annexes, along with illustrations of Enki’s cult image, the final version of which was made of wood, covered with copper, gold and lapis lazuli ornaments. The report ended with a conclusion worded in the following way:

What we have witnessed in Eridu in the period between 4100 and 3700 BC. is almost certainly the first sustained large-scale economic growth spurt in human history. Both the quality and quantity of manufactured goods increased dramatically, while agricultural output was also rising. Many innovations in craftsmanship appeared and were generalized to the whole workforce. The question which remains to be answered was: what specific aspects of the Eridu House model made this growth spurt possible ? Potential answers are:​

- Increased bureaucratization.​

- Political stability​

- long distance trade in prestige goods and metals​

- Hydraulic construction projects increasing the agricultural surplus.​

- Introduction of writing​

- Copper implements​

- Eridu’s strategic location, near the mouth of the Euphrates and on a fresh water lagoon.​

- Specific aspects of Sumerian language and culture​

- Climatic change​

This list of hypotheses is neither particularly original nor is it probably exhaustive. Further discussion and analysis will be required in order to further refine it and come up with a plausible causative scenario.​

 

[K9Otaku]

Chapter 3 – Eridu (part 2 of 2)

L. Wittgenstein was in England when the Eridu Experiment report was finalized and he did not contribute to its conclusion. When he came back, on April 17th, 1948, he flew into a rage. During the afternoon of that day, a number of people saw him pacing back and forth in the corridors of Hut 19, the main office building of the Boffin team (which was also the building Finn and I were using). The next day, when someone mentioned the report during a meeting, he exploded:

— WITTGENSTEIN: I read the conclusion of the report yesterday and it made me sick to my stomach. It is a disgrace, a bloody disgrace ! We are supposed to try and understand why people are attracted to Communism; not to think like God-damned communists ourselves ! This conclusion reads like an undergraduate archaeology paper written under the direction of Marxist professors. None of these so called “causes” explain anything. Most of them are actually, and quite obviously, consequences, not causes. Do you think writing invents itself and then causes people to become more reasonable just like that ? And the climate, the bloody climate. Thank God for the climate which is always close at hand when historians or archaeologists have no clue about the reasons for some event. Does anyone think that materialistic explanations are going to get us anywhere ? Is materialism going to magically explain itself ? Do you seriously think materialistic explanation are going to help us figure out why people are so enamored with materialistic explanations ?

— TURING: But Ludwig, there is no need to lose your temper over this …

— WITTGENSTEIN: My temper ! You have seen nothing yet. Alan, I should punch you in the face to wake you up. We are the most fortunate human beings since Adam and Eve. We have the opportunity to SEE OUR PAST. And the only thing we are able to come up with is this drivel ?!

— TURING: But Ludwig, there is no need not to stay civil …

— WITTGENSTEIN: Civil ? CIVIL ?! ...

By this point, Wittgenstein's eyes had become injected with blood. His whole body was convulsing as if under the effect of an electric current and he was sputtering left an right. He continued:

— WITTGENSTEIN: ... Do you even know what this word means, Alan ? No, you don’t. “Civil” means “of the city”, as opposed to those hicks from the countryside. And are we in a city right now ?! We are bloody well not ! We are at war; at war with ourselves. We have come to blows twice this century, nearly bringing ourselves to extinction, and we are now armed with the most dreadful weapons ever wielded by man; in danger at every second of using them and wiping ourselves from the surface of the globe. Western civilization has been giving birth to monster after monster which threaten to swallow it whole at every turn. And we do not know what is going on ! We do not know why people are attracted by monstrosities like Nazism or Stalinism. We have no time. We HAVE to find an answer right now. What is going on ? What is happening to us ? And civility ? No, we do not have time for that. We should be behaving like soldiers, shouting at each other to overcome the din of battle. We are on campaign. Do you know what the word “campaign” means, Alan ? It comes from a French word meaning “countryside”. We are not “in the city”, exchanging pleasantries over tea. We are right in the middle of the wilderness, trying to find a way out, on pain of death.

At this point, Wittgenstein stormed out of the room and slammed the door. Several team members had noted in their logbooks that for a few weeks already, Alan Turing was starting nearly all his sentence with “But Ludwig, ...” It was obvious that he had an enormous amount of admiration for Wittgenstein and yet he could not help crossing him. As a mathematician, he was not well equipped to understand the subtleties of human nature and he knew that, at this juncture, it would have been wise to keep his mouth shut on most issues. But he couldn’t. As soon as Wittgenstein was within earshot, he had to make his opinion known somehow; and face the consequences of Wittgenstein’s annoyance at the naïveté of most of his remarks.

