Obscurity, Codes and Puzzles in Books: Ponderings

"Censorship is the mother of metaphor." - Borges

While I'm on record as being with the cognitive neurolinguistics of Lakoff, et.al., as my main model for the mother of metaphor, Borges here gets at something I find exceedingly interesting: the now-marginalized idea that writers have used coded language for various reasons, and one of them would be to escape persecution by the State. I give Borges his point here.
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Joyce's Friend Byrne's Crypto

With the debates about mass surveillance and encryption continuing on to what I assume is a slow boil, and with brilliant high school students bringing the debate (literally) to Capitol Hill, many of us of a certain caste of mind eventually wonder where and when this began. One day we find ourselves in the archives and indexes of old books. We learn some of what we set out for. In my case - and probably (?) yours - you get the serendipitous hit, too. A recent example from my own forays:

John Francis Byrne, who was James Joyce's best friend at university in Dublin, later invented a cryptographic device that he thought might make him rich, because it was an uncrackable "Chaocipher," which used what's called an "autokey" in the trade. It was a cigar box with some bits of strings and a few odds and ends. When Byrne showed it to his cousin she said it would win him a Nobel Prize, "not for science, apparently, but for ushering in an age of universal peace by conferring the gift of perfect security upon the communications of all nations and all men." - The Codebreakers, Kahn, p.767

                                                       J.F. Byrne, Joyce's friend

Byrne thought his device would be used by businessmen, brotherhoods, religious groups and social institutions, and by "husband, wife, or lover." (Kahn, quoting Byrne, p.768) Anyone could use his device anywhere and it would provide perfect encryption. Byrne met with and tried to sell his device to the US Army, State Department, AT&T, and the Navy, and was turned down. The State Dept sent him a form letter, telling him their own "ciphers are adequate to (our) needs."

Byrne, who published a book in 1951 called The Silent Years, mostly about remembering Joyce, devoted the final third of his book to telling the world about his amazing encryption machine, and actually challenged the public to crack his code, offering "$5000 or the total royalties of the first three months after publication of his book..." (Kahn, 768) Byrne challenged the American Cryptogram Association, the New York Cipher Society and Norbert Wiener to crack his code.

Kahn:
"Nobody ever claimed the money, and Byrne died a few years later. One may presume that the reason both for the failure of the public to read his cipher and failure of the government to adopt it was that while the cipher probably had its merits, its many demerits outweighed them for practical use. Byrne, like many inventors, both won and lost. His cipher was never broken. But his dream never came true." (768)

                                            David Kahn, 2013. His book The Codebreakers
                                            is a tour-de-force.

When Joyce came back to Dublin in 1909, another of his old friends from university, Vincent Cosgrave, told Joyce that Nora had "walked out" with him - Cosgrave - around the time Nora fell for the dreamy writer, which devastated him. He wrote accusatory letters to Nora, who was living at their home in Trieste. He wondered if Giorgio, his first child and only son, born in 1905, was really his. Byrne tried to convince Joyce that Cosgrave and Oliver St. John Gogarty (the model for Ulysses's "Buck Mulligan") were trying to ruin Joyce. It was a plot. Joyce's brother Stan told James that Nora had rebuffed Cosgrave, and this calmed the Irish/cosmopolitan bard.

In real life, Byrne lived with cousins at 7 Eccles Street in Dublin, which is the address of Leopold and Molly Bloom. Byrne is "Cranly" in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, the character who lends a sympathetic ear to Stephen's aesthetic ideas, amongst other things. The section late at night in Ulysses, where Bloom has forgotten the key to his house, so he jumps the fence and gets in through the backdoor and lets Stephen in? That actually happened with Byrne. Joyce makes me think of it as a mythic thing, which is marvelous on his part...

By 1910 Byrne had emigrated to New York, where he worked as a journalist under the name J.F. Renby, an anagram of his last name. He died in 1960.
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Arthur Melzer Makes Me Think

"Against history, we developed community through the use of a subtle and ambiguous language that could be heard in one way by the oppressor, in another way by your friends. Our weapons of sabotage were ambiguity, humor, paradox, mystery, poetry, song and magic."
-Andrei Codrescu, the Romanian essayist, broadcaster and poet, in his 1990 The Disappearance of the Outside: A Manifesto For Escape, pp.38-39

In a dizzyingly wonderful book that leaves me wondering what I'm missing, Michigan State professor of political science, Arthur Melzer, published Philosophy Between the Lines: The Lost History of Esoteric Writing (2014).

[Get a load of his out-of-book appendix, a real data-dump of historical textual examples that bolster his claims that esoteric writing (writing in a tricky way in order to not be persecuted or not damage the body politic, but it's more complicated than that) has basically gone on since writing and the State emerged.]

The book was reviewed widely and positively...by NeoCons. The bad reviews seem to be from anti-NeoCons. Melzer says the book needed to be written, and the subject - which was one of Leo Strauss's main riffs - wasn't really Melzer's thing. He doesn't like esoteric writing. He wants to read writers who say exactly what they mean.

I've read the book and find it magisterial. Then I made the mistake of re-reading a book of essays, mostly by Umberto Eco, with contributions by Christine Brooke-Rose, Richard Rorty, and Jonathan Culler: Interpretation and Overinterpretation. I find it heady stuff. But it worsened my probably paranoid overinterpretation of Melzer's avowed reluctance to address the topic, and his NeoCon ties.

Melzer:
"My friends and colleagues all regard it as curious that I should be the one to write this book. There are people who have a real love for esoteric interpretation and a real gift for it. I am not one of them."
-p.xvii

And yet there's 450 pages (plus that online appendix!), scholarly throughout. And then I'm into Eco, illustrating how paranoid overinterpretations occur. And there's NeoCon Mark Lilla, in his book on Vico (who to me is the most interesting example of what Melzer calls "defensive esoteric" writing), saying he disagrees with Leo Strauss on an esotericist reading of Vico. (See G.B. Vico: The Making of an Anti-Modern, pp.243-245)

Before Melzer's book appeared, for years I'd accumulated notes on the topic on my own, but I hadn't read NeoCon godfather Strauss's 1952 Persecution and the Art of Writing. I accumulated notes based on my readings of Robert Anton Wilson, William S. Burroughs, Timothy Leary, Norman O. Brown, Frances Yates, Nietzsche, etc.

The British empiricist Isaiah Berlin knew Strauss and liked him, admired his mind, but thought a lot of his ideas were wrong, including the esoteric idea:

Berlin:
"Strauss was a careful, honest and deeply concerned thinker, who seemed to have taught his pupils to read between the lines of the classical philosophers - he had a theory that these thinkers had secret doctrines beneath the overt one - which could only be discovered by hints, allusions and other symptoms, sometimes because such thinkers thought in this fashion, sometimes for fear of censorship, oppressive regimes and the like. This had been a great stimulus to ingenuity and all kinds of fanciful subtleties, but seems to me to be wrong-headed. Strauss's rejection of the post-Renaissance world as hopelessly corrupted by Positivism and empiricism seems to me to border on the absurd."
-Conversations with Isaiah Berlin, with Ramin Jahanbegloo, pp. 31-32

And yet Berlin seems to me one of the most astute readers of Vico. And yet: I agree with Berlin about Strauss's rejection of Modernity. And yet: Melzer's book seems overwhelmingly persuasive.

I have not read my way into yet another Chapel Perilous. But I have once again become, lately, ever-more hyper-aware of my own interpretive schemes in reading.

The headspace? Cosmic hilarity!
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Ending in a Southernly Direction

Lee Server interviewed the late great Terry Southern, and here's a passage apropos:

Server: Reading Candy as a kid, I'll confess to you, played a definite part in my growing into manhood - I don't intend to go into details. What would you read for "erotic purposes" as a youngster?

