Philosophy—Greek Wisdom from

In an earlier instance, speaking from a less ultimate pedestal, Socrates insisted on balancing the Appollonian advice of “know thyself” with the dictum of temperance, “nothing in excess” (Protagoras 343a–b). All the same, such religio-philosophical introspective wisdom, on the one hand, and temperance, on the other, were pursued by Socrates and his companions on rather individualistic pretexts. Philosophy generally was pursued in small circles of student associates, under a single tutor. The subject matter of study generally was restricted, therefore, to that teacher's own personal soteriology.

Philosophical quests traditionally have engaged only small numbers of elitist minds, sustained by equally elitist egos. Moreover, those few minds rarely contemplated their subject matter in a time perspective much larger than could be scanned by the two generations that could be represented by a teacher and his students. Knowledge about truth was obtained from moments of intuition, moments that were expected to occur after traversing lengthy paths of formal reasoning. These mental journeys therefore tended to be dedicated to an ahistorical exploration of static eternal relationships and structures. Moreover, such personal quests for intuition, at abstract levels, seldom brought much enlightenment to large numbers of people, to those who struggled for survival in a world that contained many kinds of living beings.

With some glimpses of hindsight, cast on the entire history of Greek philosophy, Apollo's dictum of “know thyself” now beckons us to supplement philosophical with historical introspection. The expanded Apollonian dictum becomes therefore: Know thyself as one knower among many; know thyself as a changing participant in a larger changing tradition of knowing; and know your own tradition as a dribble that trickles alongside and interplays with other traditions of knowing! And not all traditions of human knowledge are philosophical. Our holistic historical introspection therefore must try to embrace, as a minimum, an extended history of Greek philosophy. We must find some evolutionary rootlets in philosophy's prehistory.

The contents and memories of human minds generally are more ancient than their containers can intuit by themselves or under the spell of some momentary fascination. Therefore, even while dwelling still nearer to the fountainhead of their tradition and while pondering a-historically at ease, Socrates and Plato nevertheless had great difficulty seeing just how much their own methods of reasoning still depended on an ethos that was rooted in mythos. Thinking of themselves as intellectual reformers, Greek philosophers generally disliked the Greek mythological substratum of more ancient mental habits. At the same time they were largely unaware of the motherland and mythology that had furnished the ontological substratum for their philosophizing.

Furthermore, Socrates and Plato would have been surprised to recognize how their philosophical analytic methods, as distinguished from their ontological assumptions, were still akin to the habits of destructive herder-bandit-warrior ancestors who, mounted on horses, had pushed out from the Eurasian plains a few centuries earlier. They would not have been any less astonished to learn how their aristocratic talent of analytic reasoning itself had evolved, as a mental substitute, from the predatorial aggressiveness of these early Indo-European intruders.

The analytic physical breakdown of prey and environment, by predators and hunters, gradually over millions of years has been enhanced beyond the basic necessity of biting and digestion. This exaggeration was accomplished most effectively by aggressive male members of the genus Homo who, over millions of years, evolved into scavengers and tool-using predators.

An updated Appollonian dictum of “know thyself” obligates individual lovers of wisdom, therefore, to seriously study the entire evolution and history of cultures and religions in light of recent anthropological discoveries. Of course, the more limited philosophical task of personal introspection remains, as it always has been, a good start in this direction.

Intercultural and interreligious understanding can succeed only in continuity with prior introspection into one's own cultural, philosophical, and religious preoccupations. Minds grasp to understand by contrast and comparison. Thus, a student who impatiently rushes toward understanding another culture or its concomitant religion still may lack the wherewithal for making valid comparisons. Without perception of historical depth, without awareness of time and the fact that all things are changing, our own cultural trends, philosophical and religious, will not come adequately into focus for us—nor will those of other peoples. We therefore must begin our introspection afresh, precisely at the point where the proponents of Indo-European glory advised us to begin—at the very beginnings of Indo-European mythology.

Hesiod

Centuries before Greek philosophers and scientists began to reduce divine functions to abstract categories and impersonal principles—nay, even before classical Greek sculptors began to incarnate old divinities in bodies of wood or weigh them down with the inertia of stone—the poet Hesiod penned “Theogony.” This powerful mythos was destined to provide ethos for practically everything philosophical and scientific that hitherto has been thought and achieved in Western civilization.