After Wittgenstein had left the room, a few minutes of silence followed. People were looking at their shoes, out the window, or at the copies of the report spread out on the conference table. Then Adam Ulam muttered, as if to himself:

— ULAM: He is right, you know. What we have seen so far of Eridu's history is the clearest possible rebuttal of Marxist historical theory ...

Alan Turing interrupted:

— TURING: Ah, the base and superstructure ? ...

— ULAM: Yes. According to Marx, the "base", i.e. the "means and relations of production", is the determining factor of social reality. Religion, besides being "the opium of the people", is included in "the superstructure", i.e. the smoke and mirrors that the ruling class uses to keep the workers quiescent. However, in Eridu, it is obviously the "superstructure" (the newly introduced cult of Enki) that creates the "base", which, in this case can be identified as the House and its nexus of economic interactions. It is this purely immaterial idea of an undying village chief that causes all the rest to develop. Furthermore, the En do not fit the bill of the "oppressive ruling class" or "cunning priests" archetypes of Marxism either. They are obviously not aware of the consequences that their innovation will have because they cannot even imagine them. In Eridu, the "superstructure" creates the "base"; the god creates the temple and the temple creates the city. This is as un-Marxist as it can get.

— QUINE: I am sure Marxists could find a rebuttal to that.

— ULAM: Of course. Marxist theory is to honest inquiry what military music is to music.

— TURING: Who said that ?

— ULAM: Groucho Marx (not Karl). But the original quotation was about military justice. I am making this one up in the same vein.

After some more chit-chat like this, the room fell back to silence. Eventually, Joseph Brady, the psychologist from Walter Reed Army Institute of Research, decided that it was time someone showed leadership. He said:

I think we should look at the problem like a primatologist would. After all, what is Eridu if not a group of primates ? The question we should be asking ourselves, I believe, is this: What changed in their behavior ? What evolution occurred in their collective interactions which could explain this change in behavior ? Like with all animals, we should be starting with our instincts. What do our instinct push us to do ? How does culture, which is specific to us hairless primates, manage to curb those instincts in order to make us adopt different behaviors ? Within a few days, I think I should be able to present to you an analysis of the material we have collected about Eridu built on these methodological assumptions.​

Everyone was relieved to have a pretext to adjourn the meeting and they all gladly agreed to Brady’s suggestion. A week later, a new meeting took place, dedicated to Brady’s presentation. What exactly transpired at this meeting is not well documented in the logbooks or in the project papers. However, Binder X-48/02 contained a short report penned by Brady himself and presenting his theory. Here it is in full:



On May 1st 1948, 3 days after the Brady report had been circulated, Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote in his personal logbook:

Brady has just come up with some truly illuminating insight. I am glad that my outburst has served this purpose. Poor Alan, I hate to do this kind of thing to him but he should realize that he is just getting in the way.​

I have been convinced for quite a while that language is primarily prescriptive[/i] and not [/i]descriptive[/i] as logicians tend to assume. The shopping list example I have used in class so many times is designed precisely to make this prescriptive nature palpable. I will repeat it here just for the sake of clarity:[/I]​

I send someone shopping. I give him a slip of paper marked “five red apples”. He takes the slip to the shopkeeper, who opens the drawer marked “apples”; then he looks up the word “red” in a chart and finds a color sample next to it; then he says the series of elementary number-words (I assume he knows them by heart) up to the word “five”, and for each number-word he takes an apple of the same color as the sample out of the drawer. It is in this and similar ways that one operates with words.​

Language is operative. Its purpose is to make us do things. Of course, trust is the necessary ingredient here. It is the fuel that powers the engine. Language traces a path; a series of steps to be followed. Naturally, we will follow these steps only if we have this “desire to follow” that Brady talks about. Interpreting trust, and belief in general, as a “desire to follow” makes a lot of sense. It meshes perfectly with the idea that language is prescriptive.​

Another example which crossed my mind just now is the kind of instructions one often reads about in novels of the treasure-hunting genre. There will be some kind of parchment on which words like these will be written: “go to the big tree on top of the hill, then take four steps towards the mouth of the river, then turn 90° clockwise, etc.” In this case, the words literally trace a path in physical space and the reader, the hero of the novel, has a strong “desire to follow” them which is due to the value of the treasure, of course, but above all to the fact that he trusts the author of the instructions. Both the prescriptive nature of language and the role of trust as “desire to follow” are clearly apparent, I think, in this example.​