Terry Southern: When I was young, they had what were called "little fuck-books" - which featured characters taken from the comics. Most of them were absurd and grotesque, but there were one or two of genuine erotic interest; "Blondie" comes to mind, as do "Dale" and "Flash Gordon" and darling "Ella Cinders." For a while, convinced there was more than met the eye, I tried to "read between the lines" in the famous Nancy Drew books, searching for some deep secret insinuation of erotica so powerful and pervasive as to account for the extraordinary popularity of these books, but alas, was able to garner no mileage ("J.O." wise) from this innocuous, and seemingly endless, series.
-Now Dig This: The Unspeakable Writings of Terry Southern, 1950-1995, ed. Mike Southern and Josh Alan Friedman, p.2
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                                                   grafica di Bob Campbell

Synthetic Biology and Giambattista Vico

Prelude
Less than two months ago as I write this, J. Craig Venter and his team published in Science the deets on how they built a synthetic organism, called "Syn3.0," and it's got only 473 genes. This is the lowest number of genes that we know of for a self-replicating living thing that doesn't require a host.

It's a sober-seeming Frankenstein scene, is it not?

HERE is a nice write-up in Nature on this. 

They did this via trial and error; they didn't build Syn3.0 from scratch. They took a bacterium, Mycoplasma mycoides, which lives in cattle, and painstakingly and systematically knocked out genes to see if they were truly essential. If a gene seemed to be essential for life, or a gene played a critical role in the regulation of other genes, they left it in. They whittled away a lot.

A complex bacterium like E. coli has around 6000 genes; humans have around 19,500.

What appears most fascinating to Venter and his crew (and me too) is this: once they finished and confirmed they had synthesized/whittled away a new organism, they still couldn't figure out exactly what 149 of the 473 genes did that were so essential to life. So: we don't know 1/3 of what is essential to life. We have our work cut out for us...or these synthetic biologists/fancy bio-hackers do.

The rest of us, like the girl who just ate a slice of pizza with anchovies, wait with baited breath.

This highlights how much we don't know, and makes ever-clearer the reason why, after Venter and scientists working for the Unistat government "mapped" the human genome 13-16 years ago, miracle breakthroughs in health and medicine did not pour forth immediately after.

                                              a human-made bacterium, believe it or not
A Variation on a Theme
My favorite analogous explanation for this went something like: for hundreds of years we heard wonderful music but weren't sure where it was coming from. Through a Herculean effort by legions of biologists, eventually we learned that this music had the structure of something we discovered was a "piano." Tremendous efforts by public sector genius and private wizards finally produced a map of the music: a Steinway piano! What a fantastic discovery of human ingenuity!

But then: you need to learn how to play Beethoven. Just having the piano and knowing that you press certain keys little hammers inside struck strings and made "notes"? Not good enough. We had to actually understand the thing. We had to learn how to play something like the Appassionata. 

Tall order? Of course! Would we shrink from it and ditch our lessons and not practice our Hanon exercises? No. We're all in. Here's where Vico makes his entrance...

Expository Material
Giambattista Vico (1668-1744), an early admirer of Descartes, later did a 180 from "Renato" (as Vico refers to him in his Autobiography) and said no: it's not correct that we humans can only truly have knowledge of the physical world because we can apply our rationality and math to understand it; Renato said we can't know the human past, so forget about it. Vico said, anzi, we can only truly know what we have ourselves made: the social world. Law, politics, art, history, etc. Even mathematics is a human construction. We did not make Nature, so we can't truly know it. Scholars of Vico (who call themselves Vichians and not Viconians) refer to this idea as Vico's principle of verum factum. 

Because of verum factum, various scholars have called Vico the first Anthropologist, the inventor of the sociology of knowledge, the first great modern sociologist, etc. It's interesting. I don't know what to think, because Vico's writing - especially in his magnum opus The New Science - seems to alternate between staggeringly prescient ideas and really crazy and "wrong" ones. Here is one of his most famous passages, and the one cited most often with regard to verum factum:

Still, in the dense and dark night which envelopes remotest antiquity, there shines an eternal and inextinguishable light. It is a truth which cannot be doubted: The civil world is certainly the creation of humankind. And consequently, the principles of the civil world can and must be discovered within the modifications of the human mind. If we reflect on this, we can only wonder why all the philosophers have so earnestly pursued a knowledge of the world of nature, which only God can know as its creator, while they neglected to study the world of nations, or civil world, which people can in fact know because they created it. The cause of this paradox is that infirmity of the human mind noted in Axiom 63. Because it is buried deep within the body, the human mind naturally tends to notice what is corporeal, and must make a great and laborious effort to understand itself, just as the eye sees all external objects, but needs a mirror to see itself. - section 331, translation by Dave Marsh

A couple of notes:
- The Inquisition was very strong in Naples, when Vico was doing his thing. The reference to "God" in his text is problematic, to my eyes. Perhaps he truly believed all the things he says about "God," but I see plenty of room for doubt. In his Autobiography he certainly seems to have been heavily influenced by Lucretius, who popularized Epicurus. Vico also has plenty of oblique things to say about the deep and enduring history of class warfare and he doesn't seem all that admiring of history's aristocracy. Vico was one of those thinkers who seemed to have read everything available; he had personally known thinkers around Naples who had paid for speaking out for thought free of Church restrictions. He certainly had read about others who'd suffered at the hands of the Inquisition.

-Hobbes and many other thinkers of antiquity and the Renaissance had ideas like verum factum, but they only mentioned this notion in passing; with Vico this idea is central to his thought.

-Axiom 63 reads thus:
Because of the senses, the human mind naturally tends to view itself externally in the body, and it is only with great difficulty that it can understand itself by means of reflection. This axiom offers us this universal principle of etymology in all languages: words are transferred from physical objects and their properties to signify what is conceptual and spiritual. 

Finally: OG's Point, If Indeed He Has One?
When I first delved into Vico I thought verum factum was wrong: the revolution in modern science since the Renaissance was based on a special way of looking into nature: some phenomenon needed to be explained, hypotheses competed until a line of very fecund thought - a theory - led to a cascade of knowledge about the physical world. Ideas were freely exchanged and published and the idea that my experiment, while exciting, needed to be replicated by many others working independently for it to be considered "true"...this seemed to me like a vast leap in human knowledge. At the same time, the idea of "knowledge" in the Humanities (which to this day I love with a very deep passion) was not making gigantic strides. When scientific knowledge cashed out into Technology, which accelerated the human world, I just thought Vico, while exceedingly erudite and weird and entertaining, was a bit daft here.

Later, when reading people like Popper, Kuhn, Feyerabend, Foucault and Latour, I realized the physical sciences didn't actually work as neatly as I'd been led to believe. Further, the most successful physical theory ever - the quantum theory - led to philosophical quagmires dizzying and surreal. Did we really understand the physical world, or did we pragmatically go with what worked, while retroactively explaining what was "really" going on?

                                          Richard Feynman's blackboard at CalTech                           

Apocalypse and/or Utopia
Now, we are making living things. I'm quite sure Syn3.0 is merely the first of thousands of human-made living things. And Venter and his colleagues are playing Creator in order to understand, at a fine-grain level, the physical, chemical and biological way something does its thing.

Is verum factum then a "dead" idea? I don't know, but when Venter and his guys came up with an artificial living thing a few years ago, it prompted Obama to issue a bioethics review and the Vatican challenged Venter on his claim of creating life. And so has it ever been...

Finally: if you read the link to the article in Nature, you may have noted that Venter and his crew inserted their own names - literally - into the deep structure of Syn3.0. Why? As watermarks, a way of marking this territory of Life as human-made. They also inserted some quotes and one was from Richard Feynman's blackboard, as seen in the photo above: "What I cannot create I do not understand."