The mythic event, of the divine son Cronos castrating his Father Uranos (Sky-Heaven), at the bidding of Mother Earth, goes a long ways toward explaining how Oedipus complexes thrive in societies afflicted with patrilineality, under gods who themselves rose up against their fathers. It exposes problems inherent in aristocratic succession. And it even provides a few ancient clues about elementary stirrings in women's liberation movements.

But in addition, this myth also exposes the roots of Western philosophy, of Western science and Western culture. It reveals some ancient existential reasons as to why, in spite of the presence of philosophy, certain new religious movements have succeeded. Seen from the angle of Greek history, the dualistic Greek philosophers, Socrates and Plato, and to some extent even Aristotle, added little more than footnotes to this seminal theogonic myth of castration, to this archetype of Western progress. Philosophical advance and scientific progress required for their legitimation this ancient archetype of “progression” from virile theogony to emasculated cosmogony.

It behooves us to refresh our memories concerning this important tale and contemplate afresh its central plot.[2] We are told here, at the dawn of Greek literature, that Earth was primary and Heaven was secondary:

Verily at first Chaos came to be, but next wide‑bosomed Earth, the ever‑sure foundation of all… And Earth first bare starry Heaven, equal to herself, to cover her on every side, and to be an ever‑sure abiding‑place for the gods.

The mythic narrative, of how Mother Earth subsequently gave birth to hills and nymphs, to Pontus, Oceanus, Coeus, Crius, Hyperion, Iapetus, Theia, and Rhea; to Themis, Mnemosyne, Phoebe, and Thetys; to Cronos, the Cyclopes, and finally Cottus, Briareos, and Gyes, moves on speedily to a divine plot. This mythic incident, as has been hinted already, produced far-reaching results in the mental development of not only ancient Greece, but of all of Western civilization.

For of all the children that were born of Earth and Heaven, these were the most terrible, and they were hated by their own father from the first. And he used to hide them all away in a secret place of Earth so soon as each was born, and would not suffer them to come up into the light: and Heaven rejoiced in his evil doing. But vast Earth groaned within, being straitened, and she thought a crafty and an evil vile. Forthwith she made the element of gray flint and shaped a great sickle, and told her plan to her dear sons. And she spoke, cheering them, while she was vexed in her dear heart:

"My children, gotten of a sinful father, if you will obey me, we should punish the vile outrage of your father; for he first thought of doing shameful things."

So she said; but fear seized them all, and none of them uttered a word. But great Cronos the wily took courage and answered his dear mother:

“Mother, I will undertake to do this deed, for I reverence not our father of evil name, for he first thought of doing shameful things.”

So he said: and vast Earth rejoiced greatly in spirit, and set and hid him in an ambush, and put in his hands the jagged sickle, and revealed to him the whole plot.

And Heaven came, bringing on night and longing for love, and he lay about Earth spreading himself full upon her. Then the son from his ambush stretched forth his left hand and in his right took the great long sickle with jagged teeth, and swiftly lopped off his own father's members and cast them away to fall behind him.[3]

Herder Culture

In contrast to the indigenous Egyptian civilization of sedentary farmers, the Greek cultural heritage received it primary impulses from Euro-Asiatic herders. During much of its early history, Egypt had been sheltered from major movements of nomadic peoples. At most, it was obliged to respond to impulses from the Mesopotamian sedentary presence. In later times, especially after the arrival of Eurasian horses in Egypt with the Hyksos and after their expulsion, Egyptian dealings were destined to expand eastward and northward in the general direction from which came the Hyksos kings with their horse-drawn chariots.

For the sake of a broad overview the ancient Near East may be approached, elliptically, by way of its two very diverse ideo-cultural foci. Egyptian culture and religion, together with its reactionary Hebrew offshoot, may be seen as representing one focus. Hellas, a representative of Indo-European intrusions into the Mediterranean realm, may be seen as representing the other.

An approach to the ancient Near East by way of focusing on extreme cultural and religious postures may not do justice to all the ordinary people who, existentially, were living along their own spectrum of aggression-retreat possibilities. But then, an understanding of the broader and extreme ideological postures nevertheless may provide a useful shortcut for obtaining an overview on the scope of this study. Nothing during the third and second millennium B.C.E., in the Near East, stood in sharper contrast than the lifeways of sedentary farmers in Egypt, on the one hand, and the ways of nomadic herder folk, on the other. Fanatic devotees to the latter way of life kept pushing from Eurasia into the Fertile Crescent. They arrived with wagons, then with horse-drawn chariots, and finally as skilled warriors on horseback. They traded some of their animals and passed on their new arts of cavalry warfare to the peoples whom they touched—who then increasingly needed these means for their safety and defense.