-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-​

When I had finished reading all this, my head was buzzing. It was clear to me that project Eridu had resulted in some groundbreaking discoveries. But I was not sure I fully understood any of them. Three days had passed since I had come back from Amundsen-Scott and I had spent my time reading the binders almost continuously, except for some snack breaks and a few hours of sleep here and there. I was exhausted. My eyes could hardly focus on the page anymore. I stood up from my swivel chair with a grunt, stretching my legs, and went over to the half-height filing cabinet on which Finn had set up a coffee pot. It was one of those 1940s Pyrex and Bakelite vacuum coffee makers with a small electric heater underneath it to keep the coffee warm. I drank a cup slowly. It felt good. After a few minutes, my head felt clearer and my eyes were able to focus again.

Finn was seated at the desk next to mine, reading a binder with the label “X-51/23”. I cleared my throat and asked:

— ME: Did you read the Brady report in binder X-48/02 ?.

— FINN: Yes I did.

— ME: There is one thing I do not get. Brady says that a Neolithic village like Eridu before the death of the last Alulim chieftain, is a group of primates headed by a dominant male, i.e. the said chieftain. But shouldn't this chieftain then have sex with all the women in the village ? It does not seem to be the case. How come ?

— FINN: Yes, this is not made clear in the Brady report, but this question was raised later on and a separate sub-project devoted to it was conducted in late 1949, I think. They were looking for the earliest signs of monogamy and they were able to pinpoint it at the transition between the PPNA and the in Syria.

— ME: What are the PPNA and PPNB ?

— FINN: They are two periods in Fertile Crescent Archaeology and the transition from the former to the latter occurred near the end of the 9th millennium BC. Actually, the terms PPNA and PPNB are not used in the Philadelphia papers. They were coined later by the archaeologist [URL=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kathleen_Kenyon]Kathleen Kenyon when she was digging at Jericho in the mid-1950s. But the dates mentioned in the monogamy investigation report correspond to the transition between them.

— ME: What did they find, regarding monogamy ?

— FINN: Apparently, during the PPNA (which means ‘Pre-Pottery Neolithic A’) early agricultural practices were exclusively undertaken by women. Men, for their part were still fully occupied with hunting. The sexual behaviors were still mostly those of an ordinary primate group, with a single dominant male having theoretical access to all females. However, secret encounters in the bushes were also quite widespread.

— ME: What happened in the PPNB ?

— FINN: The PPNA social structure was a hindrance to the development of agriculture because it did not provide a strong enough incentive for land improvement and seed selection. At the beginning of the PPNB, the social structure appears to have completely changed. Now there were monogamous couples each in control of a “farm” with a house and a certain amount of dedicated land. In other words, private property seems to also appear at this moment and it is probably linked to monogamy through the practice of inheritance. With inheritable private property, the incentive to increase yields is much higher than when all land was worked in common by the women as in the PPNA.

— ME: What happened to the dominant male ?

— FINN: He is still present during the PPNB, in the form of the village chief, and he still has access to more than one woman, although not to all of them.

— ME: How did both men and women come to accept the monogamous couple ?

— FINN: Good question ! This is where it gets really interesting. Between the PPNA and the PPNB, the key change seems to be a marked lowering of the status of women. During the PPNA, women all submit to the dominant male, just like the non-dominant males do. They are therefore more or less on an equal footing with them. In the PPNB, each woman submits to her husband, who, as a non-dominant male, submits in turn to the dominant male. From the perspective of the woman, her husband becomes her own “dominant male”, thus satisfying her instinct to mate with a dominant male. She has been demoted in the overall social hierarchy but her sexual instincts are still satisfied and therefore her capacity to have an orgasm during sex is preserved. The more women are “oppressed”, the more likely they are to find sex satisfying in a monogamous context because the stronger the ”oppression”, the stronger the feeling that their husband is indeed a “dominant” male.

— ME: Obviously, there were no feminists during the late 1940s.

— FINN: Indeed there weren't. None of these findings seem to have been considered controversial among the members of the Boffin team. In fact, my opinion is that they should not be controversial even today. There is plenty of evidence still available (and there was even more so in the 40s) that monogamous marriage relies on the granting of an aura of "dominant male-ness" to the husband. For example, in all cultures, the wedding ceremony mimics a courtly protocol in which the newlyweds are treated as king and queen. This is in effect an aphrodisiac for the wife who gets to have sex with the “king” on the wedding night. The amount of resources invested in wedding ceremonies all over the world is a testament to the importance of this aspect.

— ME: Is the perspective of hot sex the only reason women accept the new order of things in the PPNB ?

