History of the Concept of Mind

Volume 2: The Heterodox and Occult Tradition

Paul S. Macdonald

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781351930611
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Filosofía
• Subtopic: Historia y teoría filosóficas

Exploring the 'roads less travelled', MacDonald continues his monumental essay in the history of ideas. The history of heterodox ideas about the concept of mind takes the reader from the earliest records about human nature in Ancient Egypt, the Ancient Near East, and the Zoroastrian religion, through the secret teachings in the Hermetic and Gnostic scriptures, and into the transformation of ideas about the mind, soul and spirit in the late antique and early medieval epochs. These transitions include discussion of the influence of Central Asian shamanism, Manichean ideas about the soul in light and darkness, and Neoplatonic theurgy, 'working-on-god-within'. Sections on the medieval period are concerned with the rediscovery of magical practices and occult doctrines from Roger Bacon to Francis Bacon, the adaptation of Neoplatonic and esoteric ideas in the medieval Christian mystics, and the survival of these ideas mixed with natural science in the works of von Helmont, Leibniz and Goethe. The book concludes with an investigation of the many forms of dualism in accounts of the human mind and soul, and the concept of dual-life which underpins our aspiration to understand how humans could have an immortal nature like the gods.

Chapter 1
Ideas about Human Nature in the Ancient Near East

(1) Life, death and the soul in ancient Egypt

The ancient Egyptian view of human life, death and the afterlife evolved over thousands of years; it was not fully formed in the earliest period. One of our tasks will be to trace the development of the central ideas about human nature from the formation of a unified state (c.3100 BCE) through the Pyramid Texts of the Old Kingdom (c.2350–2180 BCE), the Coffin Texts of the Middle Kingdom (c.1987–1640 BCE), and the various Books of the Underworld (the best known of which is the Book of the Dead) in the New Kingdom (c.1540–1075 BCE).¹ Our investigations will employ different kinds of supporting evidence: (1) contemporary exposition from mortuary texts; (2) literary and pseudo-literary texts, such as ‘The Dispute Between a Man and his ba', ‘The Eloquent Peasant’, ‘Merikare’s Instructions’, ‘The Story of Sinuhe’,² and others; (3) images associated with mortuary texts and funerary practices, especially the vignettes found in the Coffin Texts and the Book of the Dead, and (4) artifacts associated with embalming, burial and funerary practices. The last group alone would not be sufficient for making certain claims about Egyptian beliefs, but is often suitable for supporting claims derived from direct and indirect exposition and testimony.

The exposition from mortuary texts, as well as artifactual and testimonial evidence, strongly indicates that the ancient Egyptians did not hold anything like a dualistic idea of human nature, as John Taylor says. Their concept (or complex) of human nature was a composite of physical and non-physical components, or more accurately, aspects or modes of human existence. The most important of the physical components were the body and the heart; the most important of the non-physical components were the ka, the ba, the name, and the shadow. Each of these aspects was thought to ‘enshrine some unique quality of the individual . . . [each] was capable of supporting independently the continued existence of the person after death, but each had to be nurtured and maintained according to its special needs if the afterlife was to be successfully attained’.³ The great Egyptian archaeologist Alan Gardiner said that ‘the Egyptians believed that the human individuality could present itself under a variety of forms, which are less “parts” of its nature, as vulgarly stated, than shifting modes of its being. The often visualized bird-like soul (ba) is one of these forms, the ka or double another, the shadow a third, the corpse a fourth, and so on.’ Louis Zabkar says that Gardiner was correct in this assessment, but that his ‘trend of thought’ was not followed in subsequent discussions. In his highly influential commentary on the Pyramid Texts, Kurt Sethe⁴ was probably responsible for reinforcing an older view of the ba as part of human nature, introducing a dichotomy in the Egyptian concept, a dualistic opposition between body and soul.⁵ Karl Luckert also rejects the idea that the Egyptian view of human nature can be rendered in dualistic terms, one that employs the concept of two or more substantive entities. Rather he proposes something like Plotinus’ emanationist system: every single living thing is a manifestation of a cosmic life-force; every thing in its sentient being is a participant in the divine essence:

The Egyptians called the invisible life force, that spark of life which energetically manifests itself from within, the ka. They named outward manifestations, which .... register as phenomena or as phenotypal mutations of that life force, the ba. Both ka and ba are what we might call soul. The ba, appearing along the outer reaches of divine ka emanation, is a visible, shadow-tainted, and estranged unit of ka, whereas a ka unit by itself may be characterized as a relatively pure participant within the original plethora of divine essence. The ka represents divine essence, and as such it exists in and emanates from the divine source of all being⁶

Zabkar vigorously concurs when he declares that there is no evidence whatsoever that the Egyptians thought in dualistic or trialistic terms.⁷

