Presentation Q2-8
Presented on: Saturday, May 23, 2015
Presented by: Roger Weir
The Future and The New Past
Presentation 21 of 52
Presentation 2-8
Presented by Roger Weir
Saturday, May 23, 2015
Transcript:
We come to the 21st presentation. They're not lectures. They are...it's not instruction. This is not an education. It's a con coursing with a complexity of currents in a context that allows free play.
In the universe there's only one dimension of time. And it's not the fourth dimension, but the first. And time as the first dimension provides energy. And because the energy is time then instantly that first dimension blossoms three other dimensions, which are space. And so later on for us as we recursively looked back in discovery and learning and so forth, instead of calling it time space as it actually is, we call it space time. Because of the blossoming of space as three dimensions out of the single first dimension that has not occurred instantly, but spontaneously, not out of, but within, a context that is really logically described as zero.
I have put into the notes a little blurb from a book by Susanne K. Langer, which is An Introduction to Symbolic Logic. And on page 147, she begins with the title of a small section, The Ubiquity of the Null Class, "One reason why zero cannot be represented by any diagram is the very odd but perfectly logical fact that the null class is included in every class." And she goes on to say, "The null class is ubiquitous. It is included in every class."
Now she was very capable. One of her deepest teachers was Alfred North Whitehead, who was a co-author with Bertrand Russell of a huge three volume epochal work called Principia Mathematica. It came out about 1900. And one of the deep theses of Principia Mathematica was that logic and mathematics are two sides of the same coin. That whatever, quote, valuation is in play with that coin, logic and mathematics are in a symmetry that is very close. Like two sides of the same coin.
Alfred North Whitehead by the time he was able to realize that he had transformed in writing Principia Mathematica so much because he had learned to grind very fine in terms of logical structure and mathematical thinking context. That he literally transcended logic. Transcended that kind of mathematics that can be just recorded in a measurement. And became interested in the fact that there is the reality of a mysterious process dynamic that occurs. And in fact, as we began this morning, today, here, the creativity is in the process free to play. And the space structure is within time.
And so, Whitehead wrote a very complex book about the time he was teaching Susanne K. Langer. K for her maiden name, Knauth. And the book was called Process and Reality. And it gained currency as being one of the most mysterious, complex, almost not understandable brilliant books in philosophy. It wasn't until many decades, many decades later that someone putting out an introduction and a new edition of Process and Reality had gone over the original manuscript of Whitehead and found that the published editions contained many typos and errors and omissions. And that one of the most difficult things was trying to piece together Process and Reality.
And the new addition of Process and Reality is very complex. But for those who can play in that openness of not just a zero origin of space time, but in the infinite context of an infinite time that has the possibility of instantly having space and all of its attendant things like phenomena. Like radiation particles and waves. So that the quantum world is not a quandary of visit a particle or is it a wave? Well, of course it is both and. And for someone as playfully brilliant as Einstein, it was quite easy, mathematically, and logically and in a transcendent comprehension, comprehensiveness, that, uh, yes, light is a wave, but it has the properties of a particle. And Einstein discovered in that by 1923, the photon.
The photon, the wave frequency of light, which can vary, and one can have very intense light. One can have a very quiet light, etc. The way in which this works in a triple time which characterizes civilization. And we've got to it from many different angles. And we'll revisit it again many times. But the evolution and development of civilization is due to language being able to express not only exactly the process, but to express in between the exact nesses, the reality. And this became evident when oral language became written. And the development of a written sign of way of abbreviating things. Picture for horned cows, for cows. And for repetition of them, for number and so forth. And eventually a written language was able to be expressive in terms of accounting, of business, of transactions, of setting up very complex structures of cities and lands, kingdoms, forces and so forth by about 4350 B.C. And it took about three- and one-half centuries for the capacity to have a written symbol structure, which is a language, that can be pronounced, said, can also be read and written.