— FINN: No. The biggest advantage from their perspective is that their husband is now tied to their house (the etymology of the word “husband” is “house-bound”) and that he invests most of his time in agriculture. As a result, there is a dramatic increase in yields and therefore, in food safety. This benefits both the woman and her children. In exchange for a demotion in social standing, women have redirected men’s energies to their own food collection strategy, plant gathering. Helping the transition is the fact that domesticated animals start to appear in the early PPNB, thus increasingly satisfying the community’s meat needs independent of the hunt.

— ME: For his part, the dominant male, i.e. the village chief, continues to have sex with more than one woman, right ?

— FINN: Yes. Apparently, the details vary. But the most common situation is a “legitimate wife + concubines” arrangement in which the children of the legitimate wife inherit in priority. The village chief remains a classic primate dominant male in the sense that he has authority over the other males. The only limitation is that he forgoes access to the wives of the other males (although there must have been all sorts of exceptions to this rule). Also, the fact that he appropriates several women for himself creates a deficit of marriageable women. As a result, an underclass of unmarried men appears, generally called “rubbish men” or something equivalent. These underdogs generally serve the village chief and act as errand boys and flunkies. Some of them eventually evolved into bards who sang the praises of the chief during feasts. This was pretty much the general situation all over the Middle East before the Eridu innovation.

— ME: What about shamans and warriors ?

— FINN: These were not rubbish men, of course, but ordinary married farmers who progressively developed specific skills because they were able to obtain food from another source than farming. The shaman was paid in kind by his customers and the warrior by the village chief. This is what triggered the development of the quasi-fiscal system we found in place at Eridu before the change. Initially, the men who eventually evolved into the En must have been some kind of rubbish men.

— ME: OK. It makes sense. What you are saying is that, prior to what happened at Eridu, Middle Eastern Neolithic villages still followed the classic dominant male-lead primate group model with the only limitation being non-dominant male monogamous marriage. Correct ?

— Yes.

— ME: Now, what is this “desire to follow” business. I don’t quite get it

— FINN: Well, let us start with reptiles, for example. Among them, there is no leadership of any kind; no dominant male. As a result, there is no “desire to follow” either. Each individual’s behavior is the result of his own desires and anti-desires. He will run towards food (desire) and run away from predators (anti-desire). If we now consider mammals, we see male competition for females appear, probably because the number of offspring had decreased markedly and therefore the need to secure the fittest possible genetic material for each of them has become more acute. Initially, there is no “desire to follow” here either. Males simply compete for females and the winner gets to copulate with all of those that are present. However, this simple competitive behavior runs into difficulties when the number of individuals rises, as it does in mammalian species which live in social groups. If the top male must constantly ward off competitors to ensure his exclusive access to females, the amount of energy he has to spend on this task quickly becomes prohibitive, eventually threatening his own survival. As a result, the fully developed dominant male instinct evolved to make dominant male-ness a status rather than just a state of fact.

— ME: A ‘status’ ? What do you mean ?

— FINN: Something which persists over time and continues to have an impact on behaviors without requiring periodic reinforcement. Among species which possess the fully developed dominant male instinct, an aspiring male only needs to fight a relatively small number of adversaries at a specific period of the year in order to be granted the status of dominant male for a full year. Until the next male-fighting season, a number of instinct-driven behaviors among all members of the animal group will guarantee that this status will not be challenged. These behaviors generally take the form of an urge to follow the dominant male. Females will follow him closely, in order to make themselves available, while other males will follow at a greater distance in order not to get in the way. This is the simplest mechanism possible to guarantee that the group will not disperse while granting privileged sexual access to the dominant male without forcing him to spend excessive amounts of energy defending his position. Once this set of instincts is implanted in a given species, it has the side effect of giving a leadership role to the dominant male. Wherever he goes, everyone goes. Thus, leadership appears as a side effect of sexual selection, in the form of a basic and literal “desire to follow” the dominant male which affects, in various ways, all the other members of the group.

— ME: What does this have to do with language ?

— FINN: This is the whole point of Brady’s argument and of Wittgenstein’s enthusiastic reaction to it. Firstly, Brady argues that the “desire to follow” associated with the dominant male instinct evolved, among certain species of mammals and especially primates, into a desire to be supportive of whatever the dominant male does and an anti-desire to thwart him in any way. In other words, individuals in these species have developed a “desire to follow” the dominant male in what is now a figurative sense, like when we say: “I follow his lead”. The idea of “following” is no longer taken in a literal physical sense but rather as a general disposition to be agreeable. For example, this is what enables the dominant males of many species of primates to act as arbiters in conflicts, as Brady points out. Secondly, this “desire to follow”, understood in the figurative sense, is also how we can describe trust, and trust is the basis of language.

