Maps of Meaning 1, 2, & 3

[0] Welcome to the Jordan B. Peterson podcast.

[1] This podcast is an amalgamation of the first three episodes of Maps of Meaning recorded by TV Ontario.

[2] You can support these podcasts by donating the amount of your choice to Dr. Peterson's Patreon account, which can be found by searching Jordan Peterson Patreon or by finding a link in the description.

[3] Dr. Peterson's self -development programs, self -authoring, can be found in.

[4] self -authoring .com one of the fundamental thesis of this course is that in in modern literature and in literature that isn't so modern there's the notion of a human created monster Frankenstein right springs to mind and at an adequate time I mean Frankenstein was a fantasy an unconscious fantasy a dream in actuality about the potential dangers of unbridled technological advancement right well this Frankenstein monsters face us daily.

[5] I mean it's become a constant part of our existence.

[6] Why is that?

[7] Well, maybe it's something like this, and this is certainly a notion that Jung would agree with, if we don't develop a moral sense as conscious and as elaborated as our technological sense, the fact that we're capable of becoming increasingly powerful will necessarily do us in.

[8] The bigger your weapons, the smarter you better be to control them.

[9] And so maybe it is something like this, maybe, and this is a strict Jungian notion, maybe 500 years ago when we started to ratchet up the rate at which we were developing our technological expertise and left our mythological and religious presuppositions and conceptions behind as archaic and perhaps as predicated on superstition.

[10] Maybe we need to spend as much time updating them and bringing them into the domain of clear consciousness and control as we have spent on developing our technological sense.

[11] If you were a medieval Christian or an archaic religious thinker of any sort, your first presupposition was that the world and the cosmos existed exactly as they appeared, which with you or at least your village or town or country at the center, and certainly with the earth at the center, and with the cosmos as a shield around the earth, and with the earth itself as the domain of man being the fundamental attribute of the cosmos.

[12] So this is a quotation from Jung, and it's one I like a lot, because I think it adequately and succinctly describes the distinction between the way that modern people think, and the way that people think if they're still ensconced within a traditional belief form.

[13] How totally did the different did the world appear to medieval man?

[14] For him, the earth was eternally fixed and at rest in the center of the universe, encircled by the course of a sun that solicitously bestowed its warmth.

[15] Despite the fact that pre -empirical people had to deal with death and disease on a scale that I think is completely unknown to us, it doesn't seem unreasonable to presuppose that there was a certain degree of comfort to be found in a worldview of this sort, right?

[16] Because it appeared at least to the casual observer that the cosmos was human sense, and that the notion that human purpose was in some way associated with cosmic significance seemed to be beyond question, at least in part, because there were no theories of reality that would compete with that initial preconception.

[17] Men were all children of God under the loving care of the Most High, who prepared them for eternal blessedness, and all knew exactly what they should do and how they should conduct themselves in order to rise from a corruptible world to an incorruptible and joyous existence.

[18] existence.

[19] Such a life no longer seems real to us, even in our dreams.

[20] Natural science has long ago torn this lovely veil to shreds.

[21] How is it that people could think that way, given that it was so wrong and still survive, given that in large part we are necessarily creatures of tradition?

[22] How is it that we can sever the ties with the manner in which our ancestors thought and suffer no ill consequences in result?

[23] People think automatically, and I think for good reasons, that the march of human thought has been unbroken progress towards increased rationality, increased power, increased clarity, but it's certainly the case that as a consequence of sacrifice of our religious beliefs and our philosophical beliefs, that problems of meaning have become more paramount for the modern person.

[24] And then you might ask, well, what exactly are the consequences of that?

[25] And, I think initially, the best perspective to take is one that's historical.

[26] As we've moved away from a classical, mystical, or mythological worldview, a number of dramatic occurrences have unfolded.

[27] We've become much more technologically powerful, right?

[28] The application of a strict empirical model designed to abstract out from everyone's experience, those things that are material and constant have a name.

[29] enabled us to produce technological implements of extreme power right both for good at least in principle with regards to medical advances and also for ill in terms of our ability to control weapons of unbelievable destructive force so we're more powerful are we any smarter or any wiser well I think a casual glance at the history the 20th century would suggest that perhaps we're not I don't think there's any indication whatsoever although perhaps Perhaps things have improved in the last 15 years, that an additional consequence of our capacity to extract ourselves from our religious modes of thought has been a palpable increase in wisdom or tolerance or compassion, or a palpable increase in our ability to understand explicitly what might constitute the basis for a suitable and stable state.

[30] So you might take, for example, the fact that the 20th century has been unbelievably bloody.

[31] Right.

[32] Literally hundreds of millions of people killed in conflicts of one form or another, both external say in the course of World War II or Vietnam and internal in the case of Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union or any of the vast array of countries who've subjected their citizens to terrible internal repression in the name of the maintenance of order.

[33] Alexander Solzhenitsyn estimated that 60 million people died in the Soviet Union between 1919 and 1959 as a consequence of internal repression and his estimates were that perhaps twice that many died during the Cultural Revolution in China looking back on the 20th century one thing seems relatively clear right although humanity as a whole has ceased or had ceased at least to engage in large -scale religious conflicts although they seem to have been making a vicious comeback in the last five years, our ability to live together still seems incredibly compromised by our capacity to engage in ideological conflict, right?

[34] And it doesn't seem to me ridiculous to presume that the battles between capitalism and communism say, or between capitalism, communism, and fascism, or even the emergent struggle between fundamentalist Islam and the West can necessarily be regarded as anything but extensions of our tendency to work.

[35] religious and mythological conflict, even though in principle systems like communism and fascism were not predicated on explicitly religious presuppositions.

[36] Well, it seems to me that a logical conclusion from observations of that sort is that even if you eradicate the traditional trappings of a mythological worldview, which seems to be what's happened as a consequence of our rise in empirical knowledge, that you don't eradicate the tendency for people to formulate groups, belief systems, around conceptions of ways that you should behave that are, at the very least, religious in structure and action, even if they're not religious in name.

[37] I mean, I think it's a very peculiar coincidence, for example, that the Soviet communists erected at male Trinity, Marx, Lenin, and Stalin, as an apparent replacement for the masculine and Trinity that comprised the essential deities of Orthodox, Russian Orthodox Christianity.

[38] Why would these forms reemerge so spontaneously?

[39] And what does it mean that people who regard themselves as essentially modern and empirical in their presuppositions seem to be absolutely susceptible in their fundamental to ideological claims?

[40] Well, if you look at the Soviet Union, which I think is a very instructive case, because the Soviets, the Russians, were really the last European power to fall prey to the conflict between empiricism and science and religion.

[41] And they didn't really fall prey to that until the mid -1800s, because Russia was a relatively close society, relatively illiterate, maintaining a medieval structure far past the time when other European countries had abandoned that.

[42] In the 1850s, a wave of atheism spread across Russia.

[43] Russia in some sense as a wave of enlightenment, but also as a plague.

[44] And figures as towering as Tolstoy remembered in his memoirs the very day that he realized that the empirical discoveries of Western Europeans had eradicated his ability to believe in the Russian Orthodox system.

[45] You lose something like that.

[46] What happens?

[47] Well, if you believe that mythological thinking is nothing but superstitious empiricism and that it's been replaced entirely by a more appropriate modern view, then nothing happens, right?

[48] It's all to your benefit to become enlightened.

