Ancient Religious Practice TR

2:47PM Sep 3, 2019

Speakers:

Keywords:

world

cosmology

people

storey

societies

religious traditions

religion

egypt

mythos

gods

means

power

life

ancient

religious

starts

america

anthropology

burial sites

stone age

If there was something unique to this location,

and be with other ones.

Okay, so I want to, I want to jump back to a couple of things that I said yesterday, or excuse me, whatever day that was Thursday last week, and see if I can put together a few pieces of why why I'm starting here, instead of jumping into one particular religious tradition. What I want to do is, my goal is to get you to see religious practice of a, by the way, hello, welcome. So I feel like I just jumped in, but that's what we're going to do. Is that okay with everybody, anybody object to that? Okay, if you need me to pause and go back, I can. Okay.

All right. So what I want

to do is, I want to be able to explain religious practices as a habit to use, if you remember offer three words for religion, really, Gary, Gary, and having an idea of habit two is, I want you to see religious practices, an organised set of ideas that sort of feed each other. And so what a religion might think about land will affect that same religion thinks about politics, what that religion thinks about politics will affect what they think about humans, and so on and so forth. And the easiest way to see that is to look at ancient religious traditions, because they're much more obvious. For us, it's hard to see how religious traditions functions for us as societies, because they're so close to us. Ironically, the things that are closest to us of the hardest things to see, right. So for example, if you are a Christian practitioner, and you practice the Christian tradition, you think that your religious tradition is just something that comes from a text, or something that comes from an idea, or it's a belief that you practice, you don't see the relationship to land, you don't see the relationship to climate, you don't see those elements is connected to your own practice, but they are there, they're a lot easier to see when you look at ancient tradition. So I want to look at three so that you can see how these interconnected systems work. And the major point that I kept making on Thursday was this religions function a lot like societies and societies function a lot like religions, they all have this interconnected system, and they all feed each other. The reason I'm doing it this way, so that I can not teach you about every aspect of a religion, it's impossible for me to do that. What I can do, though, is help you begin to see religions a certain way, so that when you encounter them in life, and in space and time, that you'll be able to sort of interact with them and think about how they work as systems. Everybody knew that so far. Okay. So I want to talk about these three particular ones. And by the way, you you have to interrupt me otherwise, this is insanely boring, right? I told you, I couldn't entertain you every day, I will try my damnedest, but I can't, okay. And I can't just curse just to make you attentive, right over and over. I mean, you're not eight anymore, right? I can't just like make a dirty joke. And then everybody giggle.

I mean, I could,

but it's useless because I need to press pass that into some level of an intelligence right. So I want to talk about these three lifting traditions. I want to talk about Egypt, I want to talk about Mesopotamia when I say lift, lift is just a Greek word that means stone. It's where we get all the things like Stone Age, right? And the stone ages, according to archaeologists and anthropologists are divided amongst tears. You have like Palaeolithic, which means really old stone, you have Mesolithic, which means middle stone, and then you have Neolithic, which means of a new stone. So it's just like fancy ways of saying the early stages, the middle stages and the late stages. Okay, so when you see mezzo paleo Neo, those are just different time periods. So I want to talk about how the Stone Age approaches religion. We don't have a lot of data from Stone Age stuff like you think Neanderthals you think Geico. We don't have a tonne of stuff from that era. But we have enough to kind of figure out maybe how religion functions in relationship to nature that I want to talk about Egypt, we have a tonne more from Egypt. But why do we have a tonne more from Egypt? Because we have something unique? We have writing. Right. And so we have a lot more data as far as how religion functions within this political society. And I also want to look at Mesopotamia. And if you don't know what this means, I told you the mezzo means middle, right. And the second part means rivers. So it means the land between the rivers it means what we think as sort of the Iraqi Iranian world, or what we would call the Middle East, which in in scholarly studies is called the Near East, the Near East would be like Egypt,

the Arabic world,

so on and so forth. You follow me? That's kind of like the bedrock of human history.

Okay. Very good.

So we're gonna talk about some of those religious things, you may have some familiarity with mythological traditions. And so therefore, you might object to some of my explanations of Zhang. No, no, that's not how the storey goes. Remember this. None of this is ironically to use upon here. None of this is set in stone. Right. And what I mean by that is all the storeys we have about ancient traditions are varied. Okay, so what I'm trying to do is distil those variations and put them together into a picture. Everybody good so far. questions, concerns, objections? All right. Let's look at a couple. First thing I want to say is, I want you to get rid of this idea that myth means fake. I said this the other day, but the word mythos The Greek word mythos actually means like how you organise something around a central New narrative or idea. For example, America has a myth owes, right? Freedom, troops, our country, our land. We have this idea that somehow this mythos is re engendered every time we talk about soldiers.

Right? Well, they fought for our freedom.

It's a myth, right? You could say it's fake. If you want, you could say it's real. If you want it, that's, that's irrelevant. The term simply means it's an organising principle. And a lot of times that organising principle, it's a lot like the storeys we tell about ourselves, right? If I asked you who you are, you're going to resort to something like well, I like blank. And I enjoy this. And I often go there, you usually don't describe yourself with a very abstract scholarly parameter, right? You don't say? Well, according to my therapist, I have attachment issues which stem from ba ba, ba, ba Ba, you don't do this, right? You share a mythos, you share an organising narrative. And a lot of times that organising narrative for you is,

is junk,

frankly, you organise it for yourself. It's what you want to be, may not be what you are, who you are, but it is definitely what you want to be. So mythos functions like that. It's what we think we are and how things are organised in a second, I'm going to use the example of

the time of, of the

yearly cycle

of American life. So if you want to see a mythos for something, there's a couple of ways you can do it. Right? You can look at how something is organised, spatially spatially means What's this institution, this institution, this institution, this institution, this institution, ask yourself, how are they all connected? How do they tell a storey or you can look at it like this on a timeline and say, What do we do here?

What do we do here? What do we do here? What do we do here and all of a

sudden used to start to see a unifying storey? you following me? So religions have mythological cores to them, all of them? It doesn't have anything to do with them being real or not real, it means they're all organised according to certain central ideas. So the question is, what are those central ideas? every religious practice has some has one, but the only way to access them is to start to look at their general organisation, in space and in time, and so we can say, Oh, I see it. America is driven by a mythos of consumption. Right? We never say that out loud. We think it's our freedom. Right? Freedom is what makes an American American but freedom to do what? by what you want. Right? When, when the 911 attacks happened many years ago, I don't know how old you were at that time.

But when that happened,

OW. George gets on his megaphone,

right? Does his his speech and the remember

what he says, and one of his first addresses to the nation, after it happens? It's safe to get on planes and go to the mall. what he was saying was, don't be afraid to go buy stuff. His people were freaking out, right? I can't go anywhere. Everybody's Tina seems like oh, my God, oh, rage is gonna melt down. You know, it's everybody's freaking out. But the concern was, it would destroy our economic

cycle.