Sounds a lot like Vico to me.

Reading:
"In Newly-Created Life Form, a Major Mystery," by Emily Singer

"Scientists Synthesize the Shortest Known Genome Necessary For Life," by Amina Khan

"Why Would Scientists Want to Build a Human Genome From Scratch?", by Sally Adee

The New Science, by Giambattista Vico, translated by Dave Marsh

                                                   藝術鮑勃·坎貝爾

Synthetic Biology: Potentials Perilous and Promising

"Synbio," or synthetic biology, is here. It's alive!:

It's already been three years since Craig Venter's team made a species that was self-replicating...and its parents were not a mom and dad, but a computer.

In 2003 the human genome was sequenced. It costed billions of dollars to sequence and took up the energies of people in over 160 labs. Now you can buy a sequencing machine for a few thousand and sequence your own genome overnight. Or pay 23 and Me $99. By this time next year it'll probably be half that.

Synthetic biology, according to Venter, will change everyone's life at some point. Its upside: we can make microbes that eat carbon dioxide. We can generate flu vaccines almost overnight. Tiny critters that generate clean biofuels that are cheaper and as efficient as fossil fuels seem possible. The brilliant Drew Endy of Stanford is gung-ho about genetic engineering and synthetic biology, claiming it already constitutes 2% of the Unistat economy and is growing at 12% annually.

Venter commissioned a panel to study the potential issues in public health and national security arising from synbio. Two big problems jumped out at us:

1. Synthetic biological work had become so cheap that most of the people who were doing it weren't even trained biologists, so there was no understood consensus about standards, ethics or safety.

2.) What standards existed by governments and international bodies were ten years old and so may as well have been 100 years old.

You're probably wondering what I'm wondering: when will someone get hold of some genome of a relatively benign virus or bacteria, tweak it using known methods, then use it as a bioweapon?

You can email a genetic sequence to someone else. You need to buy a few things to tinker with, but it's doable. I'm trying to spook you for Halloween. Is it working yet?

In the 18th century, Giambattista Vico, countering Rene Descartes, asserted that humans can only know what they have made. Only true understanding can come from something the mind makes, and Descartes's notion about "distinct ideas" in the mind as a basis for philosophy was flawed because we did not make the mind; Descartes was doing metaphysics. Vico called his principle, verum factum. That which is true and that which is made convert into each other; anything else is an abstraction. (I linked Vico's idea to Niels Bohr's Copenhagen Interpretation of quantum mechanics HERE, in case anyone wants to see how bent I can get.)

Back to biology, there's the GOF, which is also growing at an exponential rate, or at least ultra-quickly. It's short for Gain Of Function. Here's how it applies to the Pandora's Box of synbio: biologists attempt to combat some potential horrific pathogen by creating it in the lab, so then they can figure out a way to develop a vaccine for it. We can only know what we have made, as Vico said.

At a conference for scientists a researcher said that he'd tinkered with the H5N1 virus then being talked about as a potential killer of millions, if it mutated. It's a simple coronavirus, but he tinkered with it so a host could infect another via transmission through the air. Then another researcher said he'd done the same thing. They both published their papers, in bigtime journals Science and Nature. They knew what they had done could be interpreted as reckless, and indeed: both journals were persuaded to omit the part of each biologist's work that detailed the techniques by which they took a dangerous virus and made it far more dangerous, because who knows which band of deranged and sick mo fos would read this stuff and get ideas? And carry it off? (Beside The State, of course, by which I mean Google "Tuskegee Syphilis Study.")

But...can you really keep info under wraps? ("Paging Mr. Snowden! Mr. Edward Snowden; Please come to the white courtesy phone...")

In reading about the uncooperative governments (SARS in China, anyone?), the paranoia about Western governmental power (read up on Indonesia and their lethal coronaviral outbreaks), governmental snafus, international differences between countries, and just how hopelessly behind the curve biosecurity experts are in Unistat alone...I'm not sanguine, friends. It's only a matter of time. Let us pray the international bioterrorists make a crucial mistake and the deaths are limited.

However, when it does happen? There's nothing more paranoia-inducing than a massively-social-mediated group of people terrified of the invisible death-bringing entities that may be in the very air they're breathing. All bets are off, and it seems just the thing to get Ted Cruz elected President. (Then: watch out, "liberals": all that NSA data could be gunnin' fer ya!)

With seven billion on the planet now, even if a pandemic arose "naturally" and killed off 3-5% of the population (like the Spanish Flu of 1918 did), how much more paranoid are we now than then? Many people who didn't die will go to their grave convinced the Other was responsible...

I hope you're scared now, or I'm not doing my job, on this, October 29...

The old Biology: you observed life from outside that life, wondered about details and behavior and then dissected to see how it worked, or placed the life in some environment and observed.

The new Biology: You're an engineer: you know the life-form because you created it, from genomic information and computer models. Now you watch to see how it plays out. If it moves, eats, respirates and replicates, you've created a new species!

So...yea. The scary part is anyone with a serious political beef, or simple hatred, can align with others and send away for stuff and do what's called 4-D printing: those microbes that were just info on a screen are now ready to be released into your enemy's territory. You send away for stuff, you use steganography (al-Qaeda left a code in a porn video). Sequencers are cheap. The data is there. One fleeting problem: many biotech companies are keeping track of "nucleotides of concern": any known dangerous sequences are tracked: who is it that wants this info?

So: we have bioterror security experts who aren't sure how to determine threats, or if a threat is all that important; they don't know how to surveil those who'd go the whole nine and release something unspeakable, and they're not sure how to combat the pathogens anyway. Supposedly the International community is getting their act together along these lines. But...let's recall some sobering facts: in 2002 at SUNY Stony Brook, researchers took the genetic code for polio and made that virus. Because...verum factum, and Gain Of Function (GOF). If we truly know these bad boys we stand a chance of combating them when they come at us.

And let's not forget that in 2005 researchers sequenced the 1918 Spanish flu virus that killed 50 million people. They sequenced it...and then of course they made it. And the speed and cost of doing this is becoming ever-quicker and ever-cheaper. Just think: the Spanish Flu killed 50 million, but its lethality was only 2.5%. On the other hand, the H5N1 killed 59% of the people it infected. Can you imagine a huge batch of H5N1 tweaked (like two researchers have already done) to become transmissible via air?

(By the way: now is not the time to read this article about how Unistat labs are insecure. Just don't read this, or it might even bum your Halloween.)

Other Bad Signs: in Unistat the CDC and NIH don't have the infrastructure to develop massive amounts of vaccine for something that might appear. How many would need that magic shot or pill? Not as many as those hundreds of millions who'd take Lipitor or Viagra, paying for it all and making investors happy. Big Pharma is in the Big Money game; they cannot afford to spend an estimated $700 million to $1 billion to develop a vaccine or pill, when maybe after the bioterror attack quarantine and international cooperation stops the spread. There's no money in that! (SARS was stifled largely because of quarantine and cooperation.)

To sum up: synbio offers incredible promise, but just one really "successful" bioterror attack by angry young men who take their own version of a merciless God and some old border dispute very seriously...and life on Earth will have truly changed, and not in a good way. Because we have cops and monitors on one hand, but cheap technology, sheer fluid-like information and motivated ingenuity on the other hand. (Please make sure you wash both hands, thoroughly, when you're done reading this morose report.)

Dr. Frankenstein's imperative makes every day from here on out all the more fraught with drama, eh?

Happy Halloween! Muahahahahaha<cough>ahamuahahaha! Okay that's it: I may have failed to scare you, but in writing this - consulting 13 articles and taking notes - I've grown pallid, anemic and weak in my anxiety attack, and it further sickens me to say, "Well, I just hope that all happens after I'm dead and gone, 'cuz..." What kind of morality is that? It's like saying, "I hope all-out nuclear war happens after I'm dead, while your children are still around to experience it."