[49] But if you believe that there's more to the story than that and that more traditional ethical and moral systems predicated on mythological presuppositions offer you a map of how to behave and what to think and how to regulate your emotions and what to strive for, none of which can be replaced by a scientific perspective, then the eradication of a system like that leaves a vacuum.

[50] And then the question is, what rushes in to fill a vacuum?

[51] Well, if you look at the case of the Soviet Union, it seems quite instructive, doesn't it?

[52] I mean, there's a 30 -year period where there's tremendous intellectual clash, say, between a materialist and empirical perspective and in a Russian Orthodox perspective, the Russian orthodox perspective loses its attractiveness for the reigning intellectual elite and the presuppositions of communism which appear rational by contrast but which by all evidence were not rush in to fill the gap and I want to read you something that Nietzsche wrote it's perhaps the most famous thing he ever said although it's almost entirely taken out of context and misquoted and if not misquoted at least misunderstood because Nietzsche was one of these strange people who was capable of living 50 or even 100 years into the future and although he was is generally regarded as an enemy of Christianity and superstition and was certainly an unbelievably outspoken opponent of Christian traditionalism.

[53] He also knew that if you let the old gods die, the probability that blood would flood the land was virtually 100%.

[54] So let me read you what he wrote.

[55] Have you not heard of that madman who lit a lantern in the bright morning hours, ran to the marketplace and cried incessantly?

[56] I seek God.

[57] As many of those who do not believe in God were standing around just then, he provoked much laughter.

[58] Why?

[59] Did he get lost?

[60] Said one.

[61] Did he lose his way like a child?

[62] Said another?

[63] Or is he hiding?

[64] Is he afraid of us?

[65] Has he gone on a voyage or immigrated?

[66] Thus they yelled and laughed.

[67] The madman jumped into their midst and pierced them with his glances.

[68] Whither is God, he cried.

[69] I shall tell you.

[70] We have killed him, you and I. all of us are as murderers but how have we done this how are we able to drink up the sea who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon what did we do when we unchained this earth from its sun whither is it moving now whither are we moving now away from all suns are we not plunging continuously backwards sideward forward in all directions Is there any up or down left?

[71] Are we not straying as though through an infinite nothing?

[72] Do we not feel the breath of empty space?

[73] Has it not become colder?

[74] Is not night and more night coming on all the while?

[75] Must not lanterns be lit in the morning?

[76] Do we not hear anything yet of the noise of the grave diggers who are burying God?

[77] Do we not smell anything yet of God's decomposition?

[78] God's, too, decompose.

[79] God is dead, God remains dead, and we have killed him.

[80] How shall we, the murderer of all murderers, comfort ourselves?

[81] What was holiest and most powerful of all that the world has yet owned, has bled to death under our knives, who will wipe this blood off us?

[82] What water is there for us to clean ourselves?

[83] What festivals of atonement?

[84] What sacred game shall we have to invent?

[85] Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us?

[86] must we not ourselves become God simply to seem worthy of it?

[87] Well, as you can tell, it's a much different notion from the casual God is Dead quotation that's most generally associated with Nietzsche.

[88] Well, what is he saying?

[89] He's saying something like this.

[90] A system like Christianity or any system that's oriented a society for thousands and thousands of years can't simply be eradicated by a casual gesture without consequences ensuing in its aftermath.

[91] What consequences?

[92] Well, Nietzsche says, well, we'll no longer know up from down.

[93] What does he mean by that, metaphorically?

[94] Well, up, that's where you're headed, right?

[95] And down, that's what you want to stay away from.

[96] And when you eradicate the most fundamental presuppositions of your system of values, then there is no up.

[97] and there is no down and then where are you precisely well it's not so easy it's not so easy to say having not necessarily ever been in that position what is your life like when you don't know up from down is it merely neutral is there merely no value left or could it possibly be the case that if up and down have both been eradicated that the place that you're left in is something much more akin to a permanent state of suffering because maybe it's only the case that the constant capacity to strive for up, in it being an up that you believe in, the constant striving for up is actually what makes your life bearable to you.

[98] And if you lost the sense of up and down, the place that you would end up would be not so much neutral as terrible.

[99] Now if you have any belief system at all, you do this.

[100] So let's say you're an advocate of left -wing politics.

[101] You take a pro -environmental stance or an anti -corporate stance, which is a relatively common thing to do among undergraduates.

[102] What do you do when you hold that belief system?

[103] You view the world as it lays itself out and you explain the manner in which it manifests itself in terms of the axioms of that belief system.

[104] And you may know that you can do it, right?

[105] You can tell a credible story about why the world is the way it is by adopting, say, an anti -corporate perspective.

[106] Because there are all sorts of terrible things about the world that are a consequence, say, of corporate maneuvering.

[107] And you might also say that, and Piaget would say this, that it's a necessary developmental stage to acquire allegiance to a given belief system.

[108] Why?

[109] Well, any up is better than none.

[110] That might be the first observation.

[111] So, even if your belief system is relatively insufficient and easily challenged on intellectual grounds and perhaps not very complete anyways, the fact that it does lay out a moral structure for you and tell you good from evil and right from wrong, That's a plus, that's an advantage.

[112] Now it's relative intellectual weakness and its incoherence, assuming it is incoherent to some degree, that's a flaw.

[113] But that doesn't mean that the effort to establish a system like that is worthless, it's worthwhile.

[114] And Nietzsche said, say, with regards to Christianity and Europe, he said, well, the errors, intellectual and moral of institutional Christianity are essentially beyond count but there's one thing you have to remember first of all an ordering of that sort is necessary because the alternative which is always hidden from you in so far as you're inside a moral system the alternative is far worse chaos that's worse i mean part of the reason that the germans preferred hitler to chaos was because they felt that the order that Hitler promised, repressive as it was, was preferable to the chaos that was likely to ensue in its absence.

[115] What is it about chaos that's so terrifying?

[116] Second, Nietzsche said, adopting a belief system of any sort and imposing coherency on the world, viewing it through the lens of that explicit system, disciplines your mind.

[117] So, for example, to live in the absence of any stated beliefs is hardly to live.

[118] live at all.

[119] To live in the presence of a narrow -minded and extreme belief system is at least to undergo the rigors, both behavioral and intellectual, of coming to terms with the world from some perspective.

[120] Nietzsche said the reason that the modern mind, such as it is, was able to free itself from the past at all, was because it had first thoroughly subjected itself to the tyranny that was imposed by the past in consequence disciplined itself developed enough discipline as a consequence of that subordination to then break free of it in all science of morals so far one thing was lacking strange as it may sound the problem of morality itself what was lacking was any suspicion that there was something problematic here every society every functioning individual every functioning family every social unit has a moral code but that differ.

[121] So what does that mean exactly?

[122] Well, it's complicated, isn't it?

[123] Because the fact of the universality of the code, the fact of the code, indicates that the code or a code is necessary.

[124] By the same token, the fact that there's a multiplicity of codes seems to suggest that the particulars of a given code aren't necessarily relevant.

[125] And so Nietzsche says, brilliantly, I think, we're faced with a problem.

[126] no life without morality, no absolute morality, what do we do?

[127] One of the things Jung observed was that if you look at the structure of stories, he thought first, there's a relationship between stories and moral codes.

[128] Well, it seems relatively straightforward, doesn't it?

[129] If you tell a simple story like a parable, sometimes they're complex too, like an Aesop's fable, say, what do you extract out from the story?

[130] Moral.

[131] What's the moral?

[132] Well, it's the implication of the story for behavior, right?