And the beginning of being able to have a comprehension between the lines, between the particles in the energy of time, a triple time emerged like the triple dimensions of space. It became possible, and then it became actually phenomenal. And civilization is based upon the evolution of language in its written read capacity. And set up in the rhythm of very large structures of time that had always been just natural time now became increasingly complex as a, an energy wave that had a triple quality to it and began to structure civilization.
And by 4000 B.C., there were some, a few, human beings, Homo sapiens, Homo sapiens sapiens wise about being wise, who are able to read and write. And their comprehension resulted in being able to see that in a metaphorical way natural man was naked in the universe. Yeah, he had the animal skins and he had all of these other accoutrements. But the reality was that he was, for the first time, the phrase used about 25-30 years ago by an author, Desmond Morris, in a book, The Naked Ape.
And the first person that is recorded many, many thousands of years later that saw this was Eve. Who had had the bite of the apple of the ability to read in between the lines, in between the particles into the energy of emergence that was an extraordinarily real. And so, Adam, the first man to learn from the first woman to be able to read and write and show not just in speaking, but in writing, to have Adam learn to read and read well enough to read in between the lines.
This quality of language being, the dynamic, the metronome of the time forms of civilization carries on to our own day. Now. Here. And there have been many major punctuations. Not so many. There have been four. And those punctuations upset the equilibria that had been established as the stability before. So that a creative, refreshing and advancing of learning can occur. And as it does, the ability to have a written language increases. From 4000 BC to 2000 B.C., it increased so that for the first time you had an ability to have a written language that was a poetic. Not just an insightful rhetoric, but a poetic.
And some 350 years before then is the first woman. That's why Wisdom is named Sophia. The first woman to be able to write a poetic and sign her name. And whose name we know and whose writings we have. And her name was Enheduanna. Her father was Sargon, the transformative, not just King of a kingdom, but a King of Kings. Sargon's kingdom of kingdoms stretched from the island of Cyprus in the Mediterranean, all the way to the Indus River in India.
And in this, there were many kinds of languages, many kinds of tribes, many kinds of people. Hundreds. And Enheduanna understood that the transform had to restructure the way in which kingdoms not only learn to respect each other and not constantly be hedging and warring, but to understand that they were a part of a very strategic refinement in the way in which Kings of Kings did not rule, but that they were guides to open the possibilities of something further.
And so, by 2000 B.C., you have a new pair of men who are able to understand on one hand that there is a new possibility that is promised by the very promise of the way in which reality unfolds and for us in civilization unfolds in time and in space. And the classic protagonist of that vision of a promised land not yet reached, but vision that is possible. And the invitation is come and see. Find out. Explore. That man was Abraham.
And at the very same time as Abraham was a man whose heritage was a very long caravan route, not from the island of Cyprus to the Indus River, but much farther north in Central Asia, almost into southern Siberia. And that caravan route went from the Caspian Sea all the way into the Gobi Desert. His name was Zarathustra. And it is Zarathustra who at the very same time as Abraham, both born about 2000 B.C. When they were 75 years old they found that they had achieved the reality of being where they had vision they would be. Abraham was able to understand that he had indeed not only arrived at a promised land, but actually ceded with the purchase of the first land, the actual land of the promised land. And it was a place of burial for he and his wife, Sara, for their son Isaac and his wife Rebecca, and for further inheritors of the guiding care for all of this. And it was a cave. It's called the Cave of Machpelah. And it's under very near the oaks of Bamburgh in what is today, Hebron. That was the very first seed. And that had a building built in front of and around the cave and the lands. And that building is still there today. The tombs of Abraham and Sarah are still there. The tombs of Isaac and Rebecca are still there.
One of the things about Zarathustra is that he saw in his high poetic in The Gathas that there is a structure of reality that can be expressed, that has a quality of being able to explore, especially a very vast world, because the Eurasian context of it literally stretches all the way from ocean to ocean, from the Pacific to the Atlantic. And the northern reaches of that go all the way to Norway and to northern Japan. And it's that whole spread of a pair to the spread smaller, more intense of that promised land heritage scalar.