So he almost screams the myths and says, Oh, my gosh, our way of life is going to dissipate. But what's our way of life or way of life is the freedom to purchase what we want. Now you might say, no, it's the freedom to live how we want.

But if you don't have purchasing power,

you don't live like you want to

ask a bunch of poor people, if they have the power to live the way they want to know. Right? So you start to lay it out and you go, Oh, my gosh, I can see the mythos which is America, it's this empowering to buy, okay, fine. It doesn't mean it's bad, or it's good. It just means it's there. So how do we see that religious traditions, I think there are four categories that can help you organise religious phenomena. The first one is almost every religious system has a cosmology. A cosmology means how the world works. It's a belief in how the world is sort of supposed to be, okay. Now, if I flip the script over here to America, America has a cosmology, or the, you know, the world has a cosmology, there are certain ecosystems that are supposed to feed this, which feed this, which feed this, which feed this right, we have this belief that there's a cosmological order to things, and that's at stake right now. Right, because the whole issue with climate change concerns whether this cosmological order is going to stay that way. And sometimes that's running counter currently, to another order, which is economic. Right, which is if we change this, then all of a sudden, or if we change this policy, and we change carbon emissions, all sudden, these companies are going to go put, which means these people lose jobs, which means we

have no purchasing power. You see,

right? So generally, these cosmology, these are big deals, like how you order a society is how you think the world should be structured. And that this doesn't mean plants and animals, it can mean people to, there is a belief that the people in this cosmos, the word comes from cosmos, right, you've heard that word before. Cosmos cosmos, yes, just means Greek word for like, everything reality, how that cosmos is organised, also affects every creature in that cosmos, of which you are one. So certain religions cosmology also have certain anthropologists we'll talk about that in a second. Religions also typically have a cosmogony, not all of them. But most of them have a cosmology. And this means the difference, look at the difference between the words, this one has a root word loss, right Cosmos loss, how the world is ordered or structured, this one Cosmo, and this GON suffix means to make. So the first one is how the world works. The second one is how the world is made. And you can see how those two are connected, right? If the world is made this way, it should run this way. Think about how many times you heard that in the debate over gay marriage.

Right? If the world was created this

way, it needs to run this way.

Almost all religious societies have that.

Now, so do so called secular societies. If you take America again, America was founded like this, therefore it should run like this. The Constitution says early document about the beginnings of the nation, that therefore we should have this policy. There's a strong connection between how it's made and how it works. So anytime you're looking at a religious tradition, whether it's Hindu or whether it's Jewish, you're looking at questions like this and asking, does it have a cosmological perspective? Never has doesn't have a cosmic Masonic perspective? Does the world come into being? Or was it always there? There's another little fancy word not as put it over here on the side.

Some religions have this

theology nice.

Well, if cosmology is how the world is made, what's the

what's the Theo prefix mean? Anybody?

Yes. So this would be how the gods were made. Some religious traditions have accounts of how the gods come into being. For example, Egypt has this, how the gods come to life, Greek, religious, religious traditions have this certain religious traditions do certain religious traditions don't. This society, this American society has a kind of theology, but more like, it's not really about the gods of American society, but the patriarchs, the forefathers, how they came into power, right? And so America has a storey of its founding, but it has a storey of its founding fathers, how they came into significance. Think of founding fathers as the archaic prehistoric gods of America, we still treat them that way. Right? The Founding Fathers didn't want this, the founding fathers never envisioned. You've heard that language before. Right? And those founding fathers, how did they get their cloud?

War?

Right.

Same thing with ancient religions. You'll notice with ancient religious traditions, certain gods have more force more significance because they win more battles. Just typical. Now, that's not necessarily the case of more country religious traditions. It's not necessarily the case for Eastern religious traditions like being Shinto, or Taoist or things like that. You'll notice that Taoism and Shinto, the Shinto tradition, or maybe some other ones behind or things like that, don't necessarily have those features. So Western features, Western religious traditions like Judaism, Christianity, Islam, has some connections with conflict and violence in the origins of the world. Okay, so Eastern traditions don't have that. And you should be asking yourself, well, what's different about those systems? Why does this one not have it? Why does this one have it? It's, there's no final answer. It's the kind of questions you need to be asking if you're going to engage religions, not just while they have this kind of God, and they this one doesn't. This one believes in this and this one doesn't. The question is, how does that make how does that affect their overall system? Right, everybody good, so far. Questions? Scared, okay. They also, our own religious traditions also have anthropology, anthropology, or we could say, there's, there's other words we could use here. So this is a simple one. And it means people anthropologists means man. Of course, it means human right? Not more man or a man. It just means people. What are people for? It's a great question that the great farmer Wendell Berry once I What are people for, right? What do we do in this war? And sometimes inside these cosmology and cosmology, these you have accounts of what the humans are supposed to be doing? Like what role they play. Now, if you can flip your brain back over to them social, the Americana will put

the heat.

Right, whatever lingering would just like in your blood.

You have America,

right? By the

way, you notice in the song lakes in Minnesota, hills, the Tennessee, pride and every American Heart from sea to shining sea, it's cosmological. The whole of America. Sorry, splash, though. This, it has a Cosmo he's reciting the cosmology, like the whole land, this land is your land, this land is my land, right? God bless America. All the songs repeat the cosmology in the cosmology of this thing we call America, you hear it? It's like, and the one that we sing all the time, and we ritualised

sites, the

cosmic Sonic beginnings of America. Oh, say, can you say we're talking about a war, right? Like the founding war that began all things playing comes over to remind us of American power dominance. And we sing it, right. And so it's very sacred. It's very sacred to the American tradition. What I'm trying to explain to you then, is that if America has a cosmology and cosmology, it also has an anthropology, if that's how the world works, if that's how it's made, here's what people should be doing. It's that simple. This is what people do. They're supposed to fight for that freedom. They're supposed to maintain that freedom. They're supposed to uphold the traditions of the ancient gods that we call America's founding fathers. Why do I keep going over here to America, it's not to bash America, that's not my interest. It's to let you see how it works. It's easy for you to see with America because you are American.

Right? Either if you're visiting here, you see it.

Right. It's a general picture. Well, religions function that way, they have cosmology, cosmology, nice. They have anthropology is about what the human should be doing. And they also have political structures. And those political structures are usually if the if the world starts like this, if the world runs like this, and if the world, if the humans should be doing this, then we need a system to make sure all of that stays stable. The governing system is to make sure that that doesn't go to shit. That's key that all of this is wrapped up into political structures.

Listen, in an ancient temple.

