What’s Behind the Curtain?
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There are names – secret names behind things and if you know it, you have magic power over that thing or entity. Heard that one? I’ll bet you have. Words not only have power but words precede the reality they have power over. The snake eats its own tail.
If that is defensible to you, please don’t bother defending it. You can’t say anything original in defense really, and if you defend your myths, you have to attack the contradictory ones and that means you have to admit myths can be attacked by facts which is an admission that you don’t want to make. Better to let it lie. But that would be new and there’s nothing new in Heaven.
No offense intended, but nothing bores me more than our inclination to fill our lives with mysteries and stories that fill that inherited abscess that aches to contain secrets and arcana and contrivances that suggest the numina and shadows just beyond the tangible world. That our shared culture contains so many of them suggests a shared need. That so many persist over millennia, surviving like life itself does, by evolving to fit circumstances and infiltrating into every abandoned or empty niche, shows how independent the memes and story lines and stock characters are from the kind of reality where things have demonstrable properties.
Lo! I tell you a mystery, but if you’ve seen the movie, I’ll tell you another one or I’ll change it around a bit. I’ll take Sargon out of the basket and put in some character supplied from our own culture — like Moses, for instance, because it flatters us and so you’ll bet your life it’s true. So this flood story is false and that flood story is fake and the 4 others – but only the most recent is true because – well, just because.
Only the stories from our own frame of reference, only our secret names and holy events are real. It’s universal, predictable and boring unless you find frustration enjoyable. In short it’s politics and politics is about tribal identity and tribal identity is about stories, fables, myths, blandishments and cautionary horror stories. A wheel in a wheel from Ezekiel to Siddhartha; Taranis, Brontes, Ixion: let it roll, but at least share the road!
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I give up! What’s behind the bloody curtain?
Ok Glenn. So what IS behind the curtain? 😃
It’s a secret Timmy, go get yourself a PhD in pre history and then you’all know.
I understand the theory, and actually do have a PhD but not in “pre-history” as that would be redundant. So, Bobbie, why don’t you tell us what IS behind the curtain.
Pre-history is not redundant, it is the period of human activity between the use of stone tools and development of written communication, a period of about 5 million years. If you have a PhD then the mystery of what is behind the curtain is known to you and you are playing with me and the author of this piece.
Glenn Geist is the author of this piece Bobbie. He’s been a contributor for MMA for a number of years now. Like Tim, however, I thought history was simply the past. For example, yesterday is history, as when I wrote the last letter of this comment. Thus the expression: that’s history 🙂 I learned something today. Thanks.
A PhD, after all, means “pile it higher and deeper.” I’m with Mike. Thought everything that has already happened became “history.” Thanks.