And so, one has in the development of civilization and increasing complexity capacity, but also tension, which is a creative tension when worked with creatively, but a tension when not recognized as creative. And so, it becomes a source of discontinuity. And this discontinuity refuses to play with the continuities that are creatively developing. This is especially true in language. Because from 4000 B.C. to 2000 B.C. to zero BC to 2000 A.D., there is a reference wave 4350 of 2350 B.C., of 350 B.C., of 1650 A.D.
And in 1650 A.D., our reference wave for our carrier wave of 2000. It's a little off. It's about nine years off, actually. When one can be very precise. It's about from 9 B.C. to 1991. Our reference wave is the advance of language, not just to be poetic and not just 0 B.C. when one could have an allegorical multiple meanings between the lines. Not just between the lines, but around the words, even by the letters and by the numbers. So that there was a kaleidoscopic quality of consciousness that one can have relationalities. Not just in an integral sense, but in the differential pairing of vectors within the same kind of graphable expression that itself was only 25% of the full spherical dimension because the graph is like the upper corner of an intersection of the dynamic of time and the way in which space occurs. And so that when one comes to measure and graph space time, better time space, one can understand that pairing vectors gives you a new relationality. And that the ultimate pairing is a zero base and an infinite ascent. So that in between zero and infinity one has those paired vectors deliver, in mathematics it's called a tensor, which is the proportion relationality, the ratioing, that is eternal.
It's that quality that came into play when math mathematization of language became a digitalization. And in our time, the digitalization of language has just now in the last generation achieved a facility which is literally infinite and can deal with zeros ordinarily as a part of the expression of exactness freed from having to be limited.
An example. One of the most successful and popular mythic horizons in the world, Star Wars. Which didn't appear on the scene until 1977. Though it was already in the concourse of the childhood of George Lucas. And was in the creative gestation at USC in the film school already. With people like Spielberg and Coppola as young chums and so forth. This is one of the latest compendia of the Star Wars. It goes up to the fourth Star Wars movie, and it's issued in this collection. There are six discs. There are four discs of the films that are now re-edited. Completely re-edited and made creative. Extra things are added plus two bonus discs, which are the way in which the additions have occurred technically. And interviews with the technical people. Interviews with the actors. With the directors. With the producers and so forth.
When George Lucas wanted to add to the first Star Wars, one of the exemplary things was that he realized that when the two robots, C-3PO and R2-D2 are on Tatooine in the desert, and they're being followed and searched for and sought after. The storm troopers as minions of Darth Vader, that there weren't enough stormtroopers. And in fact, it to him now creatively some 30 years later that this needs to be by this time he's in the 21st century approaching 2007 and digital technology has leapt forward so that in those 30 years, computers that used to be seemingly very large, now one can have on your wrist something that's more powerful than a room full just two generations before.
So, he saw we need more stormtroopers and we need to reshoot this scene. And he made arrangements by this time, when you have a couple of billion dollars and technical crews around the world, you can daydream big and get it done. So, they went out not to the Tunisian desert, as in the original thing, but to a desert location with an increased crew, about 130 some people. And it was necessary for them to follow an insight. Not only did Lucas see, there weren't enough stormtroopers so we have to have new ones. We have to have people in costumes. And leading up to the one stormtrooper showing in a ring. Isn't that symbolic? Look, sir, droids. He saw that back on the horizon, which is the horizon of the perspective at the time, was a stormtrooper on an animal. And that animal was a big sloth like lizard creature that was his mount. And he wanted to have something that was dynamic. So, we have to go back in. And it was very difficult because they couldn't find the original negatives for a long while.