This is the ziggurat, it's like built like a stair case on it. In an ancient temple, here's the deal. The money goes through this. The policies and laws go through this, everything. So an ancient religious societies there is no that's where the bank is. That's where the the courthouses, and that's where the church is, an ancient societies, they're all the same thing. because money is a something that circulated between the people. And it affects how people interact with one another these days represent anthropology, and their interactions is fundamentally religious matter. Because if their interactions break down, and they fight, it affects the stability of the world. They literally believe that if the humans are screwing it up, that the world will suffer with it. Because in an ancient society, your survival depends on the trust between these people. If the trust between these people breaks down, and NGOs can put you become vulnerable to sickness, you become vulnerable to attackers, other cities, you become vulnerable to I don't know, decay, deterioration, lack of commercial power, whatever. So the anthropological actions of people is connected to the religious institutions. And how do you get these people to make sure they behave in a proper way, you remind them if they don't do this, to really crappy things are going to happen? Right? Either the world's going to suffer our stability, right? earthquakes, disasters, what, or our enemies are going to get us. And Either way, it's our gods doing it because they're pissed. If we betray this system, our God is going to get pissed, they're going to punish us, either by making nature fail on us, or letting another group of people come in and conquer us. Because in the ancient world, if another group comes in and conquers me, their god conquered me through their people. This is making sense. So all these issues are intimately wrapped up with one another. Now I want you to see something, we still have this.

We still have this, right here.

The power of this thing, this $1 note, is completely backed by the gods,

because whose pictures here

famous early American father's right, the Gods way back here in the beginning of America's founding, not a deity. It's the forefathers, it's the great like, Great gods of American society. And so the idea is, this single dollar has power, because it's backed by our religious ideals. If it doesn't have that, and it's counterfeit, it's bad. And if you use the currency outside of it, if you use currency that doesn't have that, and it's counterfeit. You're criminalised. You're outside of the society. Right. So in a way, we still have this very religious structure that we call American society, where our economy, our politics, our way of doing life is still tied, very much tied to how we believe the world should work. And when I say world, I mean America, how America should work, how it began, and what citizens should do. Right? What I'm saying is religions function very similarly. They have a belief, but how the world comes into existence, how it runs, what people do, and how to maintain order. Is that making sense? Okay, are my American examples making sense to you? Okay, they're intimately tied. I mean, it's not an accident that we keep all of that stuff printed on the money. Right? It's not just and a lot of people get all up in arms about in God, we trust as if that's a reference the Christian deity. It's just a reference to power more than anything. It reminds you that the American system is endowed by some kind of divine force, whatever that divine force is, therefore, don't screw with it.

If God be with us,

Don't f with us? Isn't that how the phrase goes? Something like that?

Just joking.

Any questions so far? Going once, going twice. Alright. So let's look at some of these systems. How do these systems work, I'm going to look at some of what I would call Olympic tales. And the reason I say this is because these come from various eras of the Stone Age, and what I want you to keep remembering, there's always cosmology, there's always cosmology needs. There's always anthropologists always political structures. In ancient stone age societies, we don't really even have societies we have small groups of travelling or embedded settled cave dwellers, right. So one of the things you'll notice is that religion is a lot more successful and functional, when it's shared in groups, you don't really have a thing such as privatised religion,

ever.

It just doesn't

exist. Now, you might argue that in the contemporary society, you could have that I could have a privatised religion. But generally speaking, religion served a very important social function in the in ancient society. So let's look at some of the key elements of Stone Age era stuff. I want to talk about these in pieces. Okay. One of the first religious practices we see in the ancient world has to do with death. Right burial. If you want to know where religion begins, it's it's at the graveside.

It's the most sacred

of religious traditions, because it deals with the edges of space and time, space and time stop where death starts. So if we're trying to develop a group, and survive in this little unit, death is that edge. It's a climactic moment,

and really defines who we are and what we do.

In ancient in some of the caves that have been scoured for

Palaeolithic

artefacts, burial instruments, burial sites were the most formative things that have been found. And one of the things that was notable in discovering of early Neanderthals was that the dead were placed in a foetal position, curled up in with their knees pulled up under a stone tablet, and usually had some of their tools with them their hunting tools with him. Because in an ancient world, when you cross this threshold of death, you don't really leave, you're just in a different dimension. So you need to go with your tools, but you're also going back into the womb, in their societies, there seems to be this belief that the earth is a womb or is a female, and it gives birth. Two things. This has naturally congruent with their experience, right? When they see something come into existence, it comes from this woman's body, and it's round.

If you've seen a pregnant woman, it's round, right?

Well, they're thinking that this world that they live in, things come from this earth. And so the earth is giving birth, so that the world the nature of the habitat, this world around them has a female sense

to it.

And if you're going to die and go back into it, you just reverse the process, you go back into egg like shape, and you go right back into the womb. This is not incredibly unusual. I mean, it's highly sensible. But we're talking about cave dwelling people that lived in groups, small groups, right? We're not talking about gigantic societies, we're talking about families.

And oftentimes, what's really

interesting is these burial sites are actually in the caves where they continue to live. There burying people where they live. And in some cases, so some artefacts show that there are cups, and other food items near the burial sites, because they would go and literally provide food for the dead.

Like, they're part of the meal, which is totally

foreign to us. But in their mind, death is not a departure. It's just a different state. And so your family is always with you. Because in the ancient mindset, the world is about balance. If this is the living world, and this is the dead world, you you cycle, back and forth, and you got to keep things in balance. So popping the Andrews all Geico was over here, we got to get him food and whatnot, because he's on the other side of the line, we got to keep everything in harmony and everything in balance.

Their patterns are very different.

In our world, death is a shameful thing.

So we hide it.

And that's changed a lot over the last 50 years.

You live in an Appalachian

region where you probably still see cemeteries go closer to urban life, and you'll see less and less unless

we hide death

will hide the dying. We don't like to talk about them. And their world is very different. There are part of things because those dying people have an essence or a power that they want to make sure keeps the world stable. Because what does the caveman or cave woman experience other than the cycles of climate, which is critical? climate is critical to their experience. Why? Because you're going to have a rainy season and dry season a cold season and a warm season that then it always repeats itself. So naturally, they think the life death cycle is on repetition to and any repetition, you want to go around even like a tire. That's not even it's a boom, boom, boom, you want it to roll evenly. Everything needs to be in harmony. If the cycle is going to be nice and smooth. Everything needs to stay in harmony. Are you following me here now? Okay. So you can see their cosmology is harmonious, they're cosmological look at the world is it needs to kind of be stable. Their cosmogony is fertile and female. things come into existence from some kind of birthing process. These are all conjectures. By the way, no one knows for sure what the Stone Age man or woman thought, it's impossible. The best we can get is based on artefacts that we've recovered in cave paintings, but we noticed a significant change. notice a pattern that I'm trying to illustrate.

What if you're a caveman? What do you have to deal with? What do you need?

Good. Which means what? What do you get the food from?

Right? Good animals? There has to be some relationship with animals.

Good. What else do okay, you need protection? Okay.

One party,

right. Maybe some will call that.

Yeah, that's good. That's good way to say it, we need some kind of energy. That's good. I like that.

Right? You may need you need water.