Now if you'll excuse me. I need to go rest. Oy! (No, but seriously: don't drink and drive on Halloween.)

Bigfoot: Impressions On Charles Fort's 139th Birthday

Bigfoot (Sasquatch, Yeti), has been included in the set of beings called Cryptids, and some cryptids have turned out to be "real." I have no idea if Bigfoot (about 1/3 of all "sightings" in the Pacific Northwest, the rest scattered all over the globe, except for Antarctica), "is" real, but, like Jane Goodall, I hope they're real. Around 10 years ago she told NPR's Ira Flatow she was "sure" Bigfeet were real; recently she admits there's no evidence, but still has hopes. (Video, bad sound, but skip ahead to 7:20)

In the last 24 months, Dr. Melba S. Ketchum of Texas, a veterinarian turned animal geneticist, has asserted she saw Bigfoot, obtained DNA that shows Bigfeet are a separate species that arose when males of some previous hominids (unnamed) had sex with female homo sapiens around 15,000 years ago, somewhere in or near Europe, then crossed the Bering Sea land bridge before the last Ice Age thawed ("they're very fast"), and are a sensitive, inquisitive but very shy species. And they need legal protection from Man.

                                                    Dr. Melba Ketchum

HERE's how Live Science reported on it.

One thing that struck me in following up this story: there is no end of articles from two groups on Ketchum: 1.) the True Believers, but even moreso; 2.) the sarcastic group Robert Anton Wilson called "fundamentalist materialists," or "skeptics," who knew her data must have been contaminated, or she was some nut, an attention hound, delusional, naive, a fraud out to cash in. I thought the Live Science article was fair. But HERE seems the fairest article I've seen, in my present state of ignorance.

Ketchum took her evidence to a forensic scientists, and note why Timmer sees this as a problem, a big one. Forensic scientists are very good at finding what they want to find, and presenting it in court. Also, I learned about how DNA breaks down over time. But the idea that Ketchum's team was coming up with human DNA that looks like it had coupled with something far more remote genetically from the Neanderthals and the Denisovans - primates we homo sapiens probably did/could have mated with...gave me pause. And yet Timmer thinks Ketchum's sincere in her beliefs that Bigfeet are human.

On the other hand, Bigfootologist Dr. Brian Sykes will release his study of DNA evidence collected from European sources in the Fall. So...Six or Eight weeks from now, we may get a Big New Wrinkle in the Bigfoot Story. Or maybe a wart or a zit...

                                              Charles Fort, proto-phenomenologist,
                                               surrealist, data-collector

A Procession of the damned.
By the damned, I mean the excluded.
We shall have a procession of data that Science has excluded.
-Charles Fort, at the beginning of Ch.1 of his The Book of the Damned. A book that you may find works magick on your nervous system, simply by taking up and reading randomly: The Complete Books of Charles Fort: over 1100 pages of data he'd culled from newspapers or High Weirdness, and an overweening sense that the Scientists were too too enamored of, and blind to, the metaphors they were systematically sifting through to eliminate what Can't Be from What Is.

For (Robert Anton) Wilsonologists, it's indispensible, especially if you want to mine his stances on epistemology, his poetic humanism, his style in The New Inquisition: Irrational Rationalism and the Citadel of Science, which seems fed heavily by Fort and Swift. (His epistemology was also, of course!, heavily influenced by quantum mechanics, Hume, Korzybski, Nietzsche, Husserlian phenomenology, the most current neuroscience in perception, and literary modernists. And Charles Fort! Etc.)

                                         Our Man in the Pacific Northwest

Vico's Bestioni
Noah's sons, according to Vico who died in 1744, neglected their dad's one true God after The Floodwaters receded. They then scattered and wandered "like brutes through the earth's great forest." Where did Ham go? Through Southern Asia, into Egypt and the rest of Africa. What about Japheth? Through Northern Asia, into Europe. Shem? Central Asia to the Near East. (Vico is writing in Naples, Italy.) It's nice that the brothers, while "brutes," could divide the known world up so strategically.

To be fair, once they went their separate ways, within this great Vast Forest, they were pushed further away from each other by "wild beasts which abounded." And in seeking pasture and water, they were further separated. Vico also tells us the brothers "pursued women who in that state were wild, timid and intractable." (These must have been women who survived The Flood and were just wandering around the Great Forest in packs. Those are the best kind, I've found. So I have something in common with Noah's brutish sons. I also dig the vast forests. What's left of 'em, anyway.)

Here's Vico, in the section of The New Science, on "Poetic Wisdom":

(It's after the Flood):

Since mothers abandoned their children, they grew up without hearing any human speech, or learning any human behavior, and sank to an utterly bestial and brutish state. In this case, mothers merely nursed their infants and let them wallow naked in their own feces, abandoning them forever once they were weaned. Wallowing in their feces (whose nitrous salts wonderfully enriched the soil), these children struggled to make their way through the great forest, now grown dense after the recent flood. And as their muscles expanded and contracted in this struggle, the children absorbed more and more nitrous salts. At the same time, these children lacked that fear of gods, fathers, and teachers which tempers the most exuberant phase of childhood. As a result, their flesh and bones must have grown inordinately large, and they became so vigorous and robust that they turned out to be giants.

...Vico then goes on to elaborate his theory of giants by citing Caesar, Tacitus, Procopius, Jean Chassagnon's treatise On Giants, archaeology (such as it was in Vico's 18th century), Greek and Latin myths...and he's sure most accounts are exaggerations! People tend to go on and on and let their poetic ingenium go wild. Let's be more sober-minded about giants. Clearly though, they interbred and covered the Earth. (I'm drawing from 369-371 from the Marsh translation.)

The Jews - Noah's clan - were taught cleanliness and fear of fathers and so they remained of normal stature.

Okay: so, for Vico, after the Flood, Noah's sons forgot all about the Jewishness, caroused about the Forests of the Earth, shitting everywhere, fucking any Wild Women they could find, and behaving like Freshmen from State on Summer Break, for a long, long time. They were, after all, hopped up and fortified by nitrous salts from all the shit in the soil, which, we all know, makes you huge like Andre the Giant. Or Lou Ferrigno. (Or Barry Bonds?)

The "poetic wisdom" here, as I glean it, not being descended from Jews myself, is this: I am descended from Bigfeet. It's a long story and Vico and tell you a lot more about it - or ask me about my ancestors, according to Vico! -  but right now I'm hungry for something nitrous, a timid and intractable woman, and maybe a Pop-Tart and some wrestling on the telly.

So: The Bigfoot Q: I don't know. Let's see what Prof. Sykes comes up with?

Hermes Will Always Return: Kircher and Vico

God of orators, poets, thieves, witty chatterers, inventors, an intermediary for humans in their dealings with other gods and goddesses, and a trickster himself: this is Hermes, probably a later version of Thoth, but once we get into origins here, it's a hermetic thing: that is to say: tricky and possibly unreliable. But Hermes - also the messenger, the god of email and letters and phone calls - who will help you ease into the afterlife, who straddles and then erases boundaries and protects travelers into unknown lands? He will always be with us.

The great American seer and weirdo extraordinaire Edgar Cayce asserted that Hermes built Atlantis and the Egyptian pyramids. More than anything else here, I note Cayce's ingenium.

Hermes is well-known to our Islamic brothers and sisters too, only he's Idries (or Idris) to them. Ibn Arabi, most Estimable, wrote that Idries traveled to incredibly large cities outside of Earth, and these cities had vastly superior technology. When a muslim invented something, he may have subsumed something from the atmosphere brought there by Idries.