Lucas with Industrial Light and Magic and Lucas Films have warehouses, saving every scrap of everything that Lucas has ever done. They're huge. Looks like smaller versions of the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark, where the Ark of the Covenant is put into a wooden box and put on a shelf in acres of shelved boxes and so forth. Lucas has warehouse after warehouse of this. And a woman who had been researching on her own found miscataloged as she opened the box, there were the little spools of the original negatives from Star Wars. They were able to clean that up. To sharpen it. So that instead of having a resolution that was about 10% of what real clarity would be, it got to 90%. And they were able then to understand that we can digitally make this creature into a very interesting mount and the rider into a very interesting mount, and we can duplicate. And we can have them rotated in such that the whole scene now not just has scores of troopers, but it has a whole handful of these mounted troopers. And the scene now, though, it's very short in the film, has this vibrance of telling the story that this is a complex pursuit of something mysterious that at first is carried to us by a pair of playfully bickering, non-cooperating droids. It's a parable.
By 2015, we can understand, The International Journal of Science for over 100, almost 150 years from Nature. Originally published in England. Now offices all over the world. The cover of the latest issue, of three women in India who are featured because they are the ones in charge of this scientific achievement that has happened in India. And behind them are all the technicians and so forth. They are the ones who envisioned who technically made the computations and carried it out of India, placing in orbit a satellite around Mars. We think it's big because the Chinese have sent a little rover that broke down right away on the moon. The moon is a quarter of a million miles away. Mars is 40 million miles away. And India has done this.
And on the back cover, this is the capacity in just a little piece of equipment to be able to do genetic measurement by hand by the hundreds almost immediately. Whereas it didn't even exist as a technology 30 years before at all. You can do PCR that used to take labs and processes and lots of money and many people weeks, if not months, to be able to do, to catalogue, to measure and so forth. Now it can be done by hand almost instantly within a couple of hours. You can have more information than could have been planned for before.
We're going to take a little break and we'll come back to the way in which learning has undergone a similar scalar of double transforms.
Let's take that break.
END OF SIDE ONE
Let's come back to this presentation, which is the 21st presentation, but the yearlong, the annual cycle, as it were, of 52 presentations. Which are in larger groups of 13, four of those making a, an annual harmonic. And the title of the 2015 series harmonic is The Future and the New Past. So that if you're doing a graph ability, the future is the infinite vertical and the new past is the zero base. So that this gives us a very cosmic quality of creativity, which has both an integral from 0 to 1 and one back to 0. A, a calculus. And it gives us an infinite possibilities, which are dimensions beyond the four dimensions of zero and one going into infinities.
In the quality of The Future and The New Past, which is a pair of vectors having a tensor of learning. Our learning is able to be self-guiding, not self-correcting, but self-guiding into the future. Into unknowns that are just unknown but not unknowable. But that do not calibrate the same way that knowables and unknowables used to be calibrated it. So that the quality of a new carrier wave time form of civilization is that it is free for possibilities that include zero and one. And not only everything in between, but everything in contextual considerations that go not into unknown but go into possibilities unlimited.
We have this as a heritage, and we have this as our gift. Our challenge is not to right the wrongs, but to be able to appreciate and to analyze together the art and science of conscious dimensions that are in complementarity to the universe's four-dimensional space time phenomenon wave energy. So that something like the Between Past and Future, a book by Hannah Arendt not too long ago has eight chapters. And chapter seven is Truth in Politics. And she begins with a poignant series of sentences.
The subject of these reflections is a commonplace. No one has ever doubted that truth in politics are on rather bad terms with each other. And no one, as far as I know, has ever counted truthfulness among political virtues. Lives have always been regarded as necessary and justifiable tools. Not only of the politicians or the demagogues, but also of the statesman's trade, which is why that is so. And what does it mean for the nature and the dignity of the political realm on one side and for the nature and dignity of man on the other?
Chapter seven Truth in Politics is nestled in between chapter six, which is The Crisis in Culture: Its Social and Political Significance, and chapter eight The Conquest of Space and the Stature of Man.