When Eurasian herders succeeded in domesticating horses, they themselves were electrified by the power and speed of their subjugated animals. When herders perfected the art of riding on horseback, warfare became more fierce and was destined never to be the same again. When these Asiatic horse breeders then brought their animals to sedentary cultures in the Near East, those sedentary civilizations were transformed by cavalry-incited militarism. An equine-inspired cultural dynamic was set in motion that pulsated clear into our twentieth century. World War I was still ignited by it, and World War II erupted among its embers—only to be continued now with variants or “antitheses” of armored, so-called "horseless" carriages. I personally may have witnessed one of the last cavalry battles in human history, just a few kilometers from my boyhood home.

Nothing in this broad overview conflicts with Colin Renfrew's postulate, of a prior westward expansion of agriculture into Europe by carriers who spoke a proto-Indoeuropean language.[4] In fact, the equine-generated cultural explosion on the steppes of Eurasia might have forced the westward movement of farmers in the first place. After the southern European plains were emptied of farmers by waves of increasingly more spirited horsemen from the steppes, the latter sometimes became acculturated to the remains of the civilization that they failed to destroy completely.

As adaptive hunters in Asia, following remnant herds of grazing animals, they had become herders. As riders on horseback, they became herder-bandit-warriors; and as such they overtook farming communities and civilizations south of the Caucasus. Their kindred by profession caught up with and plundered those planters who had resettled farther west in Europe. They “domesticated” farmers and low-class herders after the manner in which they were accustomed to control herds of grazing animals. They thereby became “grand domesticators” and “over-domesticators,” depending on the value judgment that is being applied by objective observers.

In this discussion we are not concerned strictly with the problem of linguistic movements. The mythos and ethos of nomadic herder-warriors, as they vented their “glory and honor” aspirations in their lengthy epics, transcended tribal languages and could easily be retold in the media of any lingual configurations. In fact, they most probably have contributed to the formation of new languages. In any case, mythos and ethos rest foremost on life-style and the justification of livelihood. By contrast, individual languages function only as temporary carriers—and disposable vehicles at that.

Although the appellation cowboy in its modern Western sense may not be entirely appropriate for labeling the entire scavenger-hunter-herder-bandit-warrior mentality brought into bloom by Eurasian horsemanship, in this book we nevertheless will use this term occasionally. A “cowboy” may be the closest a modern Western reader will ever have come to the primitive Asiatic horse-oriented megalomania and cultural milieu. The term cowboy enables us to think about much of ancient Egyptian culture and religion by way of a contrast, or as a foil. The ancient land of Egypt represented sedentary farmers who would rather have been left alone by grand domesticators and empire builders to plant their fields and raise domestic animals.

In Hesiod's Theogony, earlier, we were told some interesting things about the behavior of traditional Greek “cowboy” gods. And all along we know that the quoted portion was only one conspicuous act of violence among many episodes in Hesiod's theogony. Prior to the significant castration incident, Father Sky tormented his offspring, and afterward Cronos, to whom the cruel deed of castration had been attributed, was defeated and imprisoned by his own son, Zeus.

* * *

What ought a historian make of this grand array of conflict theology? Should one agree with the philosopher Plato when he suggested, in the Republic, that storytellers like Homer and Hesiod should be censured on that account? Plato himself even went as far as to propose an effective method for silencing their literature forever. That literature, according to him, contained only lies.

There is, first of all ... the greatest lie about the things of greatest concern ... how Uranos did what Hesiod says he did to Cronos, and how Cronos in turn took his revenge, and then there are the doings and sufferings of Cronos at the hands of his son. Even if they were true I should not think that they ought to be thus lightly told to thoughtless young persons. But the best way would be to bury them in silence.[5]

And here is how Plato envisioned this silent burial. First, the audience should be restricted to a very few. A pledge of strict secrecy should be required. On top of that a large sacrifice should be given— not just “a pig, but some huge and unprocurable victim.”