Yeah, we got that we have protection, we have shelter. So all of these things. And now you start to see stuff pop up, like burial. So all of this stuff remains in balance. So burial makes sense, right? Because you're trying to maintain when these things come and go, water will come and go through seasons and climate changes, protection will come and go based on whether we live in a cave, by the way, a cave kind of looks like a birthing canal. I don't know if there's any merit to that, but it's worth exploring. So you have all these sorts of, you have all these sorts of things animals are a part of this variable is a part of this, the feed out of the foetal position as a part of this, because you're being birthed from the earth, through water, and blood, right, whether that's dirt and water, whatever, you've got all these pieces going together, you change any of these pieces, and all of a sudden, some of these rituals like burial begin to change. And one of them that begins to change is because you enter into a new piece, and that is climate change, all of a sudden, the world starts getting warmer. And when the world starts getting warmer, now we can do what with our food.

A huge shift occurs.

We can get food from what, from far from plants, right? All of a sudden, in a certain stage of ancient development, climate starts to get warmer, and then on now all of a sudden, you have plants that you're getting food from, which changes the ritual

of hunting,

which changes adding

an axe, in the burial procedure

Are you following, and you start to see flowers, in burial sites, patterns are starting to change. And this is a point that I keep making this is the only thing that's worth learning in the class is habitus. All of these things feed each other, they all make sense together. And when one changes, the others morph.

Well, the same thing is happening to America, that

same thing happens here. You have all these, these ideas about freedom and war and revolution and blah, blah, blah. And let's say something dramatic changes. Our political system is adjusted certain laws are adjusted certain beliefs in if some research comes out that the constitution was a forgery.

You talking about the ship hit in the sand, right?

That's a euphemism, thank you. Have I used that one already in here, she had hit the fan. If you didn't get it, that's what it means. All right, then all of a sudden, things are going to get nasty. So their systems, they all go together, we start to see cave etchings and drawings. And a lot of times some of the drawings are of animals that are threatening. And so you might see a picture of some kind of bison like element that is on a cave. And so the idea is that we're supposed to resist the power of the force of this bison or if we kill it, we can take its life force. Right? So consumption in their world, remember, if every is supposed to be harmonious balance, we want to make sure the cycles of the seasons go smoothly, that if we take the life of this thing, and we kill it, when we consume it, we also participate in its force, it becomes a part of us. So it's not energy, you know, the whole scientific idea, energy is not lost, right? It's just sort of redistributed,

same for them.

So you take on the life, life force of that thing. There's also indication that some of the brains were taking out a certain Neanderthals, there's some speculation that they cannibalised the brains of the deceased, for belief that they were consuming their life, taking it right, that it becomes a part of them. Now, if you think this is ridiculous, and this is a weird anthropology or a weird cosmology, I beg you to consider maybe some of you are in a Christian tradition. And you practice what you call the Lord's Supper.

Where you eat

what you call flesh, and drink, what you call blood, so that you can do what partake of your God.

Hello.

It's the same pattern, your belief is that somehow this is feeding you and you're becoming at one

with your deity.

It's not unusual. It's part of what we do.

We do this.

Let's slip away from religion for a second and go back to society.

Right here we do it.

What's it called? Yeah, where we dress up, God forbid, which is god awful thing. These little elementary schools where people dress up like Native Americans, which Please dear god stop doing that. We dress up and we reiterate this old meal and we believe at some level by partaking in this meal, we are sharing in the experience of some foregone era. So eating we still celebrate feasting like this just for them feasting was actually partaking of the Body or

partaking with.

Same with animals. By the way, it's fun, right? In the same in this stone society, you have animals that were threatening to you, because they have life force that kept in balance, like they can kill you or you can kill them. Right. And those animals throughout time and religion get co opted or adopted into religions as a way of being emblematic of power systems. So like you've seen this in Egypt, right? A new base looks kind of like a jackal. Or you have like Falcons, or Eagles or things like that. Stretch it all the way up to now we still do it, don't we? What's on the dollar? What's on the money? What animal, the eagle, they all saying powerful Soaring Eagle which rises above the dirt below, right. And you do this? Every time you go to a football game, and you see smokey, 10 or 19. Or you're part of the I don't know, teams have mascots. They're still, it's like a religious phenomenon that has never gone away, that we still take animals and treat them as that they're part of the threat to our life. And we still pretend with the sort of fake symbolic gestures that we're still reliving the old ways. And like so when I play against the Rams. Yeah, I'm playing against St. Louis. I'm planning as those people in those teams, but it's like to pretend like we're conquering the dangerous ram who might kill us, right? So we're still participating this and that way back, when that's a very old thing. But why in their world is that because literally, the animal would kill you.

Right? And you eat it or it eats you.

What's interesting is there are these rituals wherever these burial sites are. And some suggestion is that they associated these rituals with music, right? Because they would, and we don't know what kind, whether there were instruments or not. But it seems to be the case because certain parts of the cave have better acoustics than the others. And research indicates that some of the rituals were performed in the acoustic parts of the cave, which means there might have been chanting, right? There might have been vocalisation. Whether we know what those words were, they were just sounds. Either way is fine. But you'll notice Same thing happens all through this.

Right? We have chanting right here.

What do we call them?

Christmas carols? You got it. Right.

We have chanting we still have religious traditions. So what I'm doing here is I'm showing you on this timeline, you can start to see a mythos emerge. You're starting to see a pattern, you starting to see a cosmology, start to see a cosmology, starting to see an anthropology, what we do, why we do what we do, helps us read religions a little bit better. You will also find a cave some fertility figurines. Now these come from various different areas of the limbic times, fertility figurines again, because I said there was a strong association with the female and the earth is giving life the mother goddess starts to be a big deal. fetishize tools now if you are thinking, oh my god, they strapped each other down like 50 Shades of Grey. That's not what fetishized means. So what is fetish?

Like, I don't want to say 50

Shades of Grey fetishize is when you give an object a spiritual power. Right. So when you fetishize an object, the reason people say, Oh, he has a foot fetish. What they mean by that is he thinks feet have some sort of power over him.

Right, which turns into a sex act.

But historically, what the word means is that anytime we fetishize an object, we think it has special power. It's the same feeling you get when you walk down the mall and you see the model in the window. There's this instantaneous moment that that garment will somehow transmute the power that you see with your eyes, and the elegance and the superiority will somehow be transposed to you if you buy it. Companies rely on fetishization. We fetishize objects all the time. And if you don't believe this tickle me Elmo, or any kind of Christmas thing that pops up where a kid has to have it. Right. And you do the same thing. I got to have that car. There's something about that car that's different than this car we fetishize objects. Well, this is no different in the Stone Age world, where the tools were fetishized. So if I have this x, or this hunting tool of this spear, not only does the animal have a life force, I have a life force. But the tool does to its meal near right. That's Thor's hammer. It's the same idea. It bears some kind of force to it. And the key for them still is, everything must remain in balance and in harmony. If things get too disrupted out of that harmony, we end up in chaos, you start to see the emergence and certain later lyric eras of shamans of people who were specialists in the life force, right? Who knew a little bit more, and they knew the secrets of the energy of the world. And I like that you said energy a minute ago, Mr. buildings, because that bears on why they would see some material acts like fire, as similar to things like spirit is because whatever energy they're seeing in the material plane is also at work in the so called spiritual plane. And I talked about feasting with the dead a second ago, you following me so far?