[133] So you tell a little story about someone who acts out a given moral code and that person does better or worse, and the moral of the story is, if you act in this manner, you will do better or worse, proverbial knowledge.

[134] We all tell stories.

[135] They have identifiable structure, you can tell that because a movie studio in Hollywood can produce a movie and people all over the world will watch it.

[136] people all over the world tell stories to one another the plot elements seem similar are the morals similar that's a more difficult question we know that the details of morality can vary from culture to culture is there anything that doesn't vary from culture to culture why would you want to find that well Alexander Solzhenitsyn thought that one of the most important occurrences at the 20th century What were the Nuremberg trials?

[137] The Nuremberg trials brought the perpetrators of the Nazi genocide to justice.

[138] And it's easy to be cynical about that, and perhaps you should be cynical about it, because the victors brought the losers to trial, and so of course the losers were going to be tried from the perspective of the winner's moral code.

[139] But Solzhenitsin says, well, wait, you know, there's something.

[140] more to this story, at least there seems to be, in that many of the events that characterized the Nazi atrocities were so awful outside of intellectual argumentation, because you can provide an intellectual argument for anything.

[141] They were so awful that the proper visceral embodied response of any observer regardless of specific moral code should be repugnance period such that encoded at least initially in international law genocide is a crime against humanity right no matter what the particulars of your moral code so goes the logic you cannot construct a viable moral code that enables genocide.

[142] If not a logical impossibility, and I think it is a logical impossibility, it's an ethical impossibility.

[143] And then you have to ask yourself, and this is not precisely an intellectual question, does that seem credible to you?

[144] Does it seem credible that there are acts that are so terrible that no one, regardless of their stated position, should ever engage in them?

[145] And if the answer is yes, then I would say, well, if you haven't moved towards personal acceptance of an ultimate up, so to speak, you've certainly identified at least one down that you don't want to approach.

[146] And that's the beginnings of the establishment of some notion of absolute moral authority.

[147] So what if we said hypothetically something like this?

[148] Let's say that morality isn't a philosophy.

[149] It's not something explicit, something implicit.

[150] How does it evolve?

[151] Well, emotional creatures produce it.

[152] You don't have to produce it in isolation.

[153] If you weren't a social animal, if you lived a solitary and nocturnal existence by yourself, there's no need for morality because you don't have to regulate your behavior with regards to your peers.

[154] But you're social animals, so you're stuck with everybody else.

[155] But everybody else could be conceived of a society.

[156] a grand average right how would you act towards the average person well I would say that very very stable moral systems tell you exactly that and they say things like do unto others as you would have them do unto you right basic principle of reciprocity why does that work and it's a complex precept it means I should treat you like I would like to be treated by you and you might think well that means to be nice to you but that isn't really what it means because nice isn't enough right what I want from you really really is communication, real communication, feedback.

[157] What am I doing that's acceptable and good?

[158] What am I doing that's unacceptable and not good?

[159] And that latter aspect of feedback is part of the reason why, if you're psychopathological and isolated, you're in much worse shape, because half of your sanity, or three -quarters of it or 90 % of it, who knows, is distributed sanity.

[160] You don't have to be that sane, as long as you're hanging around other people, because as soon as you do something that's deviant, they're going to raise an eyebrow at you, right?

[161] And then you think, oh, well, not that.

[162] And as soon as you do something good, then they're going to pay more attention to you and smile at you.

[163] So all of the information about how to regulate yourself is out there in the world, right?

[164] The average person.

[165] How many people do you interact with in a week?

[166] 300, say.

[167] Maybe it's not that many.

[168] A hundred.

[169] How about in a year?

[170] 1 ,000, 2 ,000, 5 ,000, 10 ,000.

[171] What are they all telling you?

[172] Well, the message is similar across people.

[173] How similar?

[174] I don't know exactly how similar.

[175] That's what stories tell you.

[176] So today I'm going to tell you the best three stories that I know.

[177] I think these stories are absolutely phenomenally potent, and the reason for that is that I think they illustrate in an extraordinarily powerful way the nature of the processes that led to the establishment of Western democratic ideals.

[178] Maria Eliata, whose work I rely on substantially to make the following argument, has taken Western academic culture to task in a manner that hasn't fully been revealed yet.

[179] He said that, like all human cultures, the West is parochial and narrow in its viewpoint.

[180] And although over the last 300 years there's been a substantial amount of cross -cultural intermingling and a potential broadening of philosophical and religious horizon, that broadening has not been sufficiently complete.

[181] If we build on the viewpoint that I've been developing with you over the last few courses and make the presupposition that religious modes of thinking are more phenomenological than they are rational, which means that they deal more with what you experience, say, than with the objective world.

[182] at archaic religious stories through that lens then they can start to open up and so given that I want to open up three religious stories to you today two in depth and one only in passing because we'll return to it later I'll start with the Judeo -Christian myth of Genesis when I say myth I don't mean untruth I mean a form of knowledge that's narrative and structure and predicated on presumptions that aren't empirical.

[183] A myth describes processes of transformation.

[184] A myth describes the process whereby elements of experience come into being and transform.

[185] The fundamental structural elements of Genesis are the Word of God and chaos.

[186] And the Hebrew words for chaos and waste are Teum for chaos and Tohu for waste.

[187] And Ta 'am in particular, although Tohu as well, are very interesting words, because you can track their derivation historically.

[188] And sometimes if you can track the derivation of words historically, you can get some sense of the culture milieu out of which the words sprang.

[189] And we know what Ta 'amat means because we have written records of a story that involves a character named Ta 'amat.

[190] And Ta 'amat is a dragon who lives at the bottom of the ocean.

[191] In the oldest creation myth we have, which is the Anuma Elish, the Sumerian creation myth.

[192] Sumeria, Babylon, Acadia, rightly regarded as the birthplace of modern Western civilization.

[193] In Genesis, two processes unite to produce being.

[194] The first of those processes are states is chaos, represented by Teum Ortohu.

[195] The second of those processes is Logos, and Logos is another word that has an extraordinarily broad range of meaning.

[196] It's generally transcribed in the Christian tradition as the word, and it's identified with Christ, which is a very peculiar identification because it's the word of God that creates order out of chaos, and of course the Word of God in Genesis is a phenomena that predates the birth of Christ infinitely from a classical religious perspective.

[197] So the fact that the two beings are identified is of great peculiarity and also of great interest.

[198] The fundamental story of Genesis is something like this, and it's perhaps the most brilliant contribution of Judeo -Christian thought to world history.

[199] Its total impact is virtually incalculable.

[200] The idea is this, that chaos can be conceptualized as something that has an essentially feminine aspect as a matrix and a matrix is a structure from which other structures emerge and the story in genesis makes the hypothesis that logos which is the word of god a phenomena associated with speech and communication and logic logos logic rationality courage exploration all combined into a single entity or trait logos the combination the and chaos is what brings order into being.

[201] That's what the story in Genesis means.

[202] It's not an empirical description of the origin of objects.

[203] It's a phenomenological description of the origin of experience.

[204] The idea being that without the piercing glance of whatever consciousness is, whatever the background of experience is, the matrix, chaos, cannot be conceptualized as real.

[205] It takes the interplay between the feminine principle, chaos, and the masculine principle, Logos, in order to produce being.

[206] Now, that's of substantial importance when you give some consideration to the fact that immediately in Genesis, after the establishment of livable order, the deity Yahweh identifies the individual human being with logos, right?

