Bull from the sea

2600 BC, during the Bronze Age, the Greek-Armenian ancestors had not yet embarked upon the wine-dark sea. Far south in the Cyclades, the islands were still populated by who-knows. Semites? Egyptians? Anatolians?

Some islanders from the Syra-Keros Culture found a small outcrop off the latter; it's its own island now, "Dhaskalio". They thought it was a grand place for a monument. So they quarried Naxian marble - a lot of marble. And they remade Dhaskalio into a fitting platform for a pyramid.

The researchers report to The Independent that the top of the pyramid was empty, at first. Also, they found 1,000 ritually broken religious marble figurines (mainly depicting women in symbolic form), again brought there [to Naxos] from all over the Cyclades archipelago. The figurines were from all over the Aegean; there's also obsidian tools and "blades" from Melos.

I think, here, is the Threshing-Floor rife in protohistoric Bronze Age farming-culture. Syra-Keros harvested (emmer) wheat, which they needed to thresh. 2600 BC is too early for horses, and I doubt they ever had much of a horse-culture in Keros or even Naxos. The animals in these islands tend small, like the sheep. But the Aegean shores did, by then, have cattle (even if they weren't retaining water so well). So the threshers were oxen.

Further, I am scenting the iron tang of sacrifices in the area. In the preliterate Near East, it was common for symbolic figurines be taken to the site of trade. There, mediators smashed the figurines in such a way as could only be deliberate. There the defaced images remained, to confirm receipt of the cargo. If the figurines were humanoid ...

Later, the pious locals contented themselves with smashing figurines in effigy.

The view from Tblisi

The Christian monastery at "Mount Sinai" might not be at the Israelites' Sinai, but it has earned its own importance in Christian history. Because the Roman Christians unilaterally stuck the name "Sinai" onto the site, and because it was, well, kind of dry and out of the way; it preserved a lot of manuscripts not preserved elsewhere. In 2005, a set of MSS rediscovered 1975 were published. Many MSS were in Iberian Kartuli, sometimes called "Georgian" today; Stig Simeon R. Frøyshov in 2012 published a summary.

I am sure that followers of Robert Hoyland's work - and of Stephen Rapp's - were hoping that there might be some Islam As Others Saw It in there. Well there wasn't. It's mostly eastern Christian liturgy. The base content isn't interesting to Muslims and it's not much more interesting to us Latins, influenced by Charlemagne as we are. But what it does give us, is a snapshot of the liturgies of early Iberia. Also of the Kartuli language still spoken there. And, it happens, of the Christian liturgies of the Late Antique Near East.

Christianity didn't start from the Caucasus; it started from Roman-occupied southwestern Syria. When the Iberian nation accepted Christianity, they had to learn how do Christianity. The Laz on the Pontic coast were beholden to the Greeks, and the Hayots of Armenia accepted much from northeastern Syria; but the Iberians over the hills chose to bypass it all, and to take it from the source. Then just prior to the Crusades, Iberian monks in Muslim-ruled Palestine moved their libraries to Sinai: some from Jerusalem, some from the laura of Mar / Saint / Agios Saba. The Iberians saved pretty much all of it, with few losses. As a result, there's a lot of early Jerusalem Christian practice in Kartuli, which later Christian reforms subsequently changed in Iberia as much as in Palestine; which stayed the same in Kartuli at Sinai.

Although Kartuli-language Christianity in Palestine (before the move) stayed Palestinian, Frøyshov points out that back home in Iberia the locals were drawing from further east. The Kura River flows to the Caspian, remember. Via Heinzgerd Brakmann, the ordination prayers in the MS "Tbilisi NCM A-86", had taken on additional prayers from Mahoze / Madain. These Iraqi prayers got to Iberia at some point after the Testamentum Domini, of the 300s AD; and before the MS's transcription circa 1000 AD. There's also a "Ninevite fast", by which we must read early Islamic Mosul.