— ME: Wait ! What ?! … Language exists independently of trust. Doesn’t it ?

— FINN: Yes, but it serves no purpose if trust is not present.

— ME: I don’t know. Is trust really necessary when it comes to fiction and poetry ? Do we really need to trust the poet to enjoy the poem ?

— FINN: Well this a very difficult question and we cannot tackle it right now. But it will be done in due course. Some later projects of the Philadelphia team were specifically devoted to answering it. However, it is quite clear that language did not initially evolve to make poetry possible. Early language was quite certainly used only in very short statements like “give me this tool” or “there are delicious nuts behind this rock” and the like. It is quite clear, I think, that this kind of statement does not work if trust is not present.

— ME: I understand the role of trust in the context of the second statement. I will certainly not waste my time looking behind the rock if I do not trust the person who utters this sentence. However, I am not sure about the first statement. It is simply an order. What kind of trust is involved here ?

— FINN: It is in the case of such statements that the relationship between the dominant male instinct and trust appears most clearly. I think there is another text in which Brady explains it very well. Let me see. Here it is:



After reading this text, I felt that things were starting to make a little more sense. However, I still had questions.

— ME: I do not fully see how one can equate trust with a form of authority. Isn’t trust only possible between equals ?

— FINN: This is one of the most tragic misunderstandings that our culture is suffering from today. In the real world, trust is not this wish-washy cuddly feeling that we tend to imagine. For example, if you ask anyone today “Do you trust your bank ?”, most would answer “No, are you kidding !?” Yet they keep all their money and their life savings in that bank 24/7 and they fully expect that all of it will be available for them to use whenever needed. This demonstrates that they actually do trust their bank. They just have forgotten what the word means. Trust is a much more hard-nosed notion than we generally realize. It is simply the expectation that promises will be fulfilled with a high degree of probability. You do not need to like someone to trust him. If you expect that he will deliver on his promises, that’s it, you trust him. Now, regarding the relationship between authority and trust, let us assume you know a trustworthy computer support person. If you have a computer problem, you will call him on the phone and you will do everything he tells you to do. In other words, you will accept his authority when it comes to fixing your computer problems.

— ME: Is it always like that ? Does trust always equate with authority ?

— FINN: Think about it and you will see. There is no situation in which trust actually exists and in which one cannot view it under the prism of authority. And vice-versa.

— ME: But, let us suppose I have a good friend, and I hang out with him a lot. I trust him. However, he is never in a position of authority over me or me over him.

— FINN: This is a misuse of the word “trust”. In the situation you describe, you do not trust your friend, you just enjoy his company. It is not the same thing. When push comes to shove, many people discover that they do not really trust their so-called "friends".

— ME: I see what you mean. Maybe you are right. I will think about it. One more thing. I am not sure I fully understand the biblical allusions at the end of the last text by Brady that you gave me. Are “the Word” and “the Logos” the same thing ?

— FINN: Yes and no. Both are linked with the first verse of the gospel of John, ”In the beginning was the Word”, which Brady quotes at the end of both of the reports we read. This gospel, like the rest of the New Testament, was written in Greek, and the word which is generally translated as ”the Word” in the verse is ”ho Logos” in that language. However when the expression ”the Logos” appears in modern English, it generally does not refer to the Bible but to other uses of the same word. In the ancient Greek philosophical tradition of Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, etc. ”ho Logos” is also used quite frequently, but with different connotations. As a result, the expressions “the Word” and “the Logos” now refer to different things even though they correspond to the same Greek word. “the Logos” is generally understood to mean “reason”, in a philosophical sense, while “the Word” is one of the names by which Christians call Jesus Christ.

— ME: Does it mean that Jesus Christ is considered to be "the Word of God" by Christians ?

— FINN: No, and this is indeed confusing. The expression “The Word of God” usually refers to the Bible, i.e. what Christian theology also calls “Scripture”. However, “the Word”, by itself and in the context of the Gospel of John, properly refers to “the Son”, i.e. the second member of the Trinity (Father, Son, Holy Spirit), who is called “Jesus Christ” in his human incarnation.

— ME: But why does this Gospel calls Jesus in this way ?

— FINN: There is no doubt that the use of ”ho Logos” by John bears some relationship to how this word was used by Greek Philosophers. It is probably a way to say something like “You claim to have wisdom but we have Jesus Christ who is true Wisdom incarnate” or “You claim to be rational but this is foolish because no one can be rational unless he follows Jesus Christ”. However, none of this is made explicit in the Gospel and the reason why it calls the Son “the Word” remains quite mysterious.