[207] Made in God's image.

[208] That's the essential characteristic of the human being.

[209] And what that means is that the logos that operates in human beings, which is this capacity to make order out of chaos, is identical to the principle that gives rise to the cosmos from a mythological perspective.

[210] So it partakes of the deity in a very direct sense insofar as being itself is dependent on its operation.

[211] Now, it's still possible to claim, given that perspective, that a story with that sort of structure is so, superstitious and that it doesn't bear any relationship to what actually constitutes reality, but you have to understand that that story, old as it is, is predicated on older stories and it's on the ground that those older stories established that our entire concept of natural rights rests.

[212] So if you believe that natural rights have an existence that's more than merely arbitrary, the reason you believe that is because those rights are predicated on the ideas that are expressed in these myths.

[213] OK, so now we're going to go back in time to Sumeria.

[214] And I'm going to show you how the Sumerian creation myth lays itself out.

[215] And not only that, I'm going to describe to you the direct political implications of the Inuma Illish, the Sumerian creation myth, because the political implications of that myth are well understood, because the political structure of Sumeria was directly associated with the structure of the myth, because the Sumerian emperor was regarded as the earthly representative of the highest god in the Mesopotamian pantheon, whose name was Marduk.

[216] So insofar as you were emperor, the reason that you were emperor, and this is what gave your sovereignty legitimacy, right?

[217] Because sovereignty has to have legitimacy, otherwise there's constant revolutions.

[218] What gave sovereignty legitimacy in Mesopotamia was the identification of the emperor with Marduk.

[219] And that had certain implications for the emperor, which will discuss in some detail.

[220] The story starts like this.

[221] You've got this dragon, Tiamat, and Tiamat is a great primordial beast who lives at the bottom of the ocean.

[222] And the ocean is water, and water is associated with the primal element in archaic thinking.

[223] And I told you, there's reasons for that already.

[224] If you've viewed the transformation of deserts as a consequence of rain can understand why water would be considered the element that gives life right that the element that that brings life forth and we know from an evolutionary perspective that that's accurate and we know that we're 90 % water and so to consider water the primal element is no trivial conclusion no no less than presuming that the Sun is the ultimate source of life the ultimate God because the Sun is the ultimate source of life as far as we're concerned on earth right because it's the source of all our energy these aren't stupid concepts all right so Matt is this horrible creature that lurks at the bottom of the primal element, all right?

[225] Now she has a husband, Apsu.

[226] Now the Mesopotamian creation myth doesn't say much about Apsu.

[227] We only know that he's the male consort of the dragon of chaos.

[228] And we know from reading other sources of mythology that the male consort of the dragon of chaos generally represents either logos or culture.

[229] So we're going to make the presupposition in this particular case that the husband of chaos is order or culture.

[230] And then the Mesopotamians don't say much about that.

[231] That doesn't, the development of the idea of Apsu or order or culture doesn't take new force until the ancient Egyptians.

[232] We'll talk about them today too.

[233] OK, so Tyamat and Apsu are locked into a kind of sexual embrace according to the Mesopotamian creation myth.

[234] And what does that mean?

[235] It kind of means two things.

[236] It means that they're not really distinguishable because they're locked into this embrace.

[237] And it also means that they're up to something creative because the act of sexual Congress in mythology is most Usefully is most frequently utilized as representation of something creative or as representation of the probability of some new form coming to be All right.

[238] All right.

[239] So Absu and Tiamat are locked into this embrace in a state that other creation myths describe as egg -like, the pre -cosmogonic egg.

[240] Their intermingling gives rise to the initial state of being according to the Sumerians and the initial state of being according to the Sumerians is characterized by the dominion of the elder gods.

[241] These gods being none too bright make a tremendous amount of racket doing things.

[242] Well, what does that mean exactly?

[243] Well, it means something like this.

[244] They make a lot of racket and they cause a lot of trouble.

[245] They make a lot of wind and all of their racket and trouble and wind and activity rouses tie them at.

[246] What does that mean?

[247] Well, it means if you do things, you get in trouble.

[248] It means even if you're trying to solve problems, you get into trouble because the solution to a problem tends to generate a whole bunch of new problems, right?

[249] It's like the Hydra.

[250] So what it means is that it's more or less fated that any form of activity whatsoever is likely to produce the threat of catastrophe.

[251] And of course we're absolutely keenly aware of that in the modern world because we're possessed by this sense that all of our frenetic activity, all of our frenetic motivated activity, is producing alterations in the world order such that nature itself is going to be destroyed and eliminate us.

[252] And of course, we're absolutely keenly aware of that in the modern world because we're possessed by this sense that all of our frenetic activity, all of our frenetic motivated activity, is producing alterations in the world order such that nature itself is going to be destroyed and eliminate us.

[253] That's a classic Sumerian fear.

[254] Nothing's changed in the last 5 ,000 years.

[255] The Sumerians presume that once the elder gods were constructed and started moving around on the planet, that their activity, their mindless activity, because remember, these aren't well -integrated motivational forces.

[256] They're more like primordial beasts, right?

[257] Their unintegrated activity risks plunging everything back in chaos.

[258] Well, Tyamatt's the representative of chaos, this generative chaos.

[259] but so what did the Sumerians say well the elder gods cause a lot of racket they move around the planet and they upset time at and she decides that enough is enough and she's going to wipe them out so she's sitting at the bottom of the ocean fuming away as the elder gods go about their business and then they take one step to many and they kill Apsu who's her husband now the Sumerian creation myth doesn't say much about this, but we know that Apsu is the male consort of chaos.

[260] That makes them order.

[261] So what happens is the elder gods destroy order itself.

[262] They destroy culture itself, and as soon as you destroy culture, all hell breaks loose.

[263] And that's exactly what happens in the Sumerian creation myth.

[264] So Taimad emerges, just going to wipe everything out and the world will revert back to its primordial non -existent state.

[265] Now the elder gods get wind of this, and of course they're just terrible.

[266] because they know that this thing that gave rise to them, whatever it is, the matrix of being, can easily wipe them out at a moment's notice.

[267] And so despite the fact that they're transpersonal and immortal and characterized by a certain amount of power, in the face of absolute chaos, they're insufficient.

[268] Now this occurrence is extending over a protracted period of time, and as the elder gods are threatened, they're also breeding and mating and producing new forms.

[269] And they produce a great -great -grandson, whose name is Mark.

[270] Now, Marduk has a lot of very interesting attributes.

[271] The attributes are described in the new militia in the following manner.

[272] So this is what Marduk's father sees when his wife, Damkina, gives birth to Marduk.

[273] So when he, who's Marduk's father, saw his son, he rejoiced, he beamed, his heart filled with joy.

[274] He distinguished him and conferred upon him double equality with the gods.

[275] Okay, so that's the first indication that whatever Marduk represents is something that's elevated beyond the normal status of a primordial deity, so that he was highly exalted and surpassed them in everything.

[276] Artfully arranged beyond comprehension were his members, not fit for human understanding, hard to look upon.

[277] Four were his eyes, four were his ears.

[278] When his lips moved fire blazed forth.

[279] Each of his four ears grew large, and likewise his eyes to see everything.

[280] He was exalted among gods, surpassing was his form.

[281] His members were gigantic.

[282] He was surpassing in height.

[283] Mary Utu, Mary Utu, one of his names.

[284] Son of the sun god, the sun god of the gods.

[285] Okay, complex bit of poetry.

[286] Says a bunch of things.