I expect that non-Hellenophone Melkites all along that post-Byzantine frontier from Jerusalem to Tblisi (they say თბილისი means "warm" but, consider "theo-polis"...) never did close the door against the Nestorians. Under Islamic rule came several Christian attempts at rapprochement between communions - All In This Together, You Know.

There's even a Kartuli rite of marriage at Sinai! For Latins these days this is of interest, in that we're now being told that our sacrament derives from the Synod of Diren in the 670s AD. That one is "Nestorian" but for those early days, I never could much extricate Nestorian doctrine from post-Toledo filioque Catholicism. I'd love to see what relationship the Jerusalem(?) rite has with the Nestorian sacrament.

UPDATE 7/13 10:45 PM - This noonish post can just go to 7/9 because, why not.

Our side of the mithaq

Back in the late 1990s, some Chomskyite Zappa-fan entered a competition on topic of whether God existed or not. His tack was to run for the office. He conceded he'd already lost the competition on account of begging the question. But he laid out his platform, at least; and compared that with the Biblical god's platform. He didn't win the competition, and based on Trump's own secular election he sure didn't get himself elected to that more elevated position; but he did get himself interviewed on the radio. Got hisself linked on the Secular Web too.

I harbour no interest in running for such office (especially not now). But in that spirit, I propose a constituency, for any prospective deities over this universe. Assuming they want my vote.

And I am not begging the question as hard as he did. I already know that there are gods out in the multiverse (for the gamers: "astral plane", "limbo", "far realm"...), likely an infinity of gods. I also know that we're not infesting the body of any of them, dead or alive. The only options are that we're inhabiting some god's creation or else we're drifting in an amniotic (self-created) bubble. Either way, the gods are out there, on the outside. That discussion is settled.

What I want is a god worth the following. Some gods aren't worth it. Most gods aren't. I have read my Lovecraft as diligently as that other guy had read his Chomsky.

I request that the god keep his promises. Since he is Lawful, I don't demand that the god be infinitely wise and powerful; I know that is impossible, in a being of Law.

The god should, whether or not he created this universe of Law, at least respect its Lawful nature and intervene only to protect us. Mainly from Nyarlathotep, but also on occasion from our own most grievous mistakes.

The god should have some patience and mercy for us the humans. As a limited being (by Law), the god is capable of being flawed. I count mercy despite our deserts as a slight infusion of Chaos.

The god's doctrines should promote human life. They should, also, scale in accordance with humankind's ability to understand this universe. I expect that the god, as concerned with his own preservation, will not suffer a witch to live; "disgusting quislings" as I recall Lewis calling such. I can accept that; but, since we've already conceded the point, I request further exceptions to counter anti-human humans: exceptions for just-war and for lawful executions.

If the god didn't create this universe, I want one with at least so much sentimentality as to adopt it.

COMMENTARY 7/13: I'd had this in my mind for decades; only figured how to organise it all, this afternoon. So I'm backdating it to some day this week closer my other theologic musings.

How philosophers encounter the universe

Almut Hintze researching Zoroastrianism concluded that the Gathas imagined our universe as the body of a living god, infected with evil [summary here]. There's a lot of that in modern "environmentalism".

Gnostic Christianity believed that this universe is a Created Prison. Catholicism dresses it up better but, at base, agrees.

Atheists assume that our universe has no purpose, or (if you're a Lovecraftian) that we shouldn't follow whatever purpose the gods have laid out for it. So atheists don't care how we all came into being - with one exception.

The secular-humanists, with whom I hung out in the late 1990s, are an optimistic bunch. Humanists assume we inhabit an amniotic spacetime. That Seth MacFarlane joke about the pre-whisky Irish, riffing on "converting our bodies to pure energy"? An actual humanist thing.

Those atheists who aren't humanist, deep down, don't really think that the gods never existed. They suspect that the gods were here, once upon a time; but that they have abandoned us since.