— ME: What does Brady make of all this. I do not quite get it.

— FINN: Brady’s claim is that what happened at Eridu is the key to the meaning of “the Word” in John. According to him “the Word” is what he calls Authority-L, i.e. what language can do, in terms of human cooperation, when it is properly supported by trust. Before Eridu, Authority-L’s capabilities were restrained by the superior position then held by Authority-S, i.e. dominant male-based leadership. After the change in Eridu, Authority-L is freed from the shackles of Authority-S and can thus yield its full potential. According to Brady, the victory of Jesus Christ over Satan is an allegory of the triumph of Authority-L over Authority-S, which the Bible equates with Satan.

— ME: Why did the Bible have to express this in such a cryptic manner ?

— FINN: Probably because a lot of what had happened at Eridu had been forgotten and was only remembered as myth. Also, a half-veiled expression like “the Word” probably has more impact on people’s imagination than a lengthy explanation.

— ME: Why is Brady making these negative remarks about philosophy ? Why does he say it is “wide of the mark” ?

— FINN: Come on, don’t you get it ? Western Philosophy since Plato has been saying that the fundamental opposition is between Rationality (the Logos) and Irrationality; between Knowledge and Ignorance. But it turns out that this is not at all what matters. What Eridu demonstrates is that the crucial dichotomy is between Authority-L (which can be called “the Logos”) and Authority-S, i.e. between linguistic trust-based cooperation and dominant male-centric leadership. Western Philosophy completely missed that but the Bible did not. The Bible, in its allegorical vocabulary, keeps intact the fundamental dichotomy which was made apparent by what happened at Eridu.

— ME: After how Socrates & Co. fared during the Socrates experiment, this is a second body-blow to philosophy's reputation, isn’t it ?

— FINN: Yes, absolutely. In the 1940s Philosophy’s prestige was at its peak. Among University-educated people like the Boffins, it was taken for granted that Philosophy held all the answers while the Bible was regarded as nothing but an obsolete relic of the Dark Ages. And then bang ! Socrates turns out to have been nothing but a manipulative sycophant and, double bang !, the Bible turns out to retain the most accurate memory of the foundational moment on which all subsequent forms of civilization depend. Everyone in the Boffin team must have been completely floored by these discoveries, even someone like Wittgenstein who had already anticipated some of them during his pre-Philadelphia career. Even if Marxism has hardly been scrutinized yet, we are starting to discover why it is so noxious. The problem does not lie with Marxism per se but with the entire Western Philosophical tradition from which it stems.

— ME: OK, I get it, … I think.

That said, I went to my bunk in the dormitory building, crashed on it with my clothes still on and slept straight for over 10 hours.

 

[K9Otaku]

@LesscoBlob, this is the chapter in which ISHTAR appears.

---

Chapter 4 – Uruk

On April 23rd 1948, a meeting of the Philadelphia Boffin team occurred to decide what the follow-up to the Eridu experiment should be. Alan Turing, who was chairing the meeting, opened it up by asking: “Where, and when, should we now look ?” Both von Soden and Landsberger immediately answered in one voice: “at Uruk, in the fourth Millennium BC.” And with that pronouncement, the Uruk experiment started.

In the early fourth Millennium BC, as Eridu was in the middle of its explosive growth period, several other cities started to appear in lower Mesopotamia. The phenomenon was a straightforward case of copycat behavior. When something obviously works, it would be foolish not to do the same. The first of these imitation cities was Uruk, located 70 km upstream of Eridu along the Euphrates. The transition from village to city took place in the 3920s BC., and followed the Eridu pattern very closely. The local En, servants of the Uruk village ruling family replaced their former human master, an elderly chief who had just died of old age, with an effigy deemed to be his immortal incarnation. At Uruk, like at Eridu, the village population played along and the local top shaman was duly co-opted into the En council. The copycat nature of what happened at Uruk is clearly indicated by the choice of name used for the new local master/god. “Enki”, as we have seen, means “En (i.e. “foreman”) of the Earth” and, by the time Uruk started its transformation, this name was already the most common way to refer to Eridu’s everlasting chief. Uruk’s En council seems to have reasoned that, since the Earth was already taken, they would give a Sky-related name to their own master/god. Eventually, the simplest possible name was chosen: “Anu”, which just means “the Sky”.

