Beruflich Dokumente
Kultur Dokumente
TWO
ROMAN I T Y
P RESS
NORMAN, OK
Now, James, I have noticed that, over the last few years, your work
has incorporated quite a number of new interpretive concepts. In
conversation you often mention amniotic light as a master theme
in the history of the West. What is this mysterious amniotic light?
James L. Kelley: Let's take the example of ancient Egypt. In
general, ancient accounts of creation say that earth and sky are the
end result of an earlier, more primordial process, and the ancient
Egyptian evidence follows this pattern. In the Pyramid Texts and in
the Coffin Texts the first deity, Atum, realizes that an aspect of
himself, a second god called Shu or void, has created a space or
womb inside his body. Turning his divine power of illuminative
vision toward his own suddenly androgynous midriff, Atum sees a
whole cosmos of forms that Shu has revealed to him. Atum, now
inspired, either sneezes or masturbates (depending on how you
interpret the texts). Either way, the divine fluid that exits Atum's
body turns out to be the god Shu.
The newly-externalized Shu creates a space outside of Atum's body.
This spacean external mirror-image of the womb Shu has already
made inside Atumis totally filled by the force or presence of Shu,
who remains unseen, though he makes everything else visible (and
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thus real) in the cosmos by allowing the sun to appear in his space
(some versions identify the sun with Shu, actually). Another
Egyptian text speaks of the sun as a child that opens up its eyes, and
by doing so, chase[s] away the clouds [and] repell[s] the darkness
by giving birth to his own image through what one text calls selfdeveloping.[1] Here we have a parallel between Shu being born as
a space opening up in (and out of!) Atum and the child on the lotus
bringing into being the world of rocks, trees, and oxygenated
atmosphere by being born, that is, by opening its eyes.
So, Shu makes this material world by producing Earth and Sky and
then separating them. Shu has, in a sense, replicated Atum's earlier
situation, where Atum's body floated as a mound of unformed matter
surrounded by the undifferentiated, benighted waters of chaos, or
Nun. The cosmos is a womb; bodies of gods form the outer barrier,
and inside we have a child of light that makes things move and live
and have their being by looking at them, by emitting light. Here light
is parallel to the waters of Nun in many ways. Nun is disordered and
undifferentiated; the space aspect of Shu, the relatively dry aspect,
is inseparable from the illuminating property. The Egyptian texts say
that the waters of Nun are devoid of light. But the cosmic space of
Shu is created by a wet god, since Shu is the divine moisture
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emitted by Atum. However, what has been added is air or breath, that
is, the spirit or force that pushed Shu from Atum's body. The womb
of illuminated space that is Shu is created by the drying, hardening,
solidifying action of air or breath. This is how Atum revealed
himself in the first place, as a mound of earth or congealed Nun. The
air or vital breath of his own thought is Shu. Shu is Atum's son, his
seminal thought. Thus, the world we live in is one of amniotic light.
We are in a womb of dried out air that allows ordered motion and
development, since is allows the sun to give its light. But the dried
out air, it must be stressed, is nothing more than a stabilized,
ordered counterpart to the chaotic waters of Nun, wherein all the
seeds of possible beings were mixed up and even interpenetrated
each other.
In short, the space between Earth and Sky in the Egyptian cosmology exhibits two propertiesfluidity and luminositythat make
the atmospheric womb an especially apt medium for transferring
thought and desire. We find the same thing in the ancient Greeks:
Hesiod writes that the cutting apart of the gods Heaven and Earth
created a space bounded by their bodies and filled with light. The
Greeks also understood that vision is a projection as much as a
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some of them) desired the bodied of other Greek men because they
devalued the female body as being no more than a passive
receptacle. She was the vessel, the sack, wherein the mirror image of
the (male) Self was fashioned. She was passive, but the male was
active in giving birth, through his seminal fluid, to a copy of
himself! And don't forget that the Greeks saw menstrual blood as a
kind of degenerate semen: if the woman had "cooked longer" in the
womb, she would have been a boy, but she has a defective body and
her semen, her life-blood, is also deficienther reproductive fluid
and her body "failed" to rise to the level of full personhood or
maleness.
Anyway, this all leads to one thing: outside of reproduction-oriented
union with wives, some Greek men pursued sexual union with Greek
boys. The latter were on the threshold of manhood, and this
pederasty was viewed as the child's push into manhood. The point is
not that a few Greeks liked men and boys more than women; the
point is that this proclivity seems to have been inspired by the main
religio-cultural complex that the Greeks inherited from the earlier
Indo-European peoples who migrated into the Balkans before Homer
wrote (Songe-Mller does not go into the pre-Greek background,
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and protuberance, also seems to refer to the male seed, the lifeliquid that ensures the immortality of the male through the
production of a son who, in a sense, is the father.[3] As for the
chakras, note that Homer used the word aion to mean something
like male seed, but also spinal fluid. Other ancient Greek and
Roman texts show a belief (very close to the ancient Indian
anthropology) that tears, sweat, semen, and spinal fluid are all the
same thing: the vital sap or fluid of life (the main analogy here was
with plants, who bleed out their life in the form of sap when cut).