Hermes is mentioned in the Qur'an, 19:56-57: "mention, in the Book, Idris, that he was truthful, a prophet. We took him up to a high place." Indeed, it was thought that Idris traveled from Egypt to outer space and heaven, to the same place Adam was, and this was where the Black Stone originated. Adam was 380 years older than Idris. The Prophet Mohammed was descended from Idris. Mohammed also traveled to outer space. (It's difficult when I read this stuff to not think of our postmodern comic book superheroes as existing in a long line of archetypal figures such as Hermes...and Mohammed? Ahh...but The Prophet...this is surely a different story, peace be upon him...)

For the Arabs: three Hermes-figures. One that was a civilizing hero who wrote in hieroglyphics. Then there was one that was initiated by Pythagoras. A third taught alchemy. There were some sufis who thought they were all the same guy...

Idris seems to be identified in The Bible as Enoch. See Genesis 5: 18-24. Supposedly the consonants in "Enoch" spell out the Hebrew "initiator" or "opener of the third eye." Supposedly? Hermes the boundary dissolver and messenger god somehow gets into the Old Testament? Hey, I guess it's in the job description.

Cicero noticed there seemed to be at least five different Hermes, mostly Greeks and Romans, around the time of Julius Caesar, but this incredible genius everyone talked about, "Hermes Trismegistus," seemed to be a different cat.

"Hermes Trismegistus" made an enormous splash in Western thought, especially when 15th CE philosopher/mage Marsilio Ficino was given a patronage/cool gig under the Medicis. "Hermes Thrice-Blessed" was probably a contemporary of Moses, but Hermes went from physics and math to the primo level of telling us, armed with the most righteous wisdom the attributes of God, about demons, how souls transform and travel. You know, the meaty stuff. Orpheus followed Hermes, then Philolaus, who was the teacher of...Plato? Wait...what about Socrates? Nevermind for now: we have quite a succession now, eh? Of course Plato's ideas heavily influenced Jesus and Christianity. Indeed, Jesus was a Mage himself, in that grand succession starting with Hermes. This succession of wisdom-givers was  ultimately seductive to the many minds who desire intellectual harmony.

To say the least.

I think the idea that there was a prisca theologia, or "one true theology" that has become garbled in different religions over time, a series of books that held a skeleton key that would unite all religions and show how they were all saying the same thing, originating in God, down to Moses and Hermes, down to Plato and Jesus...must have seemed like it had not only unparalleled delights for the intellect, but could possibly stem the tides of blood from religious wars.

                                                 Hermes Thrice-Blessed, imitating 
                                                  Kobe Bryant?

The Corpus Hermeticum was written by Hermes Trismegistus, roughly at the time of Moses. And it had...EVERYTHING in it! For Hermes Thrice-Great had handed down the secrets of magick to humans: astrology, alchemy, the whole nine. His works were a thrilling wind, blowing many-a-mind.

The fantastic philologist Isaac Casaubon, just before he died in 1614, showed via rigorous textual analysis, that the books attributed to "Hermes Trismegistus" were written no later than the 2nd or 3rd century CE! Possibly some of the Corpus was written in the first century after Jesus. But it's one thing to have awesome philological and overall scholarly chops and quite another to be given a sufficient hearing in the face of so many intellectuals awestruck with the heady, buzzlike effects of reading in the Corpus Hermeticum.

Casaubon suggested that these books were written by various Greek-educated NeoPlatonists and maybe a few Epicureans. They combined ideas from the great buffet of religious ideas floating around the Roman Empire circa 120-300 CE. It seems probable that the ideas in the Corpus were also hot in Hellenic Egypt, but are nowheres near as old as Moses and definitely much later than Alexander's death. Ideas borrowed from Zoroastrianism, even Kabbalah. If you prepared your mind well enough you could turn base metals into gold, find the Philosopher's Stone and the key to immortality, develop superhuman talents, and other desiderata.

Much of this is known already to readers of the scholar Frances Yates, so I apologize if I bored you.

Kircher (1602-1680) and Hermes
One of my favorite intellectuals in history is Athanasius Kircher, a Jesuit who was interested in everything, and if you clicked on the link you noticed Paula Findlen's subtitle, "The Last Man Who Knew Everything." He was most highly esteemed as a scholar, producing countless books, some over 1000 pages long and gorgeously illustrated. In his time he was also the butt of many jokes, as those who followed the new ways of thinking spearheaded by Galileo and Descartes, thought Kircher a crank, and Kircher was even "punked" for his delusions that he could read Egyptian hieroglyphics. Kircher is operating in 17th century Rome, while throughout Europe new-fangled epistemological bombs were exploding every few years. Kircher, within his own lifetime, went from being "current" to declasse, so fast were ideas changing about how to assess the veracity of claims of "truth" or "knowledge" or "science." Casaubon's debunking of the antiquity of the Corpus Hermeticum when Kircher was circa 12 years old, was available; even though his superiors at times frowned on Kircher's intricate, elaborated details of how "magic" worked according to Hermes - Kircher always issued disclaimers that this was not the true catholic religion, so beware of this evil stuff - he certainly seemed wildly enthralled by what Hermes had to say.

                                                   Athanasius Kircher, whose name
                                                    means "eternal church." 
                                                      Coincidence?

Kircher is, to me, a marvelous and hilarious figure, immensely learned and yet silly, and finally a general biography for the lay reader has come out: A Man of Misconceptions: The Life of an Eccentric in an Age of Change, by John Glassie. What a marvelous book. Glassie has Kircher nailed in a way that I had suspected from my readings of him by more specialized scholars such as the aforementioned Findlen, Ingrid D. Rowland's marvelous work The Ecstatic Journey: Athanasius Kircher in Baroque Rome, incredible books such as John Edward Fletcher's A Study of the Life and Works of Athanasius Kircher, 'Germanus Incredibilis', Joscelyn Godwin's 2009 Athanasius Kircher's Theater of the World (which, if I came into a surprise inheritance, would be one of the first books I'd buy; for now: keep re-checking it out from the library), and the book emanating from Stanford University's extensive Kircher archives, The Great Art of Knowing: The Baroque Encyclopedia of Athanasius Kircher.

Rowland's book gives more than enough goods about Kircher's researches and how he held many ideas that went against Church doctrine, and so had to find ways to put his ideas in codes. But he was wrong about most things. Which: never matter: that's the sociology of knowledge: most of his ideas were "right" or interesting enough to galvanize minds. Kircher was self-aggrandizing while claiming to be extraordinarily humble; the stories he tells about how he evaded threats in his youth (with the help of his Faith and prayers to Mary, etc) seem heavily influenced by Homer and other Hero tales.

                                          Kircher's museum. In reality it was nowheres
                                          near this spacious...which hints at the man 
                                          himself: be careful when you read Kircher!

With Kircher you get something like Aristotle mixed with High Weirdness Crank, a forerunner to Flann O'Brien's de Selby character as filtered through the mind of Robert Anton Wilson. (Just have a look at Kircher's learned and wildly baroque ideas about geology and how mountains are filled with water, the role of volcanoes, how water enters the inner Earth near Sweden and comes back out near the South Pole, etc...)

Despite his weirdness and ego, he was truly learned and had the most fantastic imagination, and I'm glad Glassie's book is getting good reviews. More people who love the history of this period, or even the sociology of knowledge or the history of ideas, should find Kircher a delight. Despite the learned flights of imagination presented as "science," for the glory of the Church and Rome and humanity, he's an amazing thinker, fecund beyond belief. Even the ideas that turned out to be wrong - most of them - are so imaginative, speculative and marvelous in vision that the students of metaphor have a field day every time they pick up Kircher.

