Group This is an excerpt from something I wrote years ago, it has some excerpts from Tarnas' chapter "Ideas and Gods"
Western civilization has been builtupon these archetypes. The founders of modern science, for example, believed, in the concept of natural law because the laws of nature were thought to be created by a sovereighn God. The only reason a natural law was thought to be eternal was because it was believed to be a thought in the mind of an eternal God* Rupert Sheldrake puts it like this, "Although many people no longer believe in such a God, his universal laws have survived him to this day. But when we pause to consider the nature of these laws, they rapidly become mysterious. They govern matter and motion, but they are not themselves material nor do they move. They cannot be seen or weighed or touched; they lie beyond the realm of sense experience. They are potentially present everywhere and always. They have no physical source of origin. Indeed, even in the absence of God, they still share many of his traditional attributes. They are omnipresent, immutable, universal, and self-subsistent. Nothing can be hidden from them, nor lie beyond their power." Plato said, "everything is full of the gods", when he noticed a similar progression of ideas in his time. Mythology becomes philosophy, which becomes science and art. He often used mythology to teach his philosophy, deliberately blurring the distinction between the two. For example, Athena could be used interchangeably with wisdom, Eros with love, Apollo with insight, Ares with aggression, and Zeus with order and justice. Later, ideas about justice or order might show up in mathematical and scientific ideas, reflecting a belief in the balance and harmony of the cosmos. In fact, Chaos and Cosmos(order) were deites in greek mythology-along with Chronos (time), and Gaia (earth). This attempt to understand divinity, or ultimate reality, becomes the blueprint on which all further thought is based. "Depending on a specific dialogue’s context, Zeus, Apollo, Hermes Athena., Aphrodite, and the rest could signify actual deities, allegorical figure, character types, psychological attitudes. modes of experience, philosophic principles, transcendent essences, sources of poetic inspiration or divine communications, *objects of *conventional piety, unknowable entities, imperishable artifacts of the supreme creator, heavenly bodies, foundations of the universal order, or rulers and teachers of mankind." "More than only literalistic metaphors. Plato’s gods defy strict definition. In one dialogue serving as fanciful characters in a didactic fable, in another commanding an undoubted ontological reality. Not Infrequently, these personified archetypes are used in his most philosophically earnest moments. as <http://moments.as/> if the depersonalized language of metaphysical abstraction were no longer suitable when directly confronting the numinous essence of things." "Specific qualities of character are regularly attributed to specific deities, as in the Phaedrus, where the philosopher who seeks after wisdom is called a follower of Zeus, while the warrior who would shed blood for his cause is said to be attendant upon Ares" "Yet it was not just the language of myth in Plato’s dialogues, but rather the underlying functional equivalence of deities and ideas implicit in much of his thought, that made Plato so pivotal in the development of the Greek mind. As the classicist john Finley has noted, "Just as the Greek gods, variable though they may have been in cult, corporately comprise an analysis of the work!-Athena as mind, Apollo as random and unpredictable illumination, Aphrodite as sexuality, Dionysus as change and excitement, Artemis as untouchedness, Hera as settlement and marriage, Zeus as order dominant over all so the Platonic forms exist in their own right. lucent and eternal above any transitory human participation in them. ... (Like the forms, the gods) were essences of life, by contemplation of which any individual -life took on meaning and substance." "the distinct implication in many passages of the dialogues is that the imaginative faculty, both poetic and religious, was as useful in* *the quest for attaining knowledge of the world’s essential nature as any purely logical, let alone empirical, approach." The development of the calender, astrology and then astonomy, the alphabet, mathematics, law, and politics are all intimately related to ideas about the Creator. It has always been so- now, as in the beginning. And when the scientists and philosophers of the 17th century saw a fundamentally orderly and rational world, made up of indestructable, indivisible particles, and governed by uniform, absolute laws, they were seeing a world, "full of their God". They were seeing a world which they believed mirrored these divine attributes. And so these characteristics of God became archetypes through which man could understand the created world. Man was rational because he was made in the image of a rational God. The created world of nature must likewise obey rational laws, since thes rational laws were thoughts in the mind of a rational God. And since God was eternal, absolute, and indestructable, so were His thoughts-the universal laws which governed the natural world. Moq_Discuss mailing list Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org Archives: http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ http://moq.org/md/archives.html