Yes or no? Okay, you got

it means like a priest or a religious figure who's a specialist. Right. And we have these two in society, right? We call them pundits, media, Celebrity, we have different kinds of shamans, different kinds of people who are specialists in the American myth hosts, they used to be history teachers, they used to be politicians, now they become celebrities, celebrities somehow have their finger on the pulse of the American myths, and therefore we listen to them as if they're like half priestly status. So am I comfortable so far? The key again, idea that I can't reiterate enough is what I'm trying to show you is not whether this is right or wrong, but how systems work, how they feed each other. All these systems have cosmology is because margin is anthropology. They have political structures. But one particular distinction about the Stone Age world is there's no real large grouping. Because the climate didn't allow it. There's only certain mental people you can have in a cave. You can't have too many people together a hunting gathering society, because you don't have enough food. You've watched survivor enough to figure that out. Right? They get pissed, who's going to eat what we got to get rid of these people, they break off into factions, when the climate changes, and all of a sudden, it's a little warmer, and you can eat off of plants, your societies can get larger, you following. Or if you live in a part of the world where there's a constant source of food, because stuff grows like crazy. And that's what you have in Egypt. Egypt has the Nile. And because every year the Nile floods, that means the dirt around the Nile is very fertile and stuff can grow. So Egypt, you see societies that you didn't see before with Neanderthal folks because they can sustain their food supply, which is why they become a political power. Are you following or No? Okay. So some themes in ancient religions a practice that's going to bug me

Okay, some themes in lyric religious practice.

Hopefully, it'll pop back up what you're saying is again, harmony, right? harmony is a key element and it's behind that black thing. Hopefully it'll pop up if you can't see it says harmony right behind that. I think that's going to go away. I don't know if it will or not, yeah, harmony, the harmony between the elements harmony between life and death. Again, we don't know this. There's no book. All we're doing is piecing together material elements that have been discovered try to figure out what was going on. Why cups with dead people, y axis and the burial site? Why the foetal position? why certain inscriptions on a cave, it seems to be that there's some belief and having harmony with the natural world. You want to stay in harmony with it, and that natural world is your mama. And you don't bad talker. Right? That's the idea. And when she comes calling you curl up in the foetal position, you go back to her. There's also this idea of passage, because this word is cyclical. Do you know what I mean by cyclical recycles, it's like a loop. So passages are very important, moving from this stage of childhood to this stage of adulthood, moving from life to death, whenever you're going across those passages, or moving from the rainy season to the dry season, or moving from the cold season to the warm season. passages in that cycle or momentous right there critical. Now, if you don't believe this, will come back to this in a second. But you can see how passages are really important. Notice how your entire American life changes. Right about somewhere in here, it starts to really heat up. Because October kicks off the holidays. Now football starts to kick in here. But that doesn't really affect the whole world, this stuff or the all American this stuff does, because it affects every Walgreens, you walk in, right? until you start to see a cycle of passages we've passed through our pre you know, the agricultural cycle of the fall is coming and death comes with it. And then we pass through our birth as a nation, and then we pass through our birth as a people who like to buy stuff, right? all this kind of stuff rotate. So these passes are very important. So this is an old ancient religious concept. And you'll see this in certain religious practice of religious traditions that we look at. You'll notice Oh, I see in the Judaic tradition, feasting is very important. There are certain moments along the timeline, or Ramadan, right, a season of fasting, you'll see certain passages that are important we see this all the way back in the Stone Age era, manna or mana, I guess, is the more proper thing. This is not what your your experience with like Moses manna, this is mana which is like an ancient word that means like life force or essence, this is something we also see in the Stone Age tradition, that there's some there's some sort of

it

that you have, or that the world has that X has, and that thing needs to be kept in balance and passed around. Right, which is what I call fetish sizing. A second ago, there's also real focus on femininity in the ancient world. And that's because birth is the most visible means of seeing how things come into being it's the most cosmic Sonic phenomenon that things are born. And so we asked how and why and and what does it mean for something to be born and, and how the women clearly are the ones in this world who performed that. So you was some scholars believe that when the climate changes, and you start to go more to a domesticated lifestyle, where societies are gathered around food,

that men

start to fear that they're going to lose their importance as hunters and gatherers, because the women were primarily the farmers. And that men started pushing arco religions, it started for grounding the masculine elements of religions, because they were afraid of losing grip

to female dominance. Now,

we don't know whether that's true or not. But there are a lot of scholars to speculate that, that men were afraid they were just going to be insignificant, because the women bore life. And they also bore life by way of agriculture. And so the closer you notice that the closer you get towards urbanity, and city life and city structures, the more political life becomes, and the more phallic it becomes, you know, what I mean by family

didn't mean to draw you a picture.

Okay? For you, younger folks, that means the male part, right? It becomes more phallic in nature, the more solidified it becomes, because that some people believe it's because men were felt threatened. But it is kind of interesting that the closer you get to city power structures, the more masculine eyes things become, especially in architecture. And you see that in Egypt. When I've said this before about the monuments, right, we talked about the obelisk before. I mean, we all know what this is. And so you're starting to see that more and more and more, as you get closer to more developed societies. There's also really interesting shift in the late sort of the Neolithic eras, or what we might call, I guess, upper Palaeolithic and Mesolithic towards taming nature and somehow exercising power over it. Remember, in in the oldest stone ages, you're highly dependent upon nature, right? You have to survive, the animal comes your way or doesn't. So you want to seek harmony. If climate starts changing, and you can have more technological control over the earth, then you start thinking that you've been endowed by some kind of religious right to rule that Earth.

You see how that shifts?

So one system might believe no, we belong together with the with the earth Kumbaya, we all want to hold hands with the dirt, you know, from dirt, we came into dirt we shall return. And then over here,

you say, Well, you know,

we can actually control we can we can build an aquifer, we can irrigate, we can figure out ways to control water. And once we can do that we no longer need to rely on the earth provide our sustenance, we can take what we need and use what we need. So that religious system that's more technologically advanced is going to have a different belief about anthropology. Oh, here the anthropology is, we belong to the earth, we're going to die, we better be obedient to it over here is your anthropology is you have a right to rule the earth. You see the distinctions are now so all the systems are in a rail related how we view climate so on and so forth. Notice that's changing for many of you in your religious circles. Now that climate is becoming unsustainable, and there's talk about a future Fallout with all of this, there's a return conversation about what humans are for. In the 80s and 90s. It was much more Reagan era,

we rule because everything was fine.

The earth is responding to our demands. Once the climate starts changing, we think Oh shit, we may not survive this all of a sudden the anthropology changes. And it's you know, we belong to the earth the earth is our sister. You see the resurgence of pagan traditions, where people are more interested in fertility rights and eco friendly sort of religious perspectives. So you're seeing Cisco Systems are highly dependent on other elements within the system.

Does that make sense?