Classification of universes

Such universes as can exist, exist in any one of these essential definitions:

• Amniotic fields in progress
• Discarded amniotic fields, which their gods had exited (not necessarily "abandoned" - see below)
• The bodies of living gods
• The bodies or fragments of dead gods
• Creations of gods

From the gods' perspective, universes have these purposes:

• The bodies of living gods
• Prisons
• None

Biography of a young god

In the utterchaos of the multiverse, wherein "time" and "space" have no meaning, shreds of the chaos conjoin and make meaning. Some of these form enough of a shell that said bubble can maintain something like the time-dimension in our universe. In these shells, dwell the gods.

Such bubbles in the multiverse - Dungeons and Dragons calls them, "planes" - are able to contain entities with intelligence, and to retain them. Let's call these bubbles "amniotic".

Within their amniotes, newly-formed self-created gods will be like newly-formed babes, without even the sense of instinct. But, since they have time on their side (so to speak), they can grow mentally.

Some intelligences take over their plane and use it, like our brains use our bodies. Others find ways to exit their birth-plane and to become free-floating planes of their own. Whether they subsumed their amniotic plane or else budded off from it, free-floating sentient planes are gods - absolute despots of their own selves.

Here is, per universe-bubble, where the first ethical choice was made. Did one sentient destroy all its rivals in its own amniotic plane, on the way to godhood? did certain sentients collaborate amongst themselves? did they merge, or spin off descendants?

Once freed of the amniotes, gods float through the multiverse with the memories of what they did there. Friendships and animosities were made, and qualities like "mercy" and "judgement".

In victory, some gods spared the sentients who lost these struggles; the latter souls are incarcerated in special planes, which planes they cannot (easily) escape or subsume. The Greeks named this concept "Tartaros". Here the cycle begins again. Maybe its "titans" can make a better effort this time.

So, the cosmology of the Bagestan: countless planes and - from them - countless gods. Each mindless plane and each mindful god contains internal logic and some analogue of "time". Concepts of order, mercy, life, and death exist outside Divine definition. Some planes are amniotic, that is self-created; of these, some have an internal order which its inhabitants set out before they became gods. The other planes, the gods created secondarily.

There is a Heaven - one Heaven. No god lives there. All the gods a human would want to worship, are trying to get there.

Upload #180: by grace of the throne

In the last six weeks, I have had cause to rethink my online presence; but I have assuredly not recanted my stance on the history of Islam. I have only collected more facts.

As usual, the last project in is the first project fixed, so: "Promised Egypt" is cleaned up... a lot. For one thing I deleted that appendix, which content you've already read in The Arabs.

I'd gone through Arthur Jeffery's Foreign Vocabulary again, so: "Blasting the Sultan" and "Against Jihad" have more Syriana. In other Jeffery news I found in Materials a variant of Q. 20:98 on the "lord of the throne" so, "The Ararat Tax" takes that into account. I also overhauled its 'Noah and the Prophets' subsection, in the light of Marijn van Putten, "The Grace of God", now published in BSOAS 82.1.

I re-read Sadeghi and Bergmann, "The Codex of a Companion of the Prophet and the Qur’an of the Prophet". This affected "Running Over The Sabbath" on sura 62 and especially "The Spenders in Hypocrisy" on sura 63, which hadn't been touched since 2016. The sura 63 links further touched on the reception of sura 76 so, "The Test of Man".

"Monks, Muslims, and Sura 57" takes on another 5>57 link I'd found in Neal Robinson's classic "Hands Outstretched" article. "God’s Path Leads through the Caliph" wrestles with Q. 59:2's clenching against the believers. "Donning the Mantle" (which was too short) has an additional 20>74 link.

Most of the altered projects were altered because I'd misspelled "Qur'an" in the title of a Boullata book; having misspelled "Boullata" earlier. @#$%! Anything else, I don't remember.

Madrassa.