[287] It says, well, whatever Marduk is, is the offspring of the gods.

[288] Whatever Marduk is is characterized by heightened awareness, because he has four ears and four eyes, and they're large.

[289] Whatever Marduk is characterized by is the status that surpasses that of his father's.

[290] whatever he's characterized by, is associated with the power of speech, real power, because when he speaks, fire spurts forth.

[291] Marduk is also huge.

[292] But more importantly, he's associated in this particular poem with the sun.

[293] Why is that?

[294] Well, the sun dominates consciousness, right?

[295] Because we're conscious during the day.

[296] Most of our brain is visual cortex.

[297] So we're visual creatures.

[298] So when the sun rises is when the day begins.

[299] So, Marduk is also associated with whatever deity dominates the day, and that's the deity of consciousness.

[300] And there's more to the story of the sun, right?

[301] Because the sun is also something that rises and sets repeatedly, and that means that the deity that dominates consciousness is characterized by a cyclical nature.

[302] That's a sun myth.

[303] Sun rises in the morning, renewed as a consequence of fighting a terrible battle in the night with the enemies of everything that's associated with consciousness, a classic solar myth.

[304] So, Absu and Tiamat give rise to the world of the gods.

[305] The activity of the world of gods reawakens Tiamat.

[306] She decides to destroy everything, but at that moment, the gods give birth to Marduk.

[307] Now that's a typical motif, which is that the hero's always born at the time of maximal crisis.

[308] And the reason for that is in part, it's simple.

[309] Look, if your culture is dealing well with the forces of the unknown, so that everything is static, but productive so that problems themselves don't arise.

[310] There's no reason for the hero, right?

[311] There's no reason to confront the unknown.

[312] It's only when crisis beckons that the birth of the hero is necessary.

[313] Marduk constitutes the birth of the hero.

[314] And they say, look, you know, we're in real trouble unless someone goes out there and confronts tie mat, straight on, she's going to wipe everything out.

[315] It's a dangerous and terrifying job, but somebody has.

[316] to do it and Marlick says though that's no problem but I got a few rules here and this is the first rule I'm in charge from here on forward what does that mean exactly well these archaic stories are polysemous in or polysemic in Northrop Fry's terminology what that means is that they can be read validly at multiple levels of analysis simultaneously and so one thing it means is that if you take the two -year -old child who's essentially under the dominion of assorted primordial gods and goddesses, right, aggression, fear, panic, and according to Freud, a certain degree of sexual aggression, the child moves from domination from motivated state to domination from motivated state.

[317] And it isn't until the age of three and four when under the pressure applied by the social world and as a consequence of the maturation of the prefrontal cortex, which matures throughout childhood and adolescence and doesn't reach its final form until perhaps into the early 20s, all of those fundamental motivational forces start taking on a structured relationship to one another, which is to say that, once as your personality becomes integrated, a single motive force forward has to bring all of these underlying motivational systems, into some sort of harmonious arrangement.

[318] Okay, so let's see what the Sumerians are doing here.

[319] Okay, first of all, they're doing psychology.

[320] They're trying to figure out, given the dominion of the elder gods, the indisputable dominion of the elder gods, instincts, who should rule, right?

[321] What should be in charge?

[322] How do you construct the hierarchy of values?

[323] And then more complexly, when you integrate a state, which is what the Mesopotamians did, right the first great civilization what does that mean the first time hundreds of tribes were hammered into some sort of stable hierarchical order how do you represent that order so marduk gets his act together the gods all meet in a huge chamber they elect him king and then they prepare him for battle when the gods the fathers beheld the power of his word they were glad and in homage saying marduk is king they bestowed upon him a sceptre a throne and a royal robe.

[324] They gave him an irresistible weapon, smiting the enemy, saying, go and cut off the life of Tiamat.

[325] May the winds carry her blood to out -of -the -way places.

[326] After the gods, his fathers had determined the destiny of Marduk, they set him on the road, the way to success and attainment.

[327] So then he goes to the heart of darkness, so to speak, and confronts Tiamat, accuses her of treachery and challenges her to battle.

[328] When Tiamat heard this, she became like one in a frenzy and lost her reason.

[329] She cried out loud and furiously.

[330] To the very roots, her two legs shook back and forth.

[331] She recited an incantation, repeatedly casting her spell.

[332] As for the gods of battle, they sharpened their weapons.

[333] Tiamat and Marduk, the wisest of the gods, advanced against one another.

[334] They pressed on to single combat and approached for battle.

[335] Okay, well, things don't go out so well with Tiamat from this point forward.

[336] The first thing that Marduk does is encapsulate her in a net.

[337] And I think that's a really interesting metaphor because that's essentially what human beings do when they encounter the unknown, right?

[338] They encapsulate it in an explanatory network.

[339] So it's a way of binding up the anomaly or the unknown and giving it a substantive form.

[340] Then he cuts her into pieces.

[341] And then he makes the world out of her pieces.

[342] In fact, one of Marduk's name is he who makes ingenious things as a consequence of the combat with Tiamat.

[343] That's very, very interesting because what it means is that the Sumerians are presenting in metaphorical form the notion that when the chips are down, the survival of being depends on the capacity of whatever Marduk represents, the solar god, to encounter the matrix of being to cut it into pieces and to make the world.

[344] If you think about it in those terms, it's a very, very straightforward story.

[345] It's basically the story of human beings, fundamentally the story of human beings, because we, in the words of a famous evolutionary psychologist whose name completely escapes me, we occupy the cognitive niche, right?

[346] Our mode of being is creativity in the face of the unknown.

[347] And when chaos threatens the established mode of being, it's necessary for us to put our creativity into action and to carve out new territory as a consequence of encounter with the unknown.

[348] Why?

[349] Well, because we can take the world apart with our hands and put it together in new ways, and then we can code what we've done verbally, and we can transmit it to another person, and then they can do the same thing.

[350] And we're all doing this all the time, and we're all telling each other how we're doing it, and that's how the embodiment of logos in the human being, which is precisely equivalent to the Sumerian notion of Marduk, that's precisely how it is that we're constantly, capable of redeeming the world.

[351] And that's why you make resolutions at New Year's because the New You is supposed to be born at the New Year.

[352] Okay, so what do the Mesopotamians do at the New Year?

[353] They take their king and they bring them outside the city.

[354] Now you have to understand that outside the city is chaos, right?

[355] Because these are city -states.

[356] When you go outside the dominion of the human, you're in chaos.

[357] and then the priest makes the emperor kneel and takes all his marks of status off him, so he's reduced to his essence fundamentally, bereft of his social persona, and then he slaps him with a glove and humiliates him, and the king is forced to recount his sins, right?

[358] Everything he did in the last year that wasn't up to Marduk's standards, so to speak.

[359] And you can see, that'd be a pretty useful thing to have somebody who's in power do on a regular basis, right?

[360] because it reminds them that they're in fact subject to a transpersonal structure whose nature isn't precisely evident but is nonetheless there which is the case act like Marduk or all hell will break loose and demolish your kingdom which is of course is true now as it was then so the emperor gets humiliated he has to recount his sins then he's locked up then he reenacts the battle with Tiamat and when he is emerges victorious, he's locked up with a ritual, a hirdual, and they mate.

[361] Why?

[362] Well, the hyrodule, the ritual prostitute, represents Tiamat.

[363] Now, why the hell would that be?

[364] Because Tiamat's a dragon, right?