As in the chakra theory, the Greco-Roman view holds that this fluid
should collect in the skull of the virtuous man; this may be behind
Athena's birth from the head of Zeus, but also remember that, in the
Egyptian Ennead, Atum gives birth through some kind of
masturbation that results in semen being sneezed out of his head. In
Homer the presence of the aion or life-fluid in the body (but
especially in the sacred sheath or spinal column) kept the flesh from
rotting, and the crushing of the spine led inevitably to the body's
decomposition. Other ancient Greek texts refer to the aion leaving
the body in the shape of a snake, which may have influenced the
Orphics and the Ophites in later times. At any rate, the important
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where does the light piece of the amniotic light theme come into
play? I see that there is fluid and water all over the place in these
Indo-European myths, but is there an equal emphasis on light?
James L. Kelley: I have found two types of references. One refers
specifically to light as the principle that allows the cosmos to exist as
a system of distinct yet interrelated beings. This is like when Hesiod
describes the separation of Earth and Heaven as the creation of a
space where beings can truly exist instead of being buried in the
Earth (literally!); the Greek poet Euripides speaks of the creation of
the amniotic space as having brought forth all things, sending into
light trees, birds...and the race of mortals.[7]
Other texts emphasize visibility, which still implies light, though the
word light may not be mentioned. For instance, in the Iliad,
Athena takes away the achlys or fog from the Diomedes' eyes, thus
allowing the latter to distinguish gods from mortals.[8] Hymn 82 of
the Tenth Book of the Rig Veda mentions the gods' original state,
floating together in the amniotic waters before the creation of earth
and heaven. Here the gods saw each other, this power of seeing
divinity being itself the sign of each god's divinity. Humans are
defined in the Hymn, contrariwise, as beings who lack divine vision,
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who lack the eye that the highest god shared with the other gods
he fathered. Humans stumble around in a misty cloud, unable to
see divine realities.[9] The parallel is this: your power of seeing
either penetrates the fluid of space without obstruction (as in the
gods, who beheld themselves together in the primordial waters), or
you see imperfectly, in a mist, as do mortals. In either case, the
semantic field is one of embryos in amniotic fluid, embryos that may
or may not see (and thus relate in an ordered manner) in the light of
the highest Truth.[10] In another session we'll talk about the earliest
Greek philosophers and physicians and their almost unanimous use
of embryology to explain the formation of the universe as a huge
living womb in which all other beings are generated or incubated.
A few parting words on this topic of the light in the cosmic lifefluid: First of all, note that the Chndogya Upanisad defines the gods
as those who neither eat nor drink. They become sated by just
looking at this nectar.[11] Secondly, note that the word most
commonly used in Greek texts for naturephysistakes its origin
from F-, meaning see. The gods know everything because
their vision takes in all of space and time with no gap or interruption.
Thus, they see the whole interrelated system of reality, both its indiv13
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NOTES
[1] You chased away the clouds, you repelled the darkness, you
illuminated the Two Lands. (E. Chassinat, Le Temple d'Edfou, vol.
6 [Cairo 1931], p. 247; cited in The Gods of Egypt, translated by
David Lorton (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001), p.79). On
Shu and Atum and self-developing, see Coffin Texts, spell 75,
English translation James P. Allen, Genesis in Egypt: The
Philosophy of Ancient Egyptian Creation Accounts (New Haven, CT:
Yale University Press, 1988), p. 15-16.
[2] Vigdis Songe-Mller, Philosophy Without Women: The Birth of
Sexism in Western Thought, translated by Peter Cripps (London and
New York: Continuum, 2002).
[3] "In several Indo-european tongues the term for 'male' refers to
liquid emitted, i.e. the seed (e.g. hersen, cf. herse, Sanscr : large; vr
'water', vrsan- 'male', O. Norse ver 'water, sea') () I suggest that ver
meant originally the liquid or sap, seed, new growth, 'offspring'...
(Richard Broxton Onians, Origins of European Thought About the
Body, the Mind, the Soul, the World, Time and Fate [Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1988], p. 178, footnote). Note that hersen (male)
is based in the I-E root ker-, which is also related to brain, heart,
horn or protuberance, grain pushing out of the earth, growth, heat,
and youth (kore) (The American Heritage Dictionary Indo-European
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