1.13 Puett丨A World of Sacrifice and Divination

So to begin to rethink our understandings of the development of cosmology in ancient Greece, and again, to do soexplicitly from a comparative perspective, let us go back a few centuries before the key developments that will become so important in the paradigms focused on by people like Hegel. So, when Hegel is claiming that things likephilosophy and science arose in ancient Greece, he is really looking at theseries of philosophers that began arising 5th, 4th, 3rd centuries, before theCommon Era in ancient Greece.

If however, we begin our discussion a little bit earlier, it will allow us to perhaps gain a fuller perspective onwho these philosophers were and why they were significant. So, let's go alittle bit earlier, a little bit earlier to a period known in most currenthistoriography as the Bronze Age. The Bronze Age is a period, very lengthy period, really 3rd and 2nd millennia BCE, that dominated really all of Eurasia.It gets its name from the fact that one of the main metals used at the time wasbronze, which is an alloy of tin and copper, a very expensive alloy. And that'simportant because bronze, although the main metal used in the Bronze Agecivilizations, was really associated with the aristocracy.

This is important because it's telling ofa key characteristic of Bronze Age societies. Bronze Age societies wereextremely hierarchical societies in which virtually all positions of power weredefined exclusively by birth. So, if you were born into a high level of thearistocracy, you would have fabulous amounts of wealth, power, and land. And,of course, if you were born into the peasant class, there you would remain.There was almost no social mobility whatsoever. These extremely hierarchicalsocieties, again, really dominated Eurasia for about two millennia. And notsurprisingly, the religions of the Bronze Age period were very much dominatedby this aristocratic class.

The conceptions of the cosmos acrossthese Bronze Age civilizations are actually surprisingly similar. Indeed,although I'll be making reference to ancient Greece, many of the verycharacteristics I'll be talking about could, with only minor permutations, beused to describe most of the Bronze age civilizations, including, as we willsee explicitly, even ancient China. Those characteristics are along thefollowing lines. The world is dominated by a series of divine figures. Thesedivine figures create everything that occurs. So, they have direct power overthe weather. They have direct power over natural events. If they choose to becomeinvolved directly in human affairs, they can do so. And these divinities tendto be highly capricious.

So what humans need to do in order tonavigate this world successfully is to constantly try to gain the support ofthese different, very capricious, divine figures. And the main means of doingso is, number one, to use divination, to try to understand the intent and thehopes and the desires of these various divine figures, and, number two, to usesacrifice, to try to give offerings to these figures to ideally bring them intothe orbit to help human beings or at the very minimum to mollify them to someextent, so they won't be overly antagonistic to things we're trying to do. Andbecause these practices of divination and sacrifice were seen as so importantin dealing with these capricious spirits, the aristocracy, which, as we'venoted, had exclusive access to all wealth and power, they were the ones thatwould hire the key priests who were seen to be most effective at doing thedivinations and doing the sacrifices.

Indeed, in many of the Bronze Agecivilizations of Eurasia, people outside of this higher class of priests wereforbidden from doing much of the key divinations or sacrifices, or at leastwere forbidden from divining and sacrificing to the most powerful spirits. So,adding this together, what this means is the following: in these Bronze Agecivilizations, the ruler tended to be, by definition, the highest born. Hewould have access to the most powerful priests. They would use divination and sacrificesto try to gain access to the most powerful deities. And insofar as the highest figure, namely the ruler had exclusive access to these defining and sacrificial experts, the ruler had exclusive access to the most powerful gods in the realm.

This also meant of course, that thesereligions helped to encourage the maintenance of the social hierarchy becauseif the ruler has exclusive access to these high priests who themselves haveexclusive access to the most powerful gods, then, by definition, everyone elsein the social hierarchy would be expected to give obeisance to that rulerbecause, again, the ruler had exclusive power through that access to thehighest divinities. Now, so far I've been speaking in very general termsbecause, again, most of what I said can be said for virtually all of the BronzeAge civilizations across all of Eurasia.

This was equally true, as we have seen,in China during the Bronze Age period. In Greece, however, there were a fewpermutations that are worth taking seriously because they will open up someintriguing questions for our later discussions. So, with each civilization,there are slight permutations, and in Greece, those s light permutationsinvolved the following points, which is that, number one, yes, ancient Greece inthe Bronze Age was an extraordinarily hierarchical civilization, equally trueof the rest of Eurasia. It is also true that in ancient Greece, these societieswere relatively small.

So, if you, say, compare them to the dominant, very powerful kingdoms in the near East, and equally true, if youlook farther afield to China, in Greece, the kingdoms were relatively small.And this will become important historically because the kings were not the kindof all powerful figures dominating extraordinary amounts of land and huge numbers of people. They were relatively small scale and largely in control of arelatively small amount of land. This also meant that there were many, many,many kingdoms, often in constant competition with each other, and in that competition there was often constant conflict over who had access to the bestpriests, who of those best priests were able to connect to the most powerfuldeities.

There were also debates about who themost powerful deities were because often certain kingdoms would claim access toone deity. Another kingdom would claim access to another deity. If those twokingdoms were in battle, one of the big questions of course would be which ofthe deities involved would be more powerful. And so constant conflicts going onat the social political realm among humans were also seeing this playing out inthe divine realm. And so the Greek gods were often seen in con as being inconstant conflict with each other. Yes, they were capricious, equally true ofall Bronze Age gods, but they were often seen as not just capricious butconstantly battling against each other, and this is occurring, of course,because on the ground those giving to divination and sacrifice were equallyconstantly battling against each other.

I mention all of this to raise a coupleof intriguing points. One that will be very important is that when the BronzeAge falls, as we will be discussing in our next podcast, it means there will bean explicit concern among people looking back on this period to rethink thatsociopolitical environment that I just described and accordingly, because theywere seen as part and parcel of the same ethos, to rethink those gods andrethink a world of highly conflictual gods, to rethink the nature of divination sacrifice in which that kind of a conflictual world existed, and this was thelandscape against which they were working.

I also mention it for another reason,too, because that world of endless conflict will continue. Even after theBronze Age falls, we will see ancient Greece will continue to be based inrelatively small scale societies. Greece itself is never going to be unified,not until much, much later in history, and, accordingly, all of these attemptsto try to break down this world of constant conflict will, well, not beterribly successful. And therefore, when we are exploring the philosophers andtheir views of cosmology, it will be important to see what it is they arereacting against and to see that that world they're trying to react against,based in the Bronze Age, they perceive to be ongoing, and they perceive their work to be ongoing, and it's really only against that background that a lot oftheir theories, that we have often misconstrued as the rise of science, the rise of philosophy, need to be understood.

In our next podcast, we will therefore explore what happens when the Bronze Ages collapse across Eurasia, but more particularly for our podcast in Greece, what is occurring, therefore, when theso-called “philosophers” begin to try to rethink the world, and what it is thatthey are really trying to do. Thank you so much, and I very much look forwardto our next discussion.