In your presentation notes for this week, for today for 21, is a page that has the **inaudible word** of Philosophy in A New Key by Suzanne Langer and her Alfred North Whitehead, Ernst Cassirer Inheritance of Philosophic Acumen.
But Hannah Arendt, in her great book, The Human Condition, came out originally from the University of Chicago Press in 1958. And what began for her was an event in late 1957 that got her off the dime. Got her off the whole emphasis for all of her life on politics. On politics and history and man and social situation. And the tussle with what in the 20th century had become for a German born Jewish woman like her, a holocaust. An unimaginable hell that she escaped by the skin of her teeth.
And one of the great tragic in Aristotle's writings on tragedy, he says the moment of realization in a tragedy is that the protagonist, the hero, or heroine, has a moment of the Greek word is daenuma (sp?), the realization, not that you are doomed. But that given the situation in its context, you were always doomed. To survive that you have to transcend time, eventually. And you have to transcend space geographically, politically, socially, before then. The transcending of space takes a recognition. The transcending of time takes a realization. And what occurs then is a recalibration. Which is what we are involved with. We are intensely immersed with. And there is no place that we can go to get away. Except to have that tensor of zero and infinity available for us as a learning tensor. Especially because it is civilization in its particular peculiar quality of time forms energizing this development and for the reach of civilization in its space to renew and to come to re calibrations every node in its carrier wave development. Which means that the language capability of reading and writing and learning thus accelerates and accumulates so that this latest carry wave carries with it almost the sense of an ultimate tragedy. Which the recognition of it alone is petrifying to most, but which energizes and thus activates those who live in guidance to not let it be realized, to work not with it or against it, but through it. And that the ancient wisdom is that when the sun rises the night, though it is there becomes illuminated by the light. And we are looking for the light in a digital way so that we understand now it's not just like at the reference wave where Sir Isaac Newton was able to take a prism to a shaft of sunlight and project the rainbow on his wall. We have carriable enough computing power to understand that we can work with 2 million colors.
So that learning becomes that quality of wisdom that takes in the transforms of recognition and the transforms of realization and braids that triple learning with a triple time form of civilization. If not for anything further, and there's everything further and beyond. But at least to be able to live, to learn another nanosecond, literally.
One of the great visionary recognitions that came out for someone who is born in the American Midwest, in Wisconsin, in Civil War times grew up to be someone as a mature man of wondering why it was that the Eastern mindset was so different from the western coast mindset. And that from his pivotal Midwest upbringing, family and so forth, that they had been at home with pioneering. And they realized that they had come from East Coast and that many people that they know knew love, so forth, went on to the West Coast and beyond. And come from before the East Coast had gone beyond the West Coast.
And so, Frederick Jackson Turner came up early in the 20th century with a series of papers that were delivered as lectures, eventually. That were collected together in 1920 as The Frontier in American History. Not only being able to face the unknown, but to open up to exploring it in terms of it being a frontier.
And so later on, after he had died, the Huntington Library, an Art Gallery here in Los Angeles and San Marino published the genesis of The Frontier Thesis: A Study in Historical Creativity by Ray Allen Billington. Who, at the time of writing this, let's see it was published in 1971. He was the senior researcher at the Huntington and eventually became the author of the great biography of Roderick Jackson Turner, historian, scholar, teacher. And he was the director of the Huntington Library. As Frederick Jackson Turner became the first director of the Huntington Library to make it a library. He's the one that started from crates and crates and crates of books and art and things that hundreds of millions of dollars of Henry Huntington had been able to buy over a lifetime and had stored in various warehouses. And it was Frederick Jackson Turner who understood how to patiently structure and distribute this mass of 2 million books and all of the art and the incredible complexities into a library that was researchable in any which way you wanted to come into it, to explore, to come out with whatever it was. And it works.
I spent a year researching at the Huntington in the 1980's. I was working in 1984 on a yearlong series for 1985, which was to be called Hermetic America. What happens if you don't start with George Washington and the Constitution? What happens if you go back and start with Benjamin Franklin and the development of invention after invention after invention, including the prismatic person that could invent them? Though this book is not a manual. It's an autobiography.