Needless to say, Plato did not want those stories repeated, neither then, nor ever. He was convinced that they were lies and that the gods never waged war or did other cruel deeds. Plato was afraid that people who hear and believe these stories might want to imitate the violent deeds of their gods. And yes, the philosopher was right. Humankind, as a rule, does imitate, usurp, and absorb whatever appears greater than itself. Originally these myths were told to glorify, that is, to “justify,” past herder-bandit type behavior. Castration and killing belonged among their repertoire of skills. Bards like Homer and Hesiod peddled their warrior theologies among would-be warriors and aristocrats, for entertainment...in what would be equivalent to our “veterans clubs.” Comparatively speaking, it may be said that these mythic tales were functional equivalents to our blue movies that, in America, first have spread among veterans and warrior clubs as well. But then, because Hesiod's and Homer's epics were so well done, as works of art, they became, as such, regular school-book fare for Greece.

Hesiod by himself should not be blamed for the existence of his craft, nor for the existence of an epic tradition as such. His was a time-honored tradition already among prehistoric Eurasian hordes of horsemen. In fact, this epic tradition was so strong and has been so revered that in Central Asia it remains alive to this very day.[6]

For a better historical perspective on this hero-horse-and-glory religiosity of Homer and Hesiod we do well when we search for an Indo-European tradition that might be even older than theirs. And yes, we do have antecedent Hittite texts, perhaps over a thousand years older. These may have been derived from still older Hurrian sources.

The first God of Heaven of the Hittites, Alalus, was killed by Anus. Thus Anus was defeated by Kumarbis. And we are told that Kumarbis bit off the manhood of the vanquished god and swallowed it. Inside his belly the phallus of Anus grew into the Hittite storm-god. After he was born, this storm-god defeated Kumarbis at the instigation of Anus who, understandably, had remained angry and sore about his loss.[7]

Seen from the Hittite angle, Hesiod's version may not necessarily seem an improvement over this older version. The severed members of Anus matured into the Hittite storm god, a counterpart to Zeus. By contrast, those cut away from Uranos according to Hesiodic mythology were neutered some more, by being transformed into their sexual opposite, the female Aphrodite and goddess of love. One may surmise that for Hesiod, personally, the precise outcome of his tale was irrelevant. The transformation of Uranus' manhood into Aphrodite was simply a convenient way of disposing a still powerful masculine “abstraction.”

If from the land of the Hittites, about that time, we had traveled far enough north and east we could have come across some Aryan tribesmen who were in the process of descending southward upon the Indus civilization. Aryan poets, perhaps a millennium later in the Rig Veda, still ascribed similar cruelty to their chief warrior deity, Indra—such as slugging Dasyu fortifications like pregnant women who, as a result, aborted their black inhabitants.[8] This is the same genre of raw theological burlesque produced by herders who turned warriors. They were men who knew well how to kill and castrate, and who had set out to rob farmers' livelihood. By the systematic pursuit of these activities they became rulers and aristocrats, and they told tales of cosmic scope to ridicule the procreation- and generation-oriented religion of the natives they subjected.

The task of fair historical interpretation always is difficult. Because whenever in history one sees someone score as a great hero, glamorous enough to where that hero can afford to build palaces and other notable monuments or temples and churches for atonement, his most cruel deeds already have been done. As a rule, the scribes and historians arrive at the scene just in time for the whitewash—to be paid royally for their whitewashing labor. For understanding religions we therefore must find additional access to culture-historical data, that is, shortcuts directly to the minds of the people. All the while, we must keep an eye on the larger historical context. Our shortcut to the minds of these horse-and-glory warriors is precisely their shabby mythology of violence, their memorized epics, and marvelous recitations.

Poets as Reformers

The first intent of every genuine religious movement, as religion has been defined in this book, is to save and balance a corresponding culture. Religion constitutes a reorientation by retreat-oriented common sense that limits cultural aggression and thereby establishes, and justifies afresh, a limit of aggression. As has been sufficiently outlined in the introductory chapter, cultures and religions essentially are opposites.

As strange as it may seem, the predecessors of Homer and Hesiod, in their time, actually were spreading some religious sentiments, of a very weak sort. They began the long process of converting actual blood-thirsty bandits and warriors into spoiled aristocrats who, in time, would rather listen to heroism in the form of poetry than do the required cruel deeds on an actual battlefield.

But, of course, the poetic method of reforming cutthroats by means of artistic sublimation does work exceedingly slow. On that account, this method was no longer sufficient, or even decent enough, to be admitted into Plato's notion of an ideal state. Belief in God or gods, to the extent that such a belief is maintained religiously, indeed facilitates honest retreat behavior. But to the extent that belief in God or gods has become organized in line with the progressive appetites of culture, it could be used as easily to justify aggression and war-mongering. All peoples on earth have had experiences with those types of so-called religious postures.