[365] A horrible man -eating dragon that lives at the bottom of the ocean, which is to say that in any encounter with the unknown, as difficult, traumatic, and violent as that might be, there's also the possibility for something creative to emerge as a consequence, right?

[366] Because it's out of the unknown that we mine new information.

[367] So insofar as the Mesopotamian emperor acted out, the role of Marduk, then he was a good emperor, then he deserved his sovereignty, and literally as well as figuratively, insofar as he did play that role, then the society was going to remain not only stable, but constantly updated, because he's engaged in this constant, creative contact with the unknown, aided and abetted by his attempts to remember his own inadequacies and weaknesses and to do something about them.

[368] Okay, so that's a pretty interesting story, and it gets even more interesting when you start to understand that the Judeo -Christian creation myth is assimilated to the Sumerian creation myth by the union of the notions of chaos and Tyamat.

[369] So the logos in Judeo -Christian thinking, the word of God that produces order out of chaos, is also essentially equivalent, at least metaphorically speaking, to whatever Marduk represents in the Sumerian creation myth.

[370] And we know that our relationship with the Anumaelish is obscured by time, but our relationship with the stories that lay out the fundamental substructure of Western culture is not so ameliorated, even though we may not believe them explicitly anymore, they still sit at the basis of our society.

[371] One of the things that people are very much confused by in the modern world is what archaic people meant by gods and that's because whatever the deities were that had the mode of force that archaic people attributed to the gods seem to have disappeared in modern culture now the union hypothesis is that's because they turned into psychological traits fundamentally or motivational forces so what the what archaic societies would describe as gods we would describe as motivational forces so for example Venus is a goddess the goddess of love and we would associate her power with love and sex fundamentally.

[372] And the reason that that's a reasonable association from the archaic standpoint is because the motive quality that makes up what Venus represents is transpersonal, which means it's not limited to one person, and it's immortal in that the motive force that characterizes sexual affiliation exists whether or not a single individual exists.

[373] So it's transpersonal, has the force of a personality because if you fall in love, you're motivated by a certain set of standards and perspectives, right?

[374] If you're gripped by beauty, say, or if you're gripped by lust, that imposes a particular view of the world on you and impels your action, sometimes despite your will.

[375] And so that would be equivalent from the archaic perspective to possession.

[376] And it's clearly the case that archaic societies who are engaged in warfare, for example, conduct rituals to ensure that the warriors that made up their societies were in fact possessed by the correct god So might be Mars for example the Roman god of war so that on the battlefield they exhibited the proper characteristics of somebody who was in a battle right rage you can think rage So possession by the god of war would be equivalent to this possession by a state of rage now.

[377] It's not quite that simple It isn't only that archaic people externalized mode of forces and gave them the status of dainties what they did was more complex than that.

[378] And I think you can understand that a little bit better if you start to give some thought to the modern behavioral notion of the stimulus.

[379] Now, the stimulus is a very, very weird concept because the behaviorists who weren't interested in taking apart what was inside the brain would attribute motive force to the stimulus, right?

[380] They'd say if you present an animal with the stimulus, he will therefore act.

[381] And that meant that the behaviors were making the presupposition that the motive power resided in some manner in the stimulus.

[382] Well, why would they think like that?

[383] Well, it's an archaic mode of thought, in a sense.

[384] You can imagine a child saying, one of my friends today made me really angry, right?

[385] Which means that the child is essentially conflating his or her own internal emotional state with the proximal stimulus that gave rise to that state.

[386] And you see complex associations like that taking place with regards to the apprehension of beauty, say, because beauty is a very, very complex and difficult to localize phenomena.

[387] If you're very attracted to someone, are you attracted by them?

[388] Well, in a sense, of course, you are because there they are, but in another sense you're not at all, because what's happening is that you're engaged as much in the attraction as anything that's motivating you from the outside world.

[389] And I think that partly accounts for your sense of foolishness, especially if the person that you're attracted to doesn't return your attraction.

[390] I mean, you know that from your perception, perspective you're attracted and dominated by the object but by the same token you know entirely that easy as it is to presume it's them and their fault say pretty much it all has to do with you so in the modern world where we've been able to separate out the object and the mode of force of the object the deities have sort of moved inside of us and become psychological forces but you can understand if you think about it in this manner that things weren't so clear prior to the dawn of the empirical age That gives you a little bit of background with regards to what the notion of deity meant to archaic societies who still utilize those notions as explanatory terms.

[391] Okay, so we know that if you're caught up in one of these little world games, that you may be motivated by something very, very fundamental, right?

[392] A tendency that transcends you the tendency to propagate yourself, say, Freud's fundamental motivational level, sexual affiliation or the tendency to maintain yourself, those you could say are the fundamental gods of existence, the fundamental driving forces, and it's the interaction of those two forces over great periods of time that produce the great diversity of life and human life that we see before us.

[393] And each of those fundamental, most fundamental of gods have their differentiated minions, so to speak, so that well engaged in the meta -goal of cells.

[394] preservation you act out plots of hunger and plots of thirst and you move from cold to hot or from hot to cold depending on your particular on your particular on the particular temperature of your surroundings or with regards to self -propagation you're attracted to people or repelled by them for reasons that are frequently absolutely beyond your comprehension by the way so I just found out this week and this is absolutely staggering I think that if you if you run an experiment on a group of women and you track their menstrual cycle and then you give them t -shirts that men have worn to smell that women who are ovulating like the smell of symmetrical men better than asymmetrical men so and that's partly because symmetrical men are probably more healthy but this is a good example of how the motive forces that configure your world are dependent on instinctual forces that are not only beyond your consciousness but they're beyond even at the moment any of our explicit explanations.

[395] So another finding that's very similar that I came across recently, turns out that mice will not mate with mice that have RH blood factors that are likely to produce unfit offspring.

[396] The more closely genetically related the RH factors, the more likely there is to be a catastrophe with regards to offspring.

[397] And the mice seem to detect the RH factor by small, so recently this was run by with women and it is also the case that women prefer men whose RH factors are at an optimal distance from them in terms of smell.

[398] So this is some example of how these unbelievably archaic systems because like the olfactory systems are unbelievably archaic produce alterations in worldview at a level that's massively below consciousness.

[399] So underneath your cortical shell which is tonically inhibiting all your emotional and motivational systems lies all these motivational and emotional systems and they have branches that grow up into the cortex and they have the capacity to control your behavior completely involuntarily so for example if you're gripped by fear if you're gripped by fear it's very very difficult to overcome that voluntarily and at least initially you won't be able to which is to say that when the chips are down the underlying motivational and emotional systems have control okay so then what happens from that perspective then what happens when you encounter something you don't understand and I think the best way to explain it is something like generalized disinhibition which is that all your underlying motivational and emotional systems are more or less disinhibited simultaneously and the reason for that is because you want to be maximally prepared to do whatever the hell is necessary to do when you're somewhere that you don't understand and because you don't know what that thing is going to be all your systems go on and when psychologists talk about stress which is an abysmal word, right?

[400] It means everything and nothing.

[401] When psychologists talk about stress, what they mean is generalized disinhibition of emotion and motivation.

[402] Then you come to the case of ancient Egypt.

[403] One of the things Elietta points out, which I think is really interesting, I mean, really phenomenal.

[404] The story I'm going to tell you right now was essentially revealed in Egyptian culture at the dawn of the culture rather than developing over the course of the culture.