It is a quality of the Huntington that you are able to go into a 2 million volume library, which is actually middling in this by the 20th century, even. There are libraries. UCLA's library has about five or 6 million. Library of Congress has 25 million, etc. It's just a matter of dealing with the complexity to a takeoff where recognition and realization are both free, not only free to operate and be, but free to interrelate and braid and be whatever with the learning guide as a spirit of inquiry that is able to bring all of this into play. Not only creatively but consciously. So that one has an art and science of the ability to carry a learning civilization with the future available and infinite outward bound. Where there's no higher or lower with the quality of even a zero field that is fertile to engender time itself spontaneously in such a way that time itself spontaneously is fertile, carrying that heritage and instantly blossomed space in its three dimensions. And that those four-dimensional space time can be alive. Organic. Yes. Living organisms that can evolve, can develop beyond belief. Can come into by the late 20th century, a realization that there is in our learning guidance extra dimensions that are able to understand that the evolution of life in a universe, a four dimensional, has the ability to come to species that then have yes even further evolution and development and lead to beyond the naked ape to us.
But that all of this has an extra dimensional, conscious, accessible aspect, and it's been styled as macro evolution. Macro, macro evolutionary dynamics. There was a special issue of the Journal of the Paleontology...Paleontological Society's journal Macro Evolution. It's the subtitle is Diversity Disparity Contingency and Essays in honor of Stephen Jay Gould, who had just died a few months before. Edited by Niles Eldredge, who is the author of Macro Evolutionary Dynamics and about 40 other books. And his original South African lady friend and great friend, also of Stephen Jay Gould, Elizabeth Vrba. V-r-b-a. And they are both still alive.
Gould was a New Yorker. He was a character. He loved writing about baseball. He loved all sorts of things. And his last great book was 1500 pages published by Harvard on a history of evolutionary theory and all of its complexity. Much as you want to know. To begin to learn enough to learn on your own and with others who are doing as well and have a kind of thing that goes beyond synergy into a distributed joy.
In Macro Evolution the new frontier is the maturity to understand that our home in a kind of a minimal mini...minimizing scalar that is able for the first time to view the universe as a frontier. And the size of that home is a star system. Not a patch of geography on an Earth, which, after all, is a planet within a star system. And that there are star systems more than sands of the Ganges out there. But a star system, wisdom scaler civilization is able to be creative on an infinite frontier. And to take from absolute zero the heritage of fertility to develop life. Even onto recognition and realization and reality.
We are there. It is very difficult to just be there without having the kind of qualities that the lies that are necessary for a political economy paired with a military protective, aggressive, the best defense is a good offense. And even by 1960, one of the most strategic generals of all time, Dwight Eisenhower leaving the presidency of the United States after eight years warned of the military industrial complex taking control not only of the society in its political situation, but its economy, its political economy. And that all of this was not there as some kind of future threat but was already had already accumulated and necessarily accumulated in a very grand style in the United States. Which had been from East and West, confronted simultaneously by two aggressive military industrial complexes that were bent on dicing up the world and ending any kind of competition. And what got in the way of both was the United States.
In response to that, the resources of a Hermetic America was able to bring the frontier heritage into play. So that you found any man or woman, boy or girl, ready to roll up their sleeves and go to work together. And then a couple of years went from a underestimated, flaccid commonness to a kind of military power and political economy that had never been seen before on that scale. Once you have built up that kind of athletic and mastered the game within which it works very, very well. There are always nibbling competitors. But as 1991 showed, they reach a collapse point because they do not have a Hermetic American background, which is not a nationality, but is an inheritance of all of the accumulated qualities of civilization going all the way back to its beginnings of literacy. To its ability to have a population that they themselves are that voice of guidance and of understanding, of recognition and of realization. And that create...creativity and that analytic are mutual in free play.