“As it was in the beginning [in God's behavior], is now, and ever shall be [in human behavior].” This is not only a Christian liturgical formula, it is the logic by which all cultures of Homines sapientes evolve, albeit at times only semiconsciously.

Philosophers as Reformers

Where does all of this leave our Greek philosophers in the ancient conflict between herder-dominated cultures and farmer civilizations? In Greek society they functioned approximately as prophets did in ancient Israel and Judah. Of course, Greek philosophers were necessarily different from Jewish prophets. They had no Egyptian imperial God of gods from under whom they needed to escape; they therefore needed no strong theology to upstage or to deny the reality of such a God.

Nevertheless, Greek philosophers were squaring off with their own Hellenic grand domesticator gods just the same. Had they acted like Hebrew prophets, Greek philosophers probably would not have survived very long in their own rough-and-tumble nation, that is, in a culture that still gloried in its old youthful “cowboy” ethos where Homeric cutthroats were still deemed aristocratic and noble.

* * *

It must be acknowledged at the outset that Greek philosophy is not entirely Greek. Its origin was in Miletus in Ionia, Asia Minor, a harbor city that at the time was the primary trading partner of Egypt. This should give us a clue. But trade in material goods is not our primary concern here; and the identity of carrier storytellers no longer can be traced. We therefore have to look for our evidence, concerning Ionia's indebtedness to Egyptian ontology, among the very ontological axioms of Greek philosophy itself. Common sense at that basic axiomatic level can be carried from harbor to harbor by ordinary folk. No exchange of leading thinkers between Egypt and Ionia was necessary for transmitting basic ontology from one place to another, though traveling scholars there surely were.

Regarding Greek philosophy, we must distinguish its method from its content, its analytic habits from its axiomatic ontology. The philosophers' analytical habits by and large have been the indigenous product of Greek predatorial herder intellect. From an evolutionary perspective, their analysis represents a sublimation of perfected physical butchering skills. There always will be a difference between the knife of analysis and the subject matter to which that knife is being applied. As of late I have permitted myself to become convinced that the ontology to which Greek philosophers have applied their analytical scalpels, all along, has been a residue of Egyptian theology.[9]

No matter how much the Greek philosophers disliked Hesiodic mythology, their own method of inquiry and thinking was still conditioned, all the same, by its very same basic “cowboy” ethos. And that ethos included the very notion of castration, and creation with the help of weapons.

Castration, in its raw physical form, is a condition that domesticators, especially herders, inflict on some of their animals to make them tame. In Hesiod's myth we obtain a glimpse of how such domesticator skills were magnified by Greek poets to the level of over-domestication cosmology and hype. When in the course of human evolution domesticators progressed to the level of grand domestication we find, in the records of history, how divinely mandated despots had their harems guarded by cut eunuchs. When finally this level of over-domestication needed religious justification, the theme of exemplary castration—as the gods themselves did it—provided a reasonable direction of theological-ascetic practice and philosophical speculation.

* * *

Up to this point the early prehistory of Hesiod's myth, in herder life, already has been sketched. What follows here as “history of Greek philosophy” will be the sequence of Greek rationalizations concocted on behalf of its sublimation.

Soon after Hesiod had postulated Father Heaven's castration, Greek sculptors transfixed the god's divine progeny into concrete and inert bodies of wood and stone. The fact that gods have been entrapped by skilled human hands in static and sometimes compromising humanlike postures proved damaging to their reputation in the longer run. In addition, ingenious playwrights also paraded the old Hellenic gods in some of these compromising postures, like columns of prisoners, to everyone's delight.

At last, when the time was ripe, came the philosophers. These men occasionally quoted the old names of Hellenic gods with an air of feigned piety. But all the same, the Greek divine names they mentioned no longer were related directly to anything basic in their personal world-views. These deities were not seriously expected to contribute anymore to ontology.

Analysis and abstraction are the mental counterparts to physical severance and castration. So, for example, that which survives after philosophical abstraction of, let us say, a Creator deity, remains no longer a personal deity. It is reduced to a static philosophical “principle of creativity.”