Alright, so let's look at the next one. The fun one right Egypt Israel, the fun storeys are we have something in Egypt that's totally different. Ryan we have writing we have hieroglyphs, you all know what hieroglyphs are? Write

them in sacred writing.

It doesn't mean up.

Okay, so a hybrid Lyft is a pictogram. Do you know what you know the difference in a pictogram in the video, Graham. All right, this is this is for free. Again, always say this and will charge you on your tuition for this. A pictogram is whenever something that's etched looks like the thing it's supposed to represent. Okay, so it's like an icon on your phone. So an icon in your phone is picked a graphic, if you want to smile to say, you use that picture. If you want to be surprised to someone, right? Use that picture, which is different than this. These are video grab any overdramatic. The shapes of those markings do not necessarily refer to an image they refer to as sound and that sound refers to an idea. You follow me? That smell of all those sounds in your mind conjures up this notion,

but it doesn't represent. Okay,

so these are what we would call video grammes. How Did any of you see? What's the movie where Amy Adams and aliens aliens come? Amy Adams is a linguists What does it call arrival? Did any of you seen arrival? Okay, so an arrival these aliens come and they they try to communicate with the humans, but they use circular Lyft forms like this. And their video dramatic right? Because they're not visually represent tentative of any phenomena. And they rather they're like little, like, subtle changes in the circle. Like the alien will draw something that looks like this, but has little things peeling off of it. And the next one looks like this. And it only has one peeling off of it. Which you think oh my god, how can anybody read that stuff? And I beg you to consider this. Like, how many little kids are like QP I can't tell how can you tell? Which one is that?

Right? Do we have very

subtle distinctions in our programmes to write if you can, somehow you can figure out whether it's an A or an Oh, just by

this little thing.

It follow him saying

so we're very versatile to grammes hieroglyphs are not video ramps are pictograms their images,

right they represent the thing they're like icons.

But that's really cool because we get a lot more from Egypt's background than we would have gotten otherwise we get a lot more I guess insight into the religious practices Now not all hieroglyphs are picture graphic but but by and large they are

okay. But it good so far.

Which by the way,

some some media grammes are historically picked a graphic like they started that way but they ended up not being that way. I don't know if Arabic or Latin ised Arabic numbers something every numerous Latin eyes letters have that in history or not? Maybe Cyrillic, I don't know. Alright, so some key elements of the Egyptian tradition. Why is Egypt's religious system different than the stone? One big thing, water, agriculture, and Nile are critical. Well, how do agriculture and now affect architecture, now you can build bricks. Because now

you have water and you have mud,

you're not looking for a cave to dwell in. So the perspective changes, you can actually build buildings that stick up from the ground to show that you now are settling on the ground, not diving into it for protection. The Stone Age man buries himself in the ground through cave I mean that's in the earth, in order to be one with it, in order to protect himself. The Egyptian, on the other hand, has a provision of water which allows him to build on top of that land. It's the deep I mean, you if you looked at a hobbit house, right in the Shire, and how Look how those people how Tolkien represents those people is very agrarian, and fun loving and easy and small. Right now come over to a colonial picture of a big house with gigantic pillars. It feels very forceful, and dominating. The house feels imposing and powerful. So once you have new agricultural conditions and new topographical conditions, and new climate conditions, now you religious perspective changes in Egypt, you're not going to see things like we need to maintain the life force of the bison or so forth, you're going to see a little bit more of a power play a little bit more interest in domination, a little bit more issue of force and control. Not completely, but somewhat. You also see the emergence of gnomes, and these are like little societies think of them as I don't know, little municipalities and they have regional deities. So now remember, the caveman is that one with the earth and the earth is the deity right? The Earth has the life force, and everything has the life force, we're all one. Well in in an Egyptian region, if you can separate into factions and are 45 people can live over here. And you're 45 people can live over here. And we can do that without never talking to each other, then we have our own God you have your own.

Because the number of Gods

is connected to the number of different little societies

because that God is their protector of their little society. So people don't just pop on the scene and go let's be Polly theistic and believe in a lot of Gods because I have some main monotheistic Christian friends that make me mad, and I just don't like, right, that doesn't happen. That's ridiculous. What happens is, you have a change in climate change landscape and a change in theological things and that sort of theological orientation. If we have our society, we have our God who protects us, they have theirs. And so what ends up happening if they have theirs, and I have mine, you have the danger of going to war, right? But at this point, what you do in Egypt is you just like so your Gods together into one gigantic storey. My God is a little private manifestation of their god of their god of their God and of their God. Are you following what I'm saying here? This is what we think about governors, or senators. We have one presiding official, and we treat the smaller officials as sort of extensions

of that one follower.

And then the local ones is extension of that that's not a hard phenomenon for us to think of. But we have this to we have our small societies and a smaller little ruling figured everybody gets so far. All right. So you start to see the emergence of regional deities, you also see much more aggressive cosmic journeys in Egypt, we're going to look at a couple of them. Now there are competing cosmology, what is it cosmology? how the world is what created how it works, there are excuse me how it's made. Now how it works. So that's because monster because modern cosmology, there's multiple different ones. Okay? Just like there is for America. Some people might say was founding fathers, other people might say, it's something else, for example, one of the great alternative storeys about American traditions. And I love to tell this to my grandma every Thanksgiving, because she gets mad when I drink beer. As I'm like, Look, this is my, this is what I should be doing on Thanksgiving, right? I don't know if you know this or not. But many scholars believe that the way you make it across the ocean, if you can't get food, you don't have enough salt to maintain the preservation of food, the one thing you can bring with you is beer. Because if you need carbohydrates, if you need sugars, if you need calories, then you drink, right, so you have gigantic jugs of beer. And the theory is that the the original American settlers, we're going to go to St. Augustine, Florida where the Spaniards had been, but they run

out of beer.

So they stopped in the north, because they had to stop and go on to land and find some other stuff to brew. That's an alternative cosmogony, right. And it's told through the lens of beer.

The point of that that I'm trying to make here is

there are multiple different storeys, about the origins of things. And the same thing goes with Egypt. So let's look at a couple of fun ones. I'll go to them in just a second. Another. Another important idea is the idea of my art. And this is justice or order. The Egyptians have a high view of irregularity. Remember when I said anthropology, cosmology, cosmology, and politics, because if you're going to keep the world working the way it's supposed to based on how it was created, what humans are supposed to do, you need to have a rigid political structure that keeps things stable. And that stability over chaos is called an odd. They have a high belief in the sun, because the sun you can see is in juxtaposition to the Nile,

right? You have water from the Nile.

But you also need the sun to make things grow and have long day so that we can work and labour, the sun is hugely important to the Egyptian tradition. So again, all this stuff is connected, where they live, how they live, what technical things are available to them. It's not just they believe in almond raw, they believe in ISIS know, it's all part of an interconnected system of a way to do life. It's all part of the same mythos. They have a belief in the afterlife, which is kind of interesting and new. Not completely know. But a lot of scholars think it has something to do with their arid climate, which is interesting. Why would an arid climate lead you to believe in an afterlife? Well, in an arid climate, things can be preserved for longer.