[405] So the Egyptians had a revelation right immediately that the most fundamental of gods was the one who created as a consequence of his tongue and his speech, very much akin to the Sumerian idea with regards to Marduk and also to later Judeo -Christian ideas.

[406] So here's this story.

[407] There's four players in this drama, okay?

[408] There's Osiris, his wife, Isis, Horus, their son, and Seth.

[409] And Seth is Osiris.

[410] evil brother.

[411] Okay, now Osiris was a remarkable guy.

[412] He was the founder of the Egyptian state from the mythological perspective.

[413] So kind of like Romulus and Remus for Rome, or like George Washington for the U .S., right, a mythologized figure who represented all of the pharaohs and people, for that matter, who'd actually constructed the Egyptian state.

[414] Osiris, father of Egypt, so to speak.

[415] But Osiris is kind of old and little archaic and maybe a little bit senile.

[416] possibly a little bit naive in that, you know, even no matter how great you were in your youth, as time goes on, you lose contact with environmental transformations, and the old rules that you live by are not necessarily applicable to the present, and some of those things that you ignore become paramount in importance.

[417] And it turns out that Osiris has an evil brother, Seth, and Seth eventually turns into Satan as mythology develops through the centuries.

[418] And Seth is a nasty guy, right?

[419] I mean, what he wants more than anything is undeserved dominion over the Egyptian state.

[420] Now Osiris, because he's not paying attention and because he isn't sufficiently cognizant any more of the power of evil, more or less ignores his evil brother, who in turn chops him into pieces and then distributes his pieces all over the Egyptian state.

[421] Now, you might say, well, why didn't he just kill him?

[422] Right?

[423] I mean, you You think chopping him up would kill him, but he's a god.

[424] You can't just kill him.

[425] The reason in mythology, and you see this in movies as well, where the villain never quite dies or the hero never quite dies, is because even if you eliminate individual embodiments of what those figures represent, new embodiments manifest themselves virtually immediately.

[426] So one of the things mythology is quite clear about is that you never win a final battle with evil.

[427] It's a permanent property of the world.

[428] So anyways, Seth hacks up Osiris, spreads them all over the last.

[429] land, Osiris ends up living a kind of shadowy and nebulous, ghost -like existence down in the underworld, and Seth becomes the ruler of the state.

[430] A nasty story.

[431] All right, but Osiris has ISIS as a wife.

[432] Now, ISIS had a huge cult.

[433] She was a powerful goddess, goddess of the underworld.

[434] A kind of combination of Kelly and Diana, so to speak, capable of tremendous destructive power, but also the source of all good things.

[435] something very much like Tiamat.

[436] Now Isis got wind of her husband's disintegration, so to speak, and she went searching around Egypt till she found his fellas.

[437] And with it she makes herself pregnant.

[438] Okay, so what does that mean exactly?

[439] It means something like this.

[440] The collapse of any great order brings with it new potential.

[441] And I think this is something that capitalism has way over forms of government like communism.

[442] Capitalism has mechanisms in place to allow large structures that are no longer meeting their function to collapse.

[443] But frequently when they collapse, it's not like they disintegrate into dust, right?

[444] They disintegrate into sub -components, so to speak, many of which then come to terms with the fact that the order has collapsed and build something new.

[445] So you can't get rid of culture so easily.

[446] You can hack it up into bits, you can disembodied it, so to speak, you can spread it all over the state, you can introduce chaos into it.

[447] But that's something that has the potential of new birth, like the phoenix, rising from the ashes.

[448] So anyways, ISIS, who's the matrix, whose tiamat, gets Osiris's phallus, which is the container of the germ of culture, right?

[449] the phenomena that's capable of the seminal idea, and she makes herself pregnant.

[450] And she gives birth to Horace, who's the long -lost son of the rightful king, right?

[451] A very typical mythological motif.

[452] Okay, so Horace is alienated from the kingdom, which is another very common mythological motif.

[453] You know, like how King Arthur, for example, is raised by commoners.

[454] This same story pops up in the story of Christ, for example, because Christ has heavenly.

[455] parents, but then he also has his kind of ordinary parents, and it's a very common motif.

[456] Anyway, so Horace grows outside of the classical structure of the Egyptian state, which is tilted terribly towards evil because Seth is dominated, because Osiris was too blind to his evil brother to take appropriate defensive actions, and he grows to maturity.

[457] And then he decides, like all rightful sons of the long -lost king, to reclaim his heritage.

[458] So he goes back to Egypt.

[459] right?

[460] And he has this vicious battle with Seth and in the process Seth tears out one of his eyes.

[461] I'll find what and that's an indication of just exactly how devastating a battle with the forces of evil so to speak precisely are.

[462] They represent a critical threat to the integrity of consciousness, right?

[463] That's why he loses an eye.

[464] Well luckily enough Horace has got his act together and he does defeat Seth and he banishes him and he gets the eye back and then you think okay great pop the eye back in, become emperor, everything's fine.

[465] Now, let's backtrack a little bit and think about this politically.

[466] Now, the Egyptians had this really weird idea.

[467] They had the idea that the living pharaoh was the living pharaoh and the dead pharaoh at the same time.

[468] That makes no sense rationally, but it makes a lot of sense from a narrative perspective because what they were saying is something like this.

[469] Look, you've got to think that when you become king or when you become president or when you take on a role of that absolute magnitude, that then you're partly you, but you're also partly this role, and there's really no way out of that, right?

[470] And the role is composed of the unbelievable weight of the cultural tradition that you're representing.

[471] And you can say, well, that's true for being king or for being president, but it's also true if you become a doctor or a lawyer, any sort of specialized occupation.

[472] It's partly you, because you're embodying the role, but it's partly the role, too.

[473] So the pharaoh is the live pharaoh and the dead pharaoh because the dead represents culture, right?

[474] The king is dead, long live the king.

[475] Okay.

[476] But paralleling that idea was the idea that the pharaoh was not only the dead pharaoh and the live pharaoh at the same time, but that he was Osiris and Horus at the same time.

[477] But then you think in the story, Horus has taken over Seth, he's got his eye back, he can be king.

[478] But he isn't king yet.

[479] And this is where the Egyptians really get their act together.

[480] And I think of the two stories that I'm telling you, this is the one that has the most significance, I think, for modern people because we're so likely to sidestep our obligation to our culture, whatever that happens to be.

[481] So instead of popping this eye back in his head, which is the first thing you think he does, he decides he's going to go back to the underworld where Osiris is living in this ghost -like and dead manner since he's been chopped up by Seth.

[482] So he goes down into the underworld, which is no piece of cake, And he finds Osiris there in this kind of half -dead state, and he gives him his eye.

[483] And that enlightens Osiris, right?

[484] It gives him vision.

[485] And so then he takes Osiris back to Egypt, arm in arm, so to speak.

[486] And it's the conjunction of Osiris and Horus that constitutes the basis for Egyptian sovereignty.

[487] And that is bloody brilliant, right?

[488] Because the Egyptians figured out that, so Horus is Marduk for all intents and purpose.

[489] He's this avenging hero.

[490] In the Egyptian story, he fights political corruption rather than chaos.

[491] But you can understand that those are two flip sides of the hero archetype.

[492] They are.

[493] The hero archetype has two basic elements.

[494] One is the confrontation of the terrible aspect of nature, chaos in its most brutal form, and the other is the confrontation with the archaic aspect of culture.

[495] And in some ways those aren't distinguishable because if culture isn't archaic, Chaos never makes itself present.