The realm of Platonic “ideas” has been conceptualized as an eternal but also static dimension of greater-than-human reality. About Aristotle's Prime Mover we are told that, although everything else moves because of him, he himself is an Unmoved Mover (Physics 5). The First Mover has no limit or magnitude and is situated at the circumference of the known world (Physics 10). Aristotle ruled out the possibility of having a Prime Mover create movement by either pushing or pulling. In his Metaphysics he therefore derived motion in the universe from the fact that the Prime Mover still represents “an object of desire” on account of which other entities move.[10] This finally implies that the First Mover is not only unmoved by someone else but in actuality, by himself, also may be impotent and unmoving.

Thus, all these famous Greek philosophical systems, and Western science subsequently, suffer from what one might call the Hesiodic castration syndrome or the Uranian predicament.

Of course, our Greek philosophers were not that negative toward all the gods. It would have been impossible for them to hope to reform their culture from the platform of an all-out atheism. In addition, Greek philosophers have appropriated, perhaps unknowingly, the primary ontology of ancient Egyptian monotheism, at least in its decayed form as monism. What is meant here by decayed form? This calls for a brief digression and explanation.

Human rationality proceeds like music, it shifts from one key to another, from a higher octave to a lower one, depending on a composer's inspiration, instrumentation, and cultural context. The language of experiential religion can accordingly be translated into the language of theology, theology into philosophy, philosophy into science, and science into technology.

Thus, genuine religious experiences naturally begin to decay by the yeast of rational theology. And this happens inevitably, because homo religiosus is homo sapiens as well. Analytic reasoning, an innate activity of the human mind, corresponds to teeth and digestive acids in an animal's physical body. Teeth and digestive acids both perform elementary analysis; that is, a kind of breakdown. Systematic theological minds, in a like manner, break down the subject matter of religion—gods or God—by way of distinguishing divine functions, aspects, and attributes.

Then processes, aspects, and attributes of some larger reality configuration are subsequently reduced by philosophers, to the size of more easily comprehensible and more manageable abstractions. Monotheism thereby becomes monism, and polytheism becomes pluralism. Sped along by the enzyme of analytic reason, the products of analytic theology continue to decay into philosophical abstractions and thinkable principles. It becomes possible to approach what used to be true greater-than-human realities without having to pray to them. Thus, philosophy by its very nature is a-theistic.

Philosophies subsequently decay into sciences. Principles are trimmed down to become even more applicable and manageable. For their part, the sciences decay into technologies, into institutions, and into hangovers for Earth and Nature. With fresh theophanies about World and Nature, as truly greater-than-human realities, with divine grace and a little luck, the process of analytic decay may be given a chance to begin anew with a mystic vision. Thus, inherent in Greek philosophy was not only the possibility of decay. There also was the possibility of redemption and reform, including religious retreats to divinely graced common sense.

Redemption, or religious retreat from analysis, was implied when Ionian philosophers paused long enough to think about substance or apeiron as something “divine”—divine in the holistic Egyptian sense. The Enneadean stream of life, or Atum's seminal emission, is what Anaxagoras fell back on when he envisioned Anaximander's apeiron as full of “seeds.” That same theology of flux and flow, which initially perhaps had been inspired by the living River Nile, still echoed in the philosophy of Heraclitus when he saw reality as alive and flowing. Plato returned to that same Egyptian theology when, in the Timaeus, he summed up his description of the cosmogonic process as God generating an “only-begotten universe.” And finally, that same theology of redemption was present when Aristotle struggled to overcome Plato's dichotomy—his static “realm of ideas” versus “objects of sense experience.” With his graduated theory of “form and matter,” the philosopher Aristotle succeeded in constructing a metaphysical halfway house between Platonic dualism and Egyptian holistic emanationalism.

Greek philosophy eventually won its skirmishes against the old imperialistic gods of the weapon-religion type. It left on its battleground the ruined reputations of old over-domestication cults. And it also left in its wake, mired in satire and disdain, the old burlesque myths that supported killing, castration, and other grand domestication tricks. The philosophers then arranged for fresh and cautious rapprochement with Egyptian dynamic monism.

Beyond that, perhaps without really knowing or trying, the Greek philosophers redefined the commonsense context and paved the way for a fresh kind of monotheistic vision. The conceptual decay of monotheism into monism was not irreversible. And behold, in the form of the Christian religion, Greek philosophy later found again a new mythological home—new life for its ancient formal skeleton and its abstract brittle bones. Booklet Five of this series will give important glimpses of that fresh turning point in the history of Greek and Western civilization.