Because what deteriorates things

moisture, right? Things get bacteria have get bacterial infections, they decay, they rot under moisture, and an arid climate. You think about like the skull of the cow that's sitting out in the middle of the Texas tumbleweed and it's preserved for a long time because the air might be a little bit drier. So some scholars think that the afterlife idea emerges alongside of their climate that things can be preserved for longer periods of time. And of course, you know, what's the one obvious phenomenon where Pete where, what ritual do they perform for preservation? Right mummification, right? You're basically drying out the body, disembowelling it, drying it out, keeping it in pristine condition. And so some scholars believe that there's a relationship between the climate and the afterlife for them.

So let's talk about

let's talk about cosmology and detail because this is important. cosmology, these typically take one of four forms, okay, the first form is going to be generally just what we would call creation. And this means there's this dead and nerve matter sitting there and the God

is going to mould it like Klay,

whatever it is, it could be Adams, it can be soil, it can be air, it can be anything. That's one Cosmo janyk perspective. different religions have those. That's one way of doing it. What that's one way The earth is created, or the world comes into being another one is tail Maki. And this means the gods fight with each other.

And if the gods fight with each other,

one kills the other and makes the world after that.

This is huge

in ancient religions, especially in Mesopotamia,

the gods are always fighting each other.

for supremacy.

don't really see it as much in Egypt, you get a little bit of it in the political system and not in the ancient ancient stuff. Another cosmic Sonic model is dictation.

A God speaks it.

The Egyptian god Pathak

speaks the world into being. This is where we get the word, you know, dictation dictum, dictum means word, right? is we get the word dictator. The idea is that the dictator can we call somebody a dictator, not because they're just a despot and rule over people, because the belief is when they stand up and say it, it is so right. The dictator says it must happen. Because they spoke it, it must come to me. Same way with ancient deity sometimes that the world is created through speech. Another obvious one is sexual generation, what you would call procreation. Having a little God babies. And that's very common to remember all of these ancient religions live in worlds where fertility is hugely important for food. And for people, the way we get to the next generation in the next generation of the next generation is that that tree has to have babies, the corn has to have babies, we have to have babies. That's the way we got to do it. This is why an old Mayan traditions, certain excavations, I don't know if you've seen this or not. We'll talk about this another time. excavations find skulls of children that are cone shaped, right. And they do this because the children's head they put things on their head to squeeze their skulls, so that their head would grow into a cone, because it looks like porn.

Literally,

the idea is, you're praising the gods who provide the corn for your livelihood. And you're basically instead of sacrificing your children back to the gods, they're an image of your worship to those deities. Does this make sense? Now you think that's nuts, but I beg you to consider that every December 20. You take your kids to the mall to be baptised by a white bearded man to make sure that they're inculcated into the tradition to Ryan that white bearded man is right. So we have those traditions to it's easy for us to look at other things and say That's bizarre, but just remember, what's the

system? What's the system in which that dwells? Now,

Egypt has a little bit of all of these. So let's look at a couple.

The first one is the storey of autumn. Autumn is like a sun deity and they're like five or six different sun deities in Egypt. So don't be confused. You're like I thought it was almond. I thought it was raw. I thought it was. So they're all like blended in together. But this is an interesting one. The belief is one of the storeys goes like this that in the beginning there was noon, and then was this chaos or this water now why would an Egyptian hold this cosmic janyk storey? What's what are they looking at all day every day? The Nile? Right? They're very familiar with water. So say in this chaotic, chaotic water. The Ben Ben emerges. And the Bindman is a pyramid ik hill or mound that exists in the middle of the chaos. And I tell you the storey already a little bit, okay. there's a there's a hill or a mound, right? a pyramid mound. Because remember, if the sun is a deity, you want to be closer to the deities, the deities are up. You get closer to them. That means you need hills, okay? pyramids are built like that. They're like Mike, they're like manufactured mountains. Okay, so in this beginning storey, there's this been been on this Ben Ben is the god autumn, and autumn spreads his seed into the Ben Ben. Okay. And that is he does this by masturbating or by spitting in it. Now, if you're thinking gross, remember life force. Right? The idea is he's transferring some of his stuff his life essence, into that soil. In in that activity. He gives birth to shoe and definite air and moisture and definite gives birth to gab and newt. Right seat male and female, they copulate and have earth and sky. So what you're saying here is that the emergence of the gods is consistent with the cosmology. The world is structured the way that it is and the Egyptian mind, because it's also how the gods came to be. The earth is one, the sky is another, the moisture is one, the air is another. So when you live throughout the day, making sure you have enough food and air moisture, blah, blah, blah, you're not just participating in a cosmological cycle, but you're recalling the grand cosmology at the beginning of things. chestnut has, which has moisture has given. And that negates the great political gods, ISIS, Osiris and FD sunset, or sit. Have you heard of these before? He's a very famous, so if you've ever watching a movie, and it's all about some like Egyptian, angry Egyptian god coming back to kill people, it's usually from this level, not usually from this level. Okay, so these Isis and Osiris, by the way, in this world, brother and sister and lover are all the same thing. Okay. So don't be confused by that. The word that we use in ancient religious studies is concert. concert means like, partner. Okay, so the partner can be the sister, it can be the it can be lover, whatever. It's just common.

Now,

here's what I need you to see. And this isn't a little bit difficult.

If this is how the world begins, okay?

this other world begins seed

growth. Everybody got it? The world starts to take shape. Why is none called chaos as the water chaotic, because water is unformed and unpredictable. It doesn't have shape. You can't say where it starts and where it ends. Extremely difficult. It's dangerous because it's dark. And we don't know what's down there. It gives life but it takes life. The problem is you cannot structure a society on that. Right? Every time we try to live on water, we have to create our own little Ben Ben. We might call it an arc in some religious traditions. Okay. So this is the way it works. That basically the gods are starting to resist the chaos of the water and starting to provide order. And how do they provide order by separating things? they separate moisture, right and air, dry and wet. Separate drying wet, which we could go right left. How about that we'll do this a separate dry and wet, separate Earth. Excuse me, sky and earth, you're starting to see organisation. you following me? Because in the Egyptian mindset, this is orderly and this is chaotic. This is the cosmic Sonic, this is the cosmological. If this, this is where we live, if you're an Egyptian, we need to live in this where there's a clear distinction between earth and sky. Dark, dry and wet. Because of those things get confused. It's very hard to stay alive. Right? For example, if you go from wet to on fire, if those things blend, you die, right? You You, you were here, now you're here. So you want to keep things separated and organised when things blend. It's dangerous because it's unpredictable. So you need a political system. That's going to organise that, okay. So in their mind, the political system is Isis and Osiris are like the great queen and king of the ancient gods. They're given the response Cyrus is given the responsibilities the mail is given the responsibility to rule. Okay. But, like is the case in many storeys, you don't just get rid of chaos. Chaos store sort of gets assigned to a sneaky little tricky figure. Right? Whether that's Loki, or whether that's Seth, the brother, once this spot, excuse me, the brother wants to be in charge. Now thesis is sort of inactive. Set once the position because it's a holdover from this chaos. Okay, this chaos now is reformulated as a conflict between two brothers. Formerly, chaos was the indiscernible group of water, or abyss. Now, it's the chaos of violence. In the ancient religious mindset, violence and chaos are part and parcel of the same thing. So when you defeat the violence, you're also defeating the chaos. And when you're defeating the chaos, you're recycling in re engendering the old cosmic Sonic storey of how we came to be.