[496] So, which is to say you can't separate out political degradation from environmental degradation, say it's the same idea.

[497] So anyways, Horace has this great idea, he needs his father, right?

[498] And I told you about the same motif emerging in Pinocchio.

[499] We already looked at that.

[500] Pinocchio doesn't become genuine until he risks his life saving his father.

[501] All right, so the same thing is happening in this particular situation.

[502] So that's pretty cool.

[503] So then you get this situation where the Egyptians characterize sovereignty as the capability to overcome evil in the political domain combined with, and that's a youthful capability, right, combined with the wisdom of the past.

[504] Then you look at that from a political perspective, and you find out already that the Egyptians viewed the pharaoh as the live pharaoh and the dead pharaoh simultaneously.

[505] But then you find out something else that's interesting, and it gives you some really real insight into just exactly how bloody, powerful these ideas were.

[506] So you think, what did the Egyptians do with their spare time?

[507] And then you think, well, they built the pyramids, right?

[508] I mean, and that was no trivial undertaking.

[509] It was sort of the 5 ,000 BC equivalent of flying to Mars.

[510] And I mean, the pyramids are pretty impressive now, but they were a hell of a lot more impressive in their original form because they were in the middle of an immense complex.

[511] And the pyramids were dedicated to the immortality of the Pharaoh, and the Pharaoh was possessed by a spirit, called kha and kha was his his immortal spirit and it was the union of horace and osiris okay so Egyptian society was dedicated to deifying the immortal spirit of the pharaoh the union of horace and osiris and it was this union that gave the it was this identification with this union that gave the pharaoh a phenomenon of the egyptians called mat and maat was like truth or good order and you can think about it as conscience in a sense.

[512] If the Pharaoh was utilizing the union of Horus and Osiris, then he would have an intuitive ability to decide what the appropriate course of order was.

[513] And so the Egyptians would say, for example, when the Pharaoh came into the court, they'd say the sun has risen, and by that they meant that the power that reigned over the dominion of the night had arrived.

[514] They conceptualized Matt as the capacity to put order in the place of chaos, essentially, formally.

[515] So they assimilated the union of Horace and Osiris with the capability of putting order in the face of chaos.

[516] They regarded that as immortal, and they spent all of the excess resources of their society glorifying that idea.

[517] And you think you don't produce something like the pyramids without really being possessed by an idea, right?

[518] This is no trivial undertaking.

[519] It's going over a period of several hundred, if not several thousand years.

[520] It takes an awful lot of work.

[521] So this idea of the immortality of the union of Horace and Osiris and its association with sovereignty was an absolutely potent idea for the Egyptians.

[522] It gave their whole culture mode of force.

[523] Okay, so the Egyptians thought Pharaoh's immortal, and that's the reason why, and we more or less partake in his immortality by being his subject.

[524] So that was a pretty good deal.

[525] But then, Iliata points out something very interesting, and this is called the democratization of Osiris.

[526] And what you found was that initially there were certain symbolic representations representing the immortality of the pharaoh that could only be used by the pharaoh.

[527] But as Egyptian culture continued to develop, then the symbolic representations of immortality started to be adopted by the aristocracy.

[528] Now what did that mean?

[529] It meant that this process that the Egyptians had conceptualized as integral to the order of the state, was no longer solely embodied in the hands of the pharaoh, right?

[530] It had started to drift down the power hierarchy into the aristocracy.

[531] Okay, well then you think what happens after that?

[532] So by the end of Egyptian society, the aristocrats were characterized by an identity with the union of Horace and Osiris, right?

[533] Sovereignty had started to spread itself out.

[534] Then you think what starts to happen with the Greeks, right?

[535] The Greeks attribute sovereignty to every male Greek.

[536] No, women, no, but at least all males, right?

[537] You get a beginning of a democratic notion there.

[538] The Jews developing ideas that if not derived from Egypt were at least similar in structure to Egyptian ideas say not the aristocracy, not the pharaoh, but every individual has the capacity of establishing a direct relationship with the form of the deity, right, then you have a Christian revolution that follows that where the idea that sovereignty inheres in the individual is distributed to everyone, right, everyone, male, female, criminal, non -criminal, murderer, rapist, taxman, you name it, sovereignty inheres within them, and it's on that soil that our whole democratic culture emerges.

[539] These unbelievably archaic ideas first acted out, right, first embodied in ritual, first dramatized, then only told his stories, developing more and more coherence over stretches of time of thousands of years, not hundreds of years, but thousands of years, becoming more coherent, becoming more pointed, becoming more relevant with regards to their embodiment, then starting to become understood explicitly and distributed through the entire society.

[540] And it's on that ground that our world rests, not on the ground of rationality as established in, say, Europe in 1500, what we have is much more profound and solid and deep than any mere rational construction.

[541] It's a form of government, an equilibrated state, so to speak, that's a consequence of an emergent, if not evolutionary, at least social evolutionary process.

[542] And I would say that it stems much farther back than that because you can imagine something like this.

[543] Look, if this ideal personality that should be sovereign is represented by the optimal combination of creativity and traditionalism say, if that's the optimal combination, and if we're prepared to regard that as optimal, if that's what you perceive when you perceive someone that you respect and admire, then you could say that success in our social hierarchies is predicated on the degree to which You actually embody that combination and then you see an interaction between individual success and this social construction that would be an interaction that extends over centuries or even thousands of centuries.

[544] So that as these ideas become more and more developed, we become more and more adapted to embodying them as a consequence of evolutionary pressure.

[545] So it's not just cultural, it's also biological.

[546] So our political presuppositions rest on a cultural basis, which is unbelievably archaic, resting in turn, on something even lower than that.

[547] And I think examples of that are those that I've provided you with already.

[548] We know, for example, that chimps who have to live in a dominance hierarchy, very aggressive, especially the males, but they're also very cooperative.

[549] So the males who are aggressive spend a substantial amount of time repairing social boundaries in the aftermath of an aggressive incident, because they're just as concerned with keeping the bloody hierarchy intact as they are in climbing it.

[550] They have to be.

[551] And we know that even wolves won't kill a subordinate wolf once they've defeated it.

[552] They allow the subordinate wolf to maintain its own existence, right?

[553] They have this notion, this procedural notion that even those entities that appear insignificant may in some manner that's beyond speech still contribute to the integrity of the whole.

[554] And that's an idea that's very much similar to our notion that sovereignty inheres in the individual, right?

[555] We've taken it further no matter what you do, even if you're in clear violation of the law, your rights remain intact because no matter how outcast you are and how apparently beyond redemption, your existence may still contribute something to the integrity of the whole.

[556] And as far as I'm concerned, that doesn't appear to be a metaphorical idea.

[557] If you dismiss it, you cannot dismiss it without simultaneously dismissing the ground on which our states rest.

[558] So then you have to ask yourself, are you willing to do that?

[559] And if the answer is no, well, then you have to start to question what it is that you actually believe.

[560] Because if you buy the doctrine of natural rights, which you do, you act it out, then all of this follows in its wake.

[561] Or it rests on sand, and it bloody well better not rest on sand.

[562] Thank you for listening to this episode of the Jordan B. Peterson podcast.

[563] This was an amalgamation of the first three episodes of Maps of Meaning recorded by TV Ontario.

[564] To support these podcasts, you can donate to Dr. Peterson's Patreon account, the link to which can be found in the description of this episode.

[565] Dr. Peterson's self -development programs can be found at self -authoring .com.

[566] Thank you.