MYTHS ARE HISTORY
1. On the Primacy of Sight
at Primary Cultural Sites |
1. On the Primacy of Sight at Primary Cultural Sites
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Human beings are first and foremost visual creatures. Eyesight has long been widely held to be the sense which allows for the greatest accuracy of discrimination, because the eyes are more readily able, than any other sense, to distinguish observable changes or differences in any object perceived. The eye is the primary sense, the crucial input factor, from where information about the phenomena of the outer world is gathered, prior to thinking.
The eye is the privileged agency of knowledge; the very beginning of modern science in the 6th century BC was rooted in the assertion that the cosmos was formed by natural processes that could be directly observed in the cosmos by the eyes. As remarked by Heraclitus: “The eyes are more exact witnesses than the ears.” To see was to know. Knowledge was a register of vision. This wasn’t an abstract symbolical or metaphorical situation of eyesight; it was an absolute or literally physical functional activity of the eyes. The Greek word for image, <Greek> (eidos), is also the root of the word idea; suggesting the connotation that our thoughts are inspired and guided by what we see. Words denotative of eyesight, as such, still continue to dominate many languages’ vocabularies, because “seeing” has always seemed to be better suited than any other sense to express qualitative distinctions of meaningful thinking or knowing. The sense of sight, in particular, works synthetically, so that we perceive both foreground and background together in simultaneous wholes. — But the observer is also part of the whole which he observes, however, and one must ultimately take account of this fact, too. — For perspectival vision locates and determines the observer as well as the things the observer observes. |
In the beginning, the celestial scene was seen. What happened in the skies above was directly observed by eyewitnesses on the ground below. The ancient astronomers were keen observers of their environment, and the meanings they gave to their observations of the sky’s regularities and irregularities became the basic framework of their peoples’ cultural traditions. Eyesight is by far the primary sense signified by the descriptions of the gods and events of myth, strongly suggesting that the oldest mythological motifs do indeed refer back to physical objects of vision.
What was first seen thereafter became what was routinely recounted by word of mouth; and the myths later written down reflect what was earlier said out loud about things that had originally been seen. Quite simply, for the ancients, Seeing Was Believing. Myths everywhere were made with the eyes before they were made in the mouth. All of the mythological mysteries that would later on only be believed in were at first originally beheld by human eyes looking up into the skies above. The dominant mythology of any society had its popular authority by being directly presentable on a regular basis in the very same sky all shared overhead. The specific local circumstances native to each culture’s immediate geographical situation provided, for each, the most direct line of physical vision. — Through this perspective, one could simply allude to things that all could easily see for themselves and understand. Their naked eyes having no objective knowledge of the actual physical nature of the cosmos above, however, meant that what they saw was what they got. |
Individual cultural mythologies concerning the actions of gods, demigods, culture heroes, and other supernatural beings are largely cosmographic observations of actual major environmental events, in particular temporary celestial events, witnessed by the members of that culture.
(W. Bruce Masse. Earth, Air, Fire and Water: The Archaeology of Bronze Age Cosmic Catastrophes, 1998) |
Accepting the basic premise that the major gods of antiquity had an astronomical origin, and that the main objects of myth were originally visibly seen by the naked, unaided human eye by all cultures everywhere during earlier epochs — recognition and application of the ancients’ intrinsic “primacy of sight” may be the surest key to recovering their mythopoeic cosmovisions.
Because the actual visible contents of cosmological events were first seen with the eyes before they were mythologized with the mouth, emphasizing the ancients’ primacy of sight immediately steers us toward recognition of the "visual vocabulary" utilized by any given mythic tradition. For what else was it — what else could it really have been? — that originally informed the forms of expression native to each homeland — if not the real life in situ observations and experiences of their own ancestors who were already living there? |
Myths of Creation — the oral traditions of the ancients that memorialized themes like the origin of the world and the activities of the gods — were intrinsically rooted to the specific geographical location where said activities were originally witnessed — most often the very site where the same myths were ritually recited and actively reenacted in perpetuity thereafter.
The thematic unity of any culture’s mythology was, in fact, intrinsically inseparable from that culture’s orientation with regard to their local environment’s unique circumstances in space and time. The narrative complexity of any culture’s cosmovision, in fact, ultimately comes down to a question of the particular angle of vision, or geophysical field-of-view, from which specific mythological themes were originally seen. — This problem is so fundamental to comparative world mythology today, that we must therefore do whatever we can to find our way back to the specific geophysical perspectives that framed the myth-makers’ original ways of confronting the world and asking questions about it. There is thus an imperative need to get back inside the unique fields-of-view rendered by the situational circumstances fundamental to each myth-making culture’s place and time; — for these are, quite literally, the very perspectives from which the narrative accounts in their respective mythologies were originally seen. — In order to recapture what the ancients saw, to recreate the celestial sights that originally comprised a given culture’s cosmovision, we must duly bring the distinct perspectives of their lands and seas and skies back into our own modern points of view. |
Ultimately, it was a much wider world that came before, when East and West were not split into divisive polar hemispheres yet. The myths of origin we seek took place in all places; — for all ancient peoples looked up into different parts of the same sky, day and night, and through their own local fields-of-view took measurements and kept careful record of the times and the seasons.
— This simple fact is the basis for the common unanimity of mythologies we find worldwide. The whole whole globe originally bore witness, each via their own respective field-of-view, to more or less the entire sequence of cosmological events remembered in mythology. |
We are not looking back to some sort of universal, all-prevailing myth or cosmology, diluted with time, but rather at strikingly similar sets of mythological themes that each derived from independent observations and coexisted alongside many others at the same time. We are looking back to ancient cultural memories that began as subjective eyewitness accounts of unforgettable events, seen from multiple points of view the world over. We are looking back to the very origins of human culture during a tumultuous period of prehistory whose echoes have continued to propagate through the ensuing ages, eventually leaving visible traces in modern religions and word-of-mouth folk traditions down to this very day.
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