This quality came out when Hannah Arendt, just a couple of years before 1960. Before Eisenhower's speech. Published The Human Condition, a 40th anniversary edition with a new introduction was put out by the University of Chicago Press in 1998. And this is a copy of it in paperback. And she says, in The Human Condition that in 1957, in early October, when Sputnik was put into orbit around the earth, not just something that went up and down, but something that stayed up because it had mastered, we call it an orbit, but an orbit is a continuous free fall. It always falls to Earth. But because everything is in motion, in a shared dynamic complex, it goes around the Earth because it's falling. Always falls in an ongoing dynamic. And so, the choreography of incredible, complex dynamics is the actuality of the universe. And it is the reality of the cosmos. And to have a learning which doesn't just know that or carves out this is what we know and that's what we don't know. And this is what we want to know. This is what we want to know is a projection to defend what is known, not from the unknown. We will we can control what's going to be unknown as well as what's known. We're very clever. It's to guard against and make sure that possibility is not infinite. And that the base is not at home and not afraid of being zero at all. So that the familiarity is with eternity.
In 2015, Niles Eldredge still alive, still in Washington, DC as the head of one of the great institutions of our time. He published Eternal Ephemera: Adaptation and The Origin of Species from the 19th Century Through Punctuated Equilibria and Beyond. And in his volume, there is a huge jump when you get to chapter five, section five, Punctuated Equilibrium. Because it was the theory of punctuated equilibrium that Stephen Jay Gould and Niles Eldridge, along with Elizabeth Vrba, they called themselves The Three Musketeers. They came from disparate parts of the world and came together and investigating evolution in an increasingly recognition freed, realization freed ability to vision creatively. And saw that there are indeed always possibilities that the accumulation of increased complexity in evolution, of our evolution, of our civilized dimensions of consciousness. That there are sudden eras, there are sudden instances in time, space, in space time, where evolution takes a jump. Takes what used to be called a decade or so ago a quantum jump. Whereas something had been stable for not only X number of years or decades or even sometimes centuries, millennia, has the capacity to have the punctuation, the penetration of not the stability, but of the limitation of the equilibria into the creative evolution of a macro evolutionary dynamic. And learning is the way in which civilization carries on in that way. There is much more.
This is a great volume published by Dan Wellstein, he published this about almost 40 years ago. 30 years ago. Diane Wolkstein and Samuel Noah Kramer. Kramer was a specialist in the Sumerian language. But Diane Wolkstein got interested in the poetic writings of Enheduanna that transformed completely through recognition and through realization, the limitations of a Sumerian empire, of a confederation of various kingdoms. By the time her father, Sargon, put his vision into play, there were 42 different kingdoms with 42 different temples, 42 different competing religious mythological sects of priests and priestesses and so forth. And kings. And armies and all of that.
And Enheduanna wrote two great qualities of epic. One were The Myths of Inanna, made into an incredible realization that all of this is within a context that is superior to and not only recalibrates the recognition of it. It recalibrates the realization of it as well. And so, Inanna Queen of Heaven and Earth: Her Stories and Hymns from Sumer. And to Akkadian about 2300 B.C., almost 4300 years ago.
But she also took a hymn for each of the temple, each of the priesthoods in each of the separate cities of the Sumerian military industrial complex and did a hymn for each of those 42 and then braided and wove all 42 together into a composition known as The Temple Hymns. And it's the first great epic poem of civilization. To go with the first transforming history from a mythological beginning through the symbolic and ritual manifestation and integration of it into the creative expression of a new quality of life. And, in a way Inanna's mythology become a mythic development raised to an art form. You have something like Homer's Iliad and The Temple Hymns weaving all the different ways in which life and this and that together is like Homer's Odyssey.
And as a pair Enheduanna was able to make the first textbooks to teach reading and writing in the world. And for hundreds of years, for a millennium, her Inanna and her Temple Hymns were the schoolbooks by which people learn to read and write for a very long time in civilization.
More next week.
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