In order to understand the implications of this choice, one has to remember how Mesopotamian cosmogony was structured. Ancient Mesopotamians viewed the world as centered on “Ki”, “the Earth”. Ki was imagined as a flat disk, with land in the middle, understood as a sort of floating island resting on a pool of water which was accessible all around as the oceans but also underneath the ground as the subterranean water table. Above the Earth was “Anu”, the Sky, viewed as a solid hemispherical dome with water stored above it. Rain was interpreted as some of this water falling through pores in the Sky dome that were opened from time to time. The waters above the Sky met those below the land along the circumference of the Earth, where the Sky dome met the Earth disk. Between the Sky dome and the Earth disk was a void filled with Air, thus completing the triad Earth-Sky-Air.

Unsurprisingly, when a third city, Nippur, appeared around 50 years after Uruk, its god/master was named “Enlil”, i.e. “En of the Air”. For nearly 4000 years, the triad Enki/Earth, Anu/Sky and Enlil/Air would remain the most fundamental group of gods in Mesopotamian religion.

For over a century, until the 3710s BC., Uruk grew in parallel with Eridu and along the same lines. In 3847 BC., a magnificent new stone building, the first ever in human history, was added to the structures forming the House of Anu at Uruk. This building, constructed with white limestone blocks cemented with bitumen, was to be the new residence of Anu’s statue. It consisted of three massive concentric walls, each pierced with a single door facing a different direction. It was thus the first ever spatial representation of the idea of the sacred, i.e. the notion that divinity must be carefully separated from ordinary mortals.

The logic behind this separation goes both ways. On the one hand, the divine presence must be protected from sacrilegious acts that mortals may commit. Howver, on the other hand, the said mortals must also be protected from the divine energy that may kill them if they approach it casually. Both these concerns find a clear expression, for example, in the Old Testament, where the structure of the "Tent of Meeting" and of the later Solomonic Temple are self-consciously described as a means to avoid sacrilegious intrusion into the "Holy of Holies" but also to protect men from accidentally touching the dangerously powerful sacred objects contained therein. To illustrate the latter risk, the second book of Samuel narrates how one of the priests who was helping move the Ark of the Covenant from Kiriath-Jearim to Jerusalem was struck dead on the spot when he accidentally touched it (2 Sam. 2:8). Both the Tent of Meeting and the Solomonic Temple are said to have been designed to the same concentric pattern as Anu's limestone House built in Uruk three Millenia before. 6000 years later, in our own time, the same general configuration is still employed in nuclear power plants, where concentric “confinement enclosures” are erected to protect the environment from the radiations of the core within. Today, the same "confinement enclosures" can still clearly be seen in the excavated remains of Anu's House near the town of Samawah in Southern Iraq.

As the first ever stone building, with its shining white facade, the new House of Anu in Uruk outshone even Enki’s House in Eridu, which was still built of sun-dried brick at the time. It was duly inaugurated, on August 7 3847 BC., with a lavish feast attended by all the people of Uruk, many guests from Eridu, and many as well from the surrounding countryside.

From the mid-3800s BC. onward, Uruk had begun competing with Eridu and this rivalry would only intensify with time. Uruk was previously one of Eridu’s dependent villages. However, in 3872 BC., it had declared independence from Eridu by sending a large gift of agricultural produce, copper objects and luxury items to the House of Enki, together with a message stating: “Anu thanks his older brother Enki for his help and protection. Having grown in strength, he will no longer need it anymore”. The En in both Eridu and Uruk were risk-averse folks. As a result, neither Uruk’s declaration of independence, nor the competition that developed between the two cities afterwards, could degenerate into war. Indeed, the concept of war did not exist at this time. Mesopotamian Neolithic culture did not have a tradition of head-hunting or inter-village warfare. The warriors of the new cities mostly played the role of a police force, deterring cattle-rustling and the like. They also acted as debt-collection agents. Also, on occasion, migrant groups descended from the mountains to the East and had to be repulsed, but these incursions were never large-scale events.

Therefore, for over 160 years, Uruk and Eridu competed peacefully. The Houses of both cities were essentially economic actors and competition spurred them to further increases in efficiency. Productivity grew, especially in textile manufacturing and copper metallurgy, and prices fell. Towards the end of the 3700s B.C., Uruk reached a population of 10,000 while Eridu was on its way to the already mentioned figure of 15,000.

-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-​

As I was reading about the early history of Uruk in binder X-48/04, Finn entered the office. He looked a little preoccupied.

— ME: What’s the matter ?.

— FINN: We are going to have a new visitor.

— ME: How do you know ? And, by the way, you never told me how you knew that I was coming. How did you ?