Anyway, as for Hermes: Kircher loved those books. If he'd heard they'd been debunked, he didn't care. One of Kircher's best-sellers explained China to Europeans for the first time. Kircher had never been to China (or Egypt), but that never stopped him from writing 1000 pages about it. One of the things we learn is that the Chinese knew Hermes too, but they called him "Confucius."

At the same time, I believe Kircher was earnest. He thought the heliocentric model was correct. And he knew about Galileo's troubles with the Authorities (Kircher's bosses). Kircher did not understand the "new" scientific method of doubt, testing, getting someone else to see if they can replicate your experiments, etc. But Kircher also knew what happened to another Wild Thinker, Bruno. Kircher wrote to a friend that he was a Copernican, but "We must always maintain that the white I see, I shall believe to be black...if the hierarchical Church so stipulates." (Glassie, p.101) Because Kircher lived under this aspect of "You must not see what the Church would not like you to see," I can never be completely sure what Kircher really thought about some of the ideas he promulgated.

Here's an interview Glassie gave to NPR about his Kircher book.

I first encountered Kircher in the Museum of Jurassic Technology, and I confess I thought it was all a put-on. I thought David Wilson had made up Kircher, just as he made up the Cameroonian Stink Ant.

Vico and Hermes
Vico was born in 1668 and says the idea that all the world's wisdom came out of Egypt fit into his proto-anthropological idea of "the conceit of nations." Vico was overweening in his awareness, via his astounding breadth of reading, of what we would call today "ethnocentrism." He knew of Casaubon's finding and honored it. In discussing the effect of Roman scholars' belief in Egyptian ancient wisdom as ultimate source (on how Hermes influenced Diodorus Siculus and even Plato), Vico writes, "In sum, all these observations about the vanity of the ancient Egyptians' profound wisdom are confirmed by the case of the forgery Pimander, which was long palmed off as Hermetic doctrine. For Isaac Casaubon exposed the work as containing no doctrine older than the Platonists, whose language it borrows." - New Science, number 47.

Vico goes on to make a classic philosophically anthropological thought: "The Egyptians' mistaken belief in their own great antiquity sprang from the indeterminacy of the human mind, a property which often causes people to exaggerate immeasurably the magnitude of the unknown."

And yet Vico draws heavily from what he ascribes as an Egyptian idea of historical cycles, see section 432 of New Science. Also...the it turns out the Egyptians had quite the antiquity, so Vico was sorta wrong. But he's right about the "indeterminacy of the human mind," isn't he? This is Vico: right even when he's wrong. (And sometimes just plain wrong. But always: edifying and fun to read.)

Back to Vico's reading of Hermes: the first nations were founded by a severe poetry that became the Laws of the Ruling Class, or "heroes." The first bards sang out these laws. Much later they were written down. Thus it is with all nations, anywhen. But Hermes supposedly handed down writing, and then the laws were known. For Vico's origins of knowledge and poetic archetypes, this gets things backwards. As he writes, "How were dynasties founded within Egypt before the arrival of Hermes Trismegistus? As if letters were essential to laws! As if Spartan laws weren't legal when a law of Lycurgus himself prohibited the knowledge of letters!" (#66-67)

So how does Vico negotiate "Hermes Trismegistus"? He cites a "golden passage" from Iamblichus in which it is asserted that every invention necessary for civil life is attributed to Hermes Trismegistus. "Thus, Hermes could not have been an individual rich in esoteric wisdom who was later consecrated as a god. Instead, he must have been a poetic archetype of the earliest Egyptian sages who, being wise in vernacular wisdom, founded first the families and then the peoples who eventually made up the great nation." (#68)

And yet Vico, living in Naples, still had his own problems with the Catholic Church. But for that sometime later.

Vico's peculiar form of rationality notwithstanding, the trickster and god of messages survives. And people still believe in the influence of planets on their personal fortunes; people still use magical thinking...even well-educated and "rational" people. The Hermes archetype lives on within us.

I assert that Hermes resides in this entire blogpost; Authorities may justly kill him off, but he never dies. That's not the way the Gods and Goddesses roll, folks. Where do poets and inventors get their ideas?

Splatter-Riffs on Neologisms, Linguistic Relativity, ETC

The Case of the Missing Sex Words

The biologist and public intellectual David Barash wrote in his book The Myth of Monogamy (co-written with his wife, Judith Lipton!), that we have a sex-as-defined-within-marriage frame: premarital sex, marital sex, and extramarital sex. But notice we have no words for post-divorce sex, or widow or widower's sex. And let's imagine the case of a 45 year old confirmed bachelor's sex life. Surely we aren't willing to call that sex "premarital," right? What does this sort of stuff tell us about the semantic unconscious in our society?

                                                   Barash and Lipton

Peter Lyman
A U.C. Berkeley professor named Peter Lyman died in late June/early July of 2007. He had written a book called How Much Information? In the book he expressed concerns about terms like "virtual community" and "information superhighway" and "digital library." He thought those metaphors/neologisms could block thinking about real problems. Did he have a point? Jaron Lanier, in his discourses with Joel Garreau in the book Radical Evolution, seemed to think so, although Lyman's ideas weren't directly addressed.

Metaphors and Public Policy
Which reminds me of Lera Boroditsky. Today I ran across a paper she co-published with Paul H. Thibodeau, on how metaphors very subtly influenced how people reasoned about issues of crime, the environment, and the economy. I've only given it a cursory read so far, but it seems to strongly buttress the arguments about metaphor and political and social thought put forth in books by George Lakoff. If anyone's interested, it's HERE. (For progressives: frame the crime problem as a "virus"plaguing the commons, and not as a "beast" that needs to be captured and locked up. Thibodeau and Boroditsky give some reasons why.)

Roots of Neologisms?
What might be the ultimate goal of a neologism? How do they arise?

Glad you asked. One answer I like was given poetically by one of the great novelists of ideas in the 20th c, Robert Anton Wilson. Very late in his novel The Widow's Son, there's a long epistolary passage from the young hero to his mentor/uncle, the novel being set in the late 18th century. The young initiate is discussing at length his evolving understanding of occult ideas such as the "vegetative soul" "animal soul" "human soul" and something called the "fourth soul," which "perceives the invisible web of connections between all things; but it is no more infallible than the rest of the brain, or the gut, or the liver, or the gonads." (italics in original) With the "fourth soul," meaning seems to flow into us, but we forget we are making the meaning. We forget we did a lot of mental work, and then suddenly meaning comes to us, seemingly unbidden, as some sort of "revelation." What's most interesting is that we don't take responsibility for these sudden "meanings." We don't know how to exercise some sort of wisdom about these meanings, and this is why we have so many "holy fools."

But to the meat of the neologism thingy: the initiate says this meaning-making is equivalent to creativity and is the god-faculty in us. We get a meaning-making revelation and take the "word" with absolute literalness. Here's perhaps the salient passage:

"When beauty was created by a godly mind, beauty existed, as surely as the paintings of Botticelli or the concerti of Vivaldi exist. When mercy was created, mercy existed. When guilt was created, guilt existed. Out of a meaningless and pointless existence, we have made meaning and purpose; but since this creative act happens only when we relax after great strain, we feel it as 'pouring into us' from elsewhere. Thus we do not know our own godhood and we are perpetually swindled by those who assure us that it is indeed elsewhere, but they can give us access to it, for a reasonable fee. And when we as a species were ignorant enough to be duped in that way, the swindlers went one step further, invented original sin and other horrors of that sort, and made us even more 'dependent' upon them." (pp.386-387 in my old paperback version)

So: with Wilson, there seems to be some sort of continuum of invention of words: here they flow into us, as if by revelation. But because we have decided to entertain this idea of where language comes from, and how it works in our lives, many of us have suffered needlessly, because we think language came from some other realm. We made the "meaning" of the words that (much earlier) were made, probably via some Vichian utterances and grunts, and gesturing, singing, and poetic intoning. Gradually words become reified, and the ruling classes and their priests began shaping what the words "really" meant.

