Attn Enenuru Occultists:
Nov 7, 2007 22:00:06 GMT -5
Post by us4-he2-gal2 on Nov 7, 2007 22:00:06 GMT -5
Whats in a few Millennia?
Momentarily, I will be posting an attempt to start on going discussion on the idea's presented by a rare analytical examination of Mesopotamian Magic - See the thread "Theoretical Understandings". Not summed there are Binsbergen and Wiggermen's comments on the survival and influence of Mesopotamian magic into the occult and esoteric communities of the last 2000 years. As Im willing to bet some of our arrivals from Occult forums especially know more on these then I do, Im inviting all interested to comment below on whichever parallels and echos suggest themselves on reading the following excerpt from the B/W paper - perhaps in conjunction- with what you've seen about Mesopotamian magic on this board or elsewhere. This is thus a very open ended thread.
cheers.
"To abandon the concept of magic with regard to Ancient Mesopotamia would mean denying a historical usage which has persisted over the past two millennia. 25 During almost that entire period first-hand textual evidence concerning the symbolic production of Ancient Mesopotamia had to be lacking since scholarship had no longer access to the cuneiform tablets nor to the language and script for which they had served as medium. Even so, distinct echoes from that symbolic production filtered through to Hellenic and Hellenistic (and ultimately Arabian, Indian and Christian) texts and practices, and here they tended to be subsumed under the heading of a complex actors’ concept, that of ma±geiva: a word deriving from an Iranian linguistic and religious context but under which — by implying, at the same time, a vague category of Chaldaeans whose actual cultural, ethnic, linguistic and religious associations with Ancient Mesopotamia may often have been more fictitious than real — also the afterlife of Mesopotamian magic was subsumed. When, in 1900, R.C. Thompson published The reports of the magicians and astrologers of Nineveh and Babylon, he used the word ‘magician’ not so much in a general, universally applicable abstract sense but in one that, for two millennia, had been used for, among others, Ancient Mesopotamian religious specialists as seen from a European perspective. In other words, Ancient Mesopotamian magic is not just one particular form of magic — it is one of the few original forms of magic as recognised in the European tradition. The history of the concept through Hellenism and Late Antiquity right down to the present day contains much of the European encounter with modes of thought which for two millennia had occupied a central position in esoteric scholarly culture, and which only in the last one or two centuries were relegated to a peripheral position. The continued dominance, in North Atlantic culture, of the Bible with its layers of Ancient Middle Eastern world-views; the survival and even twentieth-century revival of astrology; 26 the tremendous Renaissance success of GHayat al-/Hakim / Picatrix as a medieval re-formulation of Hellenistic magic with a considerable input from Ancient Mesopotamia; 27 the even greater success of geomancy, which with a similar background spread not only to Europe but also to most of Africa, the Indian Ocean region and parts of the New World:28 all this shows that the symbolic production of Ancient Mesopotamia has, albeit very selectively, filtered through to our times. Having been the science par excellence during the greater part of these two millennia (as it was in Ancient Mesopotamia, in the first place), this ancient magical tradition helped to engender modern science. Thus it can even be said to have contributed to the emergence of the intellectual stance from which we are now critically and agnostically looking at that very same symbolic production.
By now our sources, as unearthed and deciphered since the middle of the nineteenth century, have become incomparably more direct, abundant, with far greater time depth, and far more complex, then anything which seeped through in the course of European cultural history. However, to continue to apply the term magic to this newly emerged, puzzling body of assyriological material may be more nostalgic than it is revealing, unless we find a way of accounting for the dynamic historical development of this corpus and for its peculiar position vis-à-vis other ideological stances within Ancient Mesopotamia. This requires looking afresh at the concept of magic."