— FINN: It is not easy to explain. The best way I can express it, I think, is that I remember learning that someone is going to come, even though I do not remember any of the circumstances in which I learned it. It is as if memories were implanted into my brain.

— ME: Scary !

— FINN: Yes, but, at the same time, I do not feel there is anything to worry about. I know how strange it sounds, but it feels completely normal. Probably, this has something to do with the fact that these memories have always proved to be completely reliable. All the things I learned about this way turned out exactly how I remembered they were supposed to.

— ME: Who is going to come this time ?

— FINN: A biologist from the Russian Vostok station. Her name is Ekaterina Kurchatova. She is due to arrive here within 48 hours or less, from a South-Westerly direction. You arrived from due West. Apparently, these directions are related to where we came from initially. When I want to go back to Troll, I have to head North.

— ME: A girl, ha !

— FINN: Yes. I do not know anything else about her.

Finn grabbed the coffee pot and poured himself a cup. I returned to binder X-48/04.

 

[K9Otaku]

Chapter 4 – Uruk – Part 2 of 3

In March 3709 BC., an event occurred in Uruk which would have repercussions down to the present day. In Uruk, as in Eridu, the warriors were under the command of an official called the Lukig (“man of commands”, or “man of orders”, in Sumerian), who was appointed by the En. From 37182 BC. onward, Uruk’s Lukig was a man called Bilgaga (“fruit basket”, a common name related to the propitiating fruit offerings brought to the House by women expecting a child). Like all military men in Eridu and Uruk at this point, Bilgaga spent most of his time in the taverns located near Uruk’s port on the Euphrates river. The region had been peaceful for several decades and the soldiers did not have much to do, save for the occasional shakedown of farmers whose debts to the House went overdue.

Since the beginning of the fourth Millennium BC., the brewing and sale of alcohol as a specialized activity had started to develop in Eridu, and then in Uruk. Initially, the patrons of such establishments were the young men who came from the countryside to become apprentices in copper metallurgy, carpentry, pottery, etc. Donkey drivers from other towns were also among the early customers of the new taverns.

Until the late 3900s, warriors did not generally patronize the taverns. They were then mostly married men and were often still engaged, part-time, in agriculture, or another trade. However, in the early 3800s, this changed. Following the trend towards increased specialization, the military profession became a full-time activity practiced by unmarried young men in their 20s and 30s. Like the previously mentioned apprentice craftsmen, the majority of the young soldiers also hailed from neighbouring villages and were recruited by the Lukig who provided them with food, equipment, clothing and boarding. Compared to their previous part-time counterparts, these new professional troops had the advantage of immediate availability for any type of mission. Also, being away from their families, they were fully loyal to their commander and, through him, to the House. After serving for 10 to 15 years, they generally went back to their villages and got married.

During their term of service, soldiers were often idle. They were generally being drilled in the morning, when the temperature was still bearable, but were frequently left to their own devices past noon when no orders for them had come from the House. As a result, going to the tavern had become a soldierly past-time. In most establishments, payment in small copper objects was accepted. A hairpin or a nail would buy you a half gallon pitcher of beer and the right for five or six men to sit at a table for as long as they needed to drink it. Soon, games made their appearances, like dice or Kiaddir (“land and bridge”), an ancestor of backgammon, later christened “the Royal game of Ur” by its modern discoverer, the British archaeologist Sir Leonard Woolley.

Not long after games, prostitution made its appearance too. For the price of two or three pitchers, a patron could now climb to the upper room of a tavern with one of the girls serving the beer. Initially, the girls were the daughters of the tavern owners and no stigma was attached to the practice. Later on, as with most professions in Eridu and Uruk, prostitution became a specialized activity. Poor families began to sell their daughters to tavern owners at puberty. These young girls would initially serve as maids while they learned their trade from more senior ladies. When they started taking clients upstairs themselves, at 16 or 17 years of age, they had become full-fledged courtesans, skilled in dancing and music, as well as in the use of cosmetics, perfume, elaborate clothing and the bedroom arts. Some became well known around town and had a devoted following among soldiers, craftsmen apprentices, donkey drivers and boatmen.

By the mid-3710s BC, Bilgaga, the Lukig of Uruk, had become a near permanent fixture of the port district taverns. He was famed for his generosity towards his men, routinely paying the drinks of dozens of soldiers at a time. He also often threw huge parties that dragged on late into the night. Beer, gambling and dancing girls were the main attractions at these parties, which invariably ended up in drunken orgies during which soldiers competed to show off their sexual prowess. Often, Bilgaga himself was the winner in these contests.