This passage also seems to imply that it's imperative that we not only figure out how we're "swindled" by language, but to own the god-power in ourselves (the only place "god" really exists?) and use language creatively, actively, to take back the power of language and to use it to better our lives.

Six Faves

1. Sturch: This hasn't seemed to have caught on. It's a word that implies the State and Church have mutual interests of control in mind. According to a 1961 article by Robert Anton Wilson in Paul Krassner's The Realist, Philip Jose Farmer, the wild science fiction writer, coined it.
2. Santorum: Dan Savage gets credit for the coining of this one, but he canvassed his readers first. A good example of purposeful, mindful and creative use of neologizing capacity to attempt to discredit a political foe. What is it? For our non-Unistatian readers, it's "the frothy mix of lube and fecal matter that is sometimes the product of anal sex."And also the last name of a prominent anti-sex, very conservative Senator.
3. Shordurpersav: Coined by the Church of the Subgenius, who acknowledge that our belief in deities can be temporary, if we want it, and it's a short way of saying a god or goddess or some other entity is one's own "short duration personal savior." 
4. Sardonicide: Possibly minted by Hakim Bey, it means to laugh something to death, or something that was laughed to death. 
5. Privateering: I was going to make all six start with "S" but I liked this one too much, at least recently. I'm not sure who coined it; it may be very old indeed. But George Lakoff suggests that those of us who object to the privatization of the public sphere -  by billionaires and others who do not have the idea of the common good in mind - should use this word for what they do. 
6. Modeltheism: I got this from Robert Anton Wilson. It describes intellectuals, academics, or any one of us who stumbled onto one model of looking at the world, forgot it was only a model and not the Absolute Truth, and now seem to worship this model as if it was heaven-sent. When we do this, we block out millions of other signals; we make ourselves stupid this way. 

OG as Promiscuous Neurotheologist Part One: Vico

O! Sing to me, Gods and Goddesses of sex, ecstasy, enlightened hedonism and equanimity! Breathe into me some...god-stuff! Only via the auspices of the Goddess of Cosmic Laughter can I see these Things through, which, aye, like all things and kidney stones, shall pass in the fullness of Space/Time. And if you're gonna go on being a bitch, I guess I'll just have to wait. Sheesh! Goddesses can be so temperamental!

Aye, but still: Sing to me?

                                     Erin C. Perry's image of Aphrodite. I think I saw that 
                                        outfit when I browsed Naughty Lingerie one day. 
                                     What does it say about our paideuma that we in
                                     the West have no female love goddess that competes for 
                                     the attentions of Yahweh? (Or do we?)
                                    

Origins of Religion: Giambattista Vico (1668-1744)
In his Autobiography (one of the first true modern ones), Vico writes of his Newtonian breakthroughs in what today we'd call the "social sciences":

"He discovers new historical principles of philosophy, and first of all a metaphysics of the human race. That is to say, a natural theology of all nations by which each people naturally created by itself its own gods through a certain natural instinct that man has for divinity. Fear of these gods led the first founders of nations to unite themselves with certain women in a lifelong companionship. This was the first human form of marriage. Thus he discovers the identity of the grand principle of gentile theology with that of the poetry of the theological poets, who were the world's first poets of all gentile humanity." (167-168)

A "natural instinct that man has for divinity." We will soon see that this is still a hotly contested topic in evolutionary psychology and cognitive science.

Okay, also note that Vico brackets off the Jews, who he considered to be the one tribe truly under a special dispensation from Gee Oh Dee. Over the years, in my reading of Vico, I think this is just a convenient way to seem like a Bible believer: he thought he'd perhaps score points with the Inquisition everywhere. But if you read Vico - just check out the Autobiography - you see he was influenced by Lucretius, whose hero was Epicurus. This is a stark fact that I find hard to square with most scholars' reading of Vico, and certainly a NeoCon like Mark Lilla doesn't see it this way. (But of course!) Vico knew of the persecution of heretics. Some of them had been his friends. Bracketing off the Jews made his sly act of writing as if he was a devout Roman Catholic, while a deeper and more nuanced reading shows him to be the first modern Anthropologist, and perhaps the inventor of the sociology of knowledge, which shows that people will tend to have certain political and other ideas based on the time, place, and social stratus in which they were born and raised and educated, and that what people believe is knowledge anywhere and anytime should be taken seriously, however much most other scholars would scoff. That which we do not consider "rational" can, when studied closely, reveal much about humankind. (And possibly suggest ways to avert socio-political dead ends?)

At present, I surmise that Vico's bracketing of the Jews was a move that made his work simpler: he had even bigger fish to fry; accounting for the Jews in his grand schema would only create more work for him. Hence: why not grant them their special one-to-one relationship with the Big Guy, and concentrate  on more interesting things? Like how class warfare is always being fought by the Owners against the Workers?

                                    Here's a vision of Zeus, a thunder-sky-father god. Note 
                                    how important it usually is for Angry Daddy to be ripped.
                                   Zeus here is so godly he seems to have an 8-pack, and he's 
                                   ready to run for Mr. Olympia yet again. And who would DARE
                                   vote against him? (Pssst: word on the street is this dude was
                                   into bestiality, which I can neither confirm, nor is it up to
                                   mortal me to deny.)

For Vico, "gods" first spoke through us as we began to try to interpret the entrails of animals and other acts of "divination;" very slowly we began to think in metaphors. Then most of language was based in metaphors, and we had learned to mostly think in language-constructs, or metaphors. The metaphor, in some sense, was a hypnotizing symbol for Objective Reality, but words can only be signs at the most...And language has always been used as Class Warfare by the landowners and the rich and the aristocratic, against everyone else. Vico argues that there's always been a dialectic: the intermarried Owners versus Everyone Else. The proles eventually gain more and more rights, things become more and more secular...then the local civilization, anywhere in History, falls apart, and then the Whole Thing starts up again. It's an idea - the cyclical model of history - that had been used before (Vico was influenced by people like Varro here), and it's been used again, most notoriously by James Joyce. It seems a poetic conception foremost to me, and in the case of Vico, it also provided a bulwark against persecution: he's really some stupendously weirdo thinker who's still totally brilliant. The Authorities probably didn't know what to make of him. He got away with it. (But he paid for it too: his grand masterwerk was neglected while he lived - though he worked the "social media" of 1725-1740 Naples/Europe as best he could - and it drove him over the edge, and he died soon after.)

Gods and goddesses in every country, every religion, came out of the sky and ground (metaphorically) and spoke to humans in poetic ways, via the first poets, who, funny enough, spoke in terms of Laws in such a way that seemed to favor the Landlords overwhelmingly. At one point in his magnum opus The New Science, he says that, initially, the Law was a "severe form of poetry."

Those who follow the latest neurobiological ideas about how language is instantiated in neural clusters in our brains, which we picked up via experience and repeated hearings, will find in Vico an 18th century Neapolitan weirdo-genius (my favorite types!) who prefigured it all. George Lakoff acknowledges as much in his The Political Mind when he writes, "A few philosophers (such as Vico, Nietzsche, and Cassirer) and literary critics (such as I.A. Richards) had noticed the existence of metaphorical thought, but none had figured out the scientific details of how it works." (252) Nietzsche was born in 1844, Cassirer in 1874, and Richards in 1893. Vico, again, was born in 1668.