Are you following?

You can't tell me that's not the same thing over here.

Every time a country wins a war. They come out with the same old regalia, remembering remembering their first wars and linking them. We made these Iraqis just like we freed ourselves on the right, there's a strong, there's a connection. That's how it works. They do the same thing. So here's the storey about Seth and Isis and Osiris. Basically, what ends up happening is Seth kills Osiris, and cuts his body up into multiple pieces, scattered and scatters them all over, which is kind of interesting, all over Egypt, like seeds, which you remember me telling you that Egypt has these little smaller societies, right? So you can see how they all get connected. IO saw Osiris is just sort of scattered everywhere. And that leads to his seed being inadvertently scattered, which makes the land grow right into all these little communities. And ISIS goes back with net face and gets all of those viruses body parts, puts him back together, revives him, copulate with him. Right. Not for indicates they make love. And they have Horace, and Horace becomes the king. And Seth is dethroned. And what's interesting is Seth is castrated in the fight between Horace and Seth. But why?

No more seed.

Right? He can't rule.

He can't rule without being able to fertilise life. So Horace becomes the architect pickle figure of the game. We'll talk about it more in a second. So it's really fascinating. These cosmology knees bleed over into the political structures. They explain why the political structures where that is, and all religious societies have this at some level, whether they have a kingship or not, there's some kind of structuring of political and moral life. Normal, some other cosmology needs these are fun. Not is the storey of almond, or season autumn. Interesting. There's another storey of the quad. I'll be done in a second, I promise. There's another storey of the quad, which is this belief that there are eight deities and four pairs, and they all live in the water. And they are the ones who birthed the Ben Ben to

come out of the water.

They call the OG do odd, and they produce an egg inside of the Ben Ben, and it pops out and it bears the original God. So instead of the or the sun sort of spitting or masturbating on to the mound, you have this egg emerging out of it. And inside that egg is the original very ruler, God. And in some cases, that original God is the God for which is the God of the moon and wisdom, but you can see the juxtaposition to the moon and

the sun. Right?

What's interesting in some other narratives thought also brings was writing to the people which is why wisdom starts to emerge. That's some of the belief Why am I telling you all these weird old storeys? Why are we not talking about this ism? Because I'm trying to show you how religious structures work, how the land climate all the stuff interrelate into the storeys so hard for us to see. Now if I just popped out and said, here's what Jewish people believe. It's that's no good. It doesn't tell us kind of how the system works and I want you to be able to think that way. There's also storeys about aman Potok mentioned. Let's see, that's only for that I have there. They're not super duper important. But I want you to know that there are other cosmology nice. I want to show you one more quick thing and then we'll go part. We ended 1205. Right. Okay. You all might have to keep me on that. Sometimes I'll forget I'll get so excited. Okay, but do it like an adult? Just like bark. All right, can I move forward to the next frame? No. Yes. Okay. Anyway, objections Going once, twice. Okay. Well, if I can get to the next one, okay. So the utilities really quickly again, the the storey continues. Osiris and ISIS rule set kills a Cyrus and scatters his body. It has an adverse effect because it actually spreads his seed all over Egypt. Nafisa and I ISIS try to dethrone says so they do so by they collect and revive Osiris and Osiris right before he's put off into the underworld. A Bear's Horace horses, there's their sign. Cyrus ends up used to rule on Earth, but then he's basically given his twilight of his career. His golden age or his later days is spent ruling the underworld. Okay, so he was a guy, he was the God on earth, and then it becomes the god of the underworld. Horace becomes the ruler on earth, and Horus in their mind inhabits

the pharaohs.

Every Pharaoh is a recapitulation of Horus. So in their mind, the king who keeps order in the society is the same king that was birthed from the ancient Cosmos Sonic storeys. Something sense and that's how order will be maintained. Order will be maintained on the earth, which is Egypt, by way of the original Gods ruling, because order must rule over chaos. So Pharaoh is Horace, and then when Pharaoh dies, he becomes a Cyrus. Because now he goes enrols the underworld. So Pharaohs huge key, their political structure, because my ology because margins are all connected. Here's the one thing you should be asking, what about all the people?

What are humans for?

And the weird thing is in these traditions, there's not a whole lot of talk about humans. That comes later. You'll see that in other situations like ancient Judaism, there's a focus on humans being created a certain way. It's very different. It's not is focused on the political structure. Why? Maybe because of climatological changes, maybe because cultural changes and ships, different scenarios will lead to different outcomes.

Last thing, there's I,

ISIS is important, because each year she cries in memory of Osiris, and that's why the Nile floods, and that's why they eat. So the storey, Ryan genders that over and over and over. Now, I got one minute to say something. For you all do that packing thing that's so obnoxious. We do this too. If American missiles is centred on purchasing power, notice that what purchasing power promises you you have the power to get what you want, be what you want, how you want, ok. October 31, is not about Damon's not in America, maybe if you were Nordic, or maybe if you lived in the British Isles. But October 31 is about being what you want to be. We dress up sexy nurse, not demon, right? We pretend to be whatever we want to be. Halloween is the promise of masquerading yourself as a thing that you've always desired. So in the first stage of the holiday cycle, you're invited into the American mythos, be what you want. Thanksgiving reminds you that you rule whatever land that you want, even if that means pushing people out. And how do you do it, you feast on whatever you want, you eat as much as you want. It's your opportunity to indulge in selfhood. And you're marketed to the whole time it's being sold to you, October commercials and the Great Pumpkin, you've all watched Charlie Brown enough.

And it's being fed to you every commercial and Senate.

This has been fed to you quite literally and metaphorically, because the great moment of thanksgiving leads to the great moment of Black Friday, which is the inauguration of the buying season. You can buy what you want, you can buy for other people and they're going to buy for you. Then you go through the great orgasmic exchange of goods, right and everybody needs a cigarette afterward. Don't know what it is, you're so tired. Then you start the cycle, you come back here finally, that the holiday season caps off right about here. It's not in January 1. Right here, you were starting to be marketed to that you could be what you want your marketing to more you can be what you want your marketing to more you can buy and purchase whatever you want. And right here the marketing season closes. What is it? Now, now, this is super bowl, because all of you will sit and say I don't care about the game. I want to watch the commercials. You're kept off. Finally your body has been made ready to just be marketed to for marketing sake. And every year you repeat it over and over and over. And you invite kids into the same ritual. And you start to see the American mythos. And then in summer, you spend all your goods and your money. You started over. We'll talk about more

next week or Thursday. Sorry. So y'all