Phillipe Derchain says that the ancient Egyptians talked about numerous aspects of the human person, aspects which are difficult to understand and without equivalent in modern European languages. The commonly accepted polarity between body and soul cannot be applied ‘in every case’ to the Egyptian schema; it is not possible ‘to trace clear boundaries’ amongst the physical, social, religious and magical fields. Derchain suggests ordering all the essential aspects of human nature along two axes, the concrete and the imaginary, arranging them from the most perceptible (observable) to the most private, while noting a displacement between the two series which are not synonymous. The concrete series comprises: the body, the name, the shadow and the heart; and the imaginary series comprises the akh, the ka, the ba and the god-in-man. In the New Kingdom and late epochs there is a reduction and internalization of some psychical aspects which, Derchain says, caused the imaginary terms to disappear, ‘transferring to the organs themselves the functions that they expressed and that had always been manifested through those organs’.⁸

In some respects, the setting or frame in which such aspects are manifest is an ordinary human being, but other texts speak of external entities or properties as falling within the domain of the psychic amalgam: ‘The limits of the person are not reached by the limits of the body and its faculties.’ The inclusion of such items as the stele, the tomb, the birth-stool, and so forth are claimed to be constituents of an individual’s personality; ‘but since they also belong to other categories of beings, it is impossible to establish an ontological distinction between human and the others’. However,

the difference is only a quantitative one, depending upon the relative participation in the two facets of the world, the imaginary and the perceptible. The imaginary world is essentially composed of the gods, who are connected to the perceptible world through their statues, temples, and diverse manifestations. Human, by contrast, located essentially in the perceptible world, passes into the imaginary through the intermediary of the Pharaoh, who is the incarnation of the idea of human and is in this way on an equal footing with the gods on the level of artistic representation.⁹

However, it is not necessary that one postulate two axes of being, one real and the other unreal, in order to account for the otherwise disparate and incongruous properties and powers claimed as aspects of human beings. Some of the confusion in Derchain’s statement above comes through in the use of ‘essentially’ for ‘mainly’ or ‘mostly’, and by expecting but failing to find an ‘ontological distinction’ between one category and another category. The Egyptian concept of human nature appears to be diffuse, over-determined, polyvalent, and so forth because a cognitive concept employs the formal ideas of genus and species, substance and property, essence and attribute, whereas a cognitive complex embraces more than one genus and does not have one essence. Derchain also says that there is no ontological difference between human and god, ‘since it is possible to define both of them in connection with the same components’; hence, ‘the distinction must be sought elsewhere, essentially in the relative proportion of the real and the imaginary’. But the very ideas of ‘definition’ and ‘distinction’ are closely tied into the same Aristotelian categories that have already given rise to so much difficulty in accommodating the many diverse aspects. The structure of Egyptian religion, he says, is organized in a unitary way where the gods of every region are found in every temple and yet are entirely realized on the local level in each temple: ‘The indigenous god is the synthesis of all the gods of the country, whose functions he fulfills to the extent that they are differentiated; and his person is recognized in each foreign god who would, in his own locality, perform his specific function.’¹⁰ This is indeed very close to an appropriate formulation of the ideas involved in human nature: one might say that the ka or the ba (and so on) is the synthesis of all the psychic entities in the earthly domain whose functions it fulfills to the extent that it can be differentiated from other psychic entities, and can be recognized as that person’s ba or ka in the unearthly world insofar as it carries out functions specific to its ‘nature’.¹¹

Let us now consider in detail the various aspects of human being according to the exposition and testimony of ancient Egyptian texts. One of the most striking features of the Egyptian picture was the notion that the human body played an important role in the individual’s survival after death. John Taylor is quite explicit about this: ‘It is clear that a physical body was considered essential for the deceased’s continued existence. Attainment of the afterlife depended on preservation of the body and the ability of the individual members to function, but more importantly the body served as the physical base for the entities known as the ka and the ba, which required a physical form.’ The production of a mummy was the preservation of the corpse by artificial means and arose in response to the need to maintain this physical substrate. But the mummy was not merely the same earthly body: ‘the aim was to transform the corpse into a new eternal body, a perfect image of the deceased. This body, the sah, was not expected to rise up and be physically active after death, since its principal function was to house the ka and the ba. Only through the survival and union of these aspects of the individual after death could resurrection take place.’¹²

The Egyptians distinguished between the earthly and the unearthly body with separate words: the words khet (form) and iru (appearance) referred to the earthly body...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Introduction: The Heterodox Tradition in Western Philosophy
• Chapter 1 Ideas About Human Nature in the Ancient Near East
• Chapter 2 The Ancient and Medieval Horizon of the Shamanic Soul
• Chapter 3 Secret Teachings about the Soul in the Post-Classical World
• Chapter 4 Byzantine Doctrines of Mind, Soul and Spirit
• Chapter 5 Christian Mystical Ideas About the Soul's Ascent
• Chapter 6 Magical Ideas about the Soul from Isidore to Goethe
• Chapter 7 Plurality of Dualisms and Duality of Life
• Sectional Bibliographies
• Index of Names
• Index of Subjects