So: the origin of gods and goddesses come from, first: the Ruling Classes, then the Workers have divinities speak through them. The local gods - especially the thunder/bird of prey/vengeful/Father God - will sometimes be used by the Ruling Classes as a political form of crowd control, but the Workers will come back with their own gods. (There's really an hellaciously lot of more from Vico, but no one likes it when I go on too long...)

Let us consider this a First Model for thinking about Neurotheology, based upon one Overweening Generalist's readings of the staggeringly brilliant and at times maddeningly opaque Vico.

If The Reader has a favorite origin model for religion, I wouldn't mind hearin' it.

Origin of Music: A Kluge? A Spandrel? An Exaptation?

How and when did music begin? I'm not sure we'll ever "really" come to a conclusion that will satisfy most people, but that's not the point; if we're at all interested in The Question, then the intellectual-aesthetic joys seem to reside in the debates and the different frameworks of talk and explanatory schemes that attend the query. It's easy to get mired in one scheme. Try JOOTSing ("Jumping outside of the system," a term from Douglas Hofstadter) and looking at another system of explanation. My favorite models have switched four or five times in the past few years.

                                   Charles "I Don't Want to Make Anyone Upset" Darwin

I used to be in the Darwin camp, and it's still a robust, vital model. (Of course!) Basically, the Darwin model sees not much of a practical "use" for a reason we evolved to be musical beings: the hot stuff is in sex selection. One of the reasons I've always found the "music is not practical for anything except pleasure and advertising as a viable sex mate" a persuasive bit is because of my own wallflower background as a kid. I was too too shy and didn't know the first thing about getting girls. It was agonizing. If I did have women my age in my life, I'd fallen into "let's just be friends" territory. But when I started playing guitar - I'm some sort of extremist because I took to it so strongly that I made myself practice four hours a day, almost right from the start - that when I got into my first bands, the girls "all the sudden" came at me like iron filings and I was some tall, gaunt, poorly-complected goofball girl-magnet. Yes they did come. It worked!...far better than I ever thought it would! Soon, I realized I wanted to actually be good and try to impress myself with my axe, but that's another story.

Recently - the last few years - I've been following the genes stuff that say music rides on language genes. This is where the science gets hairy, because I'm no expert and read debates between evolutionary psychologists, geneticists, and psycholinguists who have far better knowledge of the particulars. I find I look for elegance of rhetorical style in a psychologist's or sociobiologist's or semiotician's or linguist's or cognitive scientist's or ethnomusicologist's or zoomusicologist's arguments, which is no way to evaluate, but let's face it: most of us generalists just don't know...and if very many Experts disagree, I don't feel so bad. I'm not convinced anyone knows. Hence this blog...

Just in the past few years, we've found prehistoric flute-like instruments (a mammoth's bone-flute from c.35,000 years old that gave - approximately - the first four notes of the major scale [No 5th? O! As Maxwell Smart might've said, "Missed it by that much."]). Some have found some genes that seem to help in learning music. Neuroscientists have found localized areas of the brain that seem to function for improvisation. It's all very bewildering to me, I must confess.

But intriguing...

I scanned my copy of Edward O. Wilson's magisterial 1975 bombshell of an intellectual book, Sociobiology: The New Synthesis for observations on music and there's one short paragraph on it (p.564 in the first ed.), in the final chapter "Man: From Sociobiology to Sociology," and EOW hits on quasi-religious "uniting" people, identification like birds, apes drumming like carnival displays, animals just like us in some way, on a grand continuum. Comparing animals' uses of music to ours, "Richness of information and precise transmission of mood are no less the standard of excellence in human music." Later: "Human music has been liberated from iconic representation in the same way that true language has departed from the elementary ritualization characterizing the communication of animals. Music has the capacity for unlimited and arbitrary symbolization, and it employs rules of phrasing and order that serve the same function as syntax." And who can quibble with that? EOW seems influenced by Chomsky in that last bit, but EOW's also talking about where music ended up, by 1975 at least, before Auto-Tune.

HERE's a pretty good example of two psychologists who disagree about the "innateness" of music. I consider this polite debate between Geoffrey Miller and Gary Marcus to be a "push." I have no dog in this fight. Gary Marcus is also interviewed HERE for his latest book, Guitar Zero: The New Music and the Science of Learning, by the beautiful Cara Santa Maria. It's a good debate - the one between Miller and Marcus - if you haven't been keeping up on the origin of music debates lately, I think it's a very readable entry place. There's a book called Origins of Music by Wallin, Merker and Brown that came out in 2000 if you want to get quickly immersed in the intricacies of this stuff.

[A brief aside: the Marcus book shatters some assumptions about learning an instrument like guitar at a late age, say over 30. If you "always wanted to" but felt like you "waited too long," you still can! And Marcus provides some enticing neurobiological reasons why you still can.]

Lately I've favored the data about shamans, who imitate the sounds of animals and other sounds in nature, or the trough of onomatopoeiac explanations. The birds sing: are they communicating with each other, trying to wow a potential mate, or doing it for some bird-intrinsic rewarding "reason"? I don't know, but lately my main guys on this subject are two poetic philosophers: Lucretius (c.98-55 BCE), and Gimabattista Vico (1668-1744), who was influenced by Lucretius.

In his baroque exposition of his "New Science," Vico is fascinated by ideas about the origins of speech, writing, poetry, singing, gods, social order, and metaphors. In this he prefigures modern cognitive science, and many current Anthropologists and Sociologists think Vico originated cultural anthropology. Some of his passages on how metaphors work in the mind seem uncannily like George Lakoff's ideas, and indeed, in Lakoff's book The Political Mind he acknowledges Vico as a pre-empirical forerunner of thinkers who saw metaphor not as a figure of speech but as basic to thought.

"The authors of the first pagan nations must have formed their first languages by singing. For they had fallen into the brutish state of mute beasts, and in such dull-witted creatures only the stimulus of violent passions could have awakened consciousness."

"Mute people can utter crude vowels by singing, just as by singing stammerers can overcome their impediment and articulate consonants."

Orpheus would be a metaphorical god for those who were particularly adept at singing and perhaps playing a primitive instrument, like a lyre. An Orphic used music as strong rhetoric. I'd say He still does! But perhaps I'll go into that some other day.

                                         Supposedly this was what Lucretius looked like

Now my favorite passage from any book on this subject. From Lucretius's On The Nature Of Things, Book V:

By imitating with the mouth the clear notes of birds was in long use before men were able to sing in tune smooth-running verses and give pleasure to the ear. And the whistlings of the zephyr through the hollows of reeds first taught peasants to blow into hollow stalks. Then step by step they learned sweet plaintive ditties, which the pipe pours forth pressed by the fingers of the players, heard through pathless woods and forests and lawns, through the unfrequented haunts of shepherds and abodes of unearthly calm. These things would soothe and gratify their minds when sated with food; for then all things of this kind were welcome. Often therefore stretched in groups on the soft grass beside a stream of water under the boughs of a high tree at no great cost they would pleasantly refresh their bodies, above all when the weather smiled and the seasons of the year painted the green grass with flowers. Then went round the jest, the tale, the peals of merry laughter; for the peasant muse was then in its glory; then frolick mirth would prompt to entwine head and shoulders with garlands plaited with flowers and leaves, and to advance in the dance out of step and move the limbs clumsily and with clumsy foot beat mother earth; which would occasion smiles and peals of merry laughter, because all these things then from their greater novelty and strangeness were in high repute. And the wakeful found a solace for want of sleep in this, in drawing out a variety of notes and going through tunes and running over the reeds with curling lip; whence even at the present day watchmen observe these traditions and have lately learned to keep a proper tune; and yet for all this receive not a jot more of enjoyment, than erst the rugged race of sons of earth received. - translated by H.A.J. Munro

                               In case you haven't seen this, Slovakian violist is able to roll with
                               the modern punches (one minute or so):