An Essay on Violence, Tradition and Modernity

Rafael Leyre ( Rafael_Leyre@yahoo.com)       Third Edition - February 2007

Babylon

Tower of Babel

Babylon was a borderline city for much of the last millennium BCE. It was alternately ruled by Assyrian, Syrian, Chaldean and native kings, and the continuous shifting of borders made its population, more than other cities, cosmopolitan by nature. All this caused Babylon to flourish in between many conflicts and changes. Wealth raised and attracted adventurers and intellectuals. The Assyrians at a certain moment wanted to eradicate Babylon as an uncontrollable outpost, but decided eventually, from the seventh century BCE on, to take profit from its invaluable reputation and to rebuild it in all its splendour - and more engineers and craftsman travelled to the metropolis to assist in the reconstruction. In 614 BCE Assyria’s two centuries of eternity were fulfilled and the empire went down in a turmoil of destroyed borders and shattered exiles. The newcomer Persia empowered the cultural turntable of Babylon further when Cambyses submitted Egypt in 525 BCE, and when only ten years later Darius did the same to India.443

Babylon, now the capital of a Persian province, grew to the world’s most splendid city. In its palaces, temples and gardens ideas from India, Africa, Phoenicia and from the whole Middle East were exchanged, contrasted and interpreted.

The pinnacle of Babylon’s reconstruction was the legendary Tower of Babel. When, from the seventh century BCE on, the Babylonians were allowed to rebuild their devastated city, they also re-erected the millennia old Etemenanki, the ‘House of the Foundation of Heaven on Earth’, called the Tower of Babel in the Bible book of Genesis:

And the Lord came down to see the city and the tower, which the children of men builded. And the Lord said, behold, the people is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do: and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do. Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another’s speech. So the Lord scattered them abroad from thence upon the face of all the earth...444

As was always the case with such ambitious projects, the work was done by war captives, slaves and hired craftsmen and engineers, all from different countries and speaking various languages. Contrary to the common notion and to the bible story, the scorned multilingual workforce completed the splendid tower only a few years after frustrated Jewish prophets sullied it. After one century of construction, at about 605 BCE, Nebuchadnezzar carved in its foot:

I set my hand to finish [this tower] and to exalt its head. As it had been in ancient days, so I exalted its summit.

It was the tallest building of the city ever - 91 meters high, with a floor of 91 by 91 meters - and the most lucid demonstration that communication between ancient nations of different languages existed and flourished. A short time after the completion of the Tower of Babel, philosophy arrived in Greece.

Besides the inscription of Nebuchadnezzar, the accomplishment is testified by a cuneiform tablet found in Uruk, now in the Louvre, and from Herodotus, who wrote in the fifth century BCE: ‘on the summit of the topmost tower stands a great temple with a fine large couch in it’.445 On this couch a woman, all by herself, awaited the coming of the god Marduk, the Golden Calf, disguised as the planet Jupiter.

Pieter Bruegel the Elder has made two oil paintings representing the construction of the Tower. As the first modern painter of Europe, and a humanist acquainted with a secret society deploring the endlessly ongoing Christian fratricide of his times, he purposely turned the legend about a failing human endeavour into the vision of a flourishing human enterprise: the artist had understood the real events before the historians did.446 On his painting the breath-taking construction, modelled after the Roman Coliseum, reaches already above the clouds – the region of the gods - while cooperation among workers continues in a peaceful atmosphere.447 It is remarkable that experts as well as inexperienced viewers interpret the painting following the way they are conditioned by their biblical education, and see the Wrath of God all over an evidently peaceful scene. This is exactly the obstinate submission to religious ideology that Bruegel tried to counter when he evoked the splendid power of human collaboration.

Mazdaianism and the classification of creatures

The worship of Ahura Mazda was the most powerful religious expression in Persia at least since Cyrus II.448 Ahura Mazda is often translated as ‘Lord of Wisdom’ or ‘Wise Lord’, but literally means ‘Lord Omniscient’, because his followers maintained that Ahura Mazda had (scientific) knowledge of nature as well as foresight in the outcome of the cosmic struggle between Good and Evil. Now the word ‘wisdom’ today refers to devotion and pious insight, and is not really a divine attribute. A better translation of his name is therefore ‘All Knowing Lord’ or simply ‘Lord of Knowledge’.449 Ahura Mazda allowed a glance at his knowledge when he offered a hallucinogenic drink to the prophet Zoroaster (old Iranian Zarathustra, Persian Zartosht). His knowledge demonstrates the scientific canon of the time:

Seven days and nights Zartosht was in the wisdom of Ahura Mazda. And Zartosht beheld the men and cattle in the seven regions of the earth, where the many fibres of hair of every one are, and whereunto the end of each fibre holds on the back. And he beheld whatever trees and shrubs there were, and how many roots of plants were in the earth of Spandarmad450, where and how they had grown, and where they were mingled. 451

Like other tribal religions Mazdaism spread through violence. An ancient text speaks of ‘the war of the religion, when there was confusion among the Iranians’. In the heat of this war a peak broke off a mountain and ‘slid down into the middle of the plain; the Iranians were saved by it’.452 In an oath novices pledged solemnly not to plunder dwellings of adherents, implying that non-believers were a different matter. As in the Bible the farmer’s leitmotiv - the need for space to roam and dwell - is crucial to the conflict:

I renounce the theft and robbery of the cow, and the damaging and plundering, of the Mazdayan settlements. I want freedom of movement and freedom of dwelling for those with homesteads, to those who dwell upon this earth with their cattle. [..] I vow this: I shall nevermore damage or plunder the Mazdayan settlements, even if I have to risk life and limb. 453

A practical and geographical division between Good and Evil, much as the Israelites and so many other warring tribes saw it, is also confirmed in an apocalyptic text. Notice the tribal (ethnic) undertone in the importance attributed to hairstyle and look:

The token that it is the end of thy millennium, and the most evil period is coming, is that a hundred kinds, a thousand kinds, a myriad of kinds of demons with dishevelled hair, of the race of Wrath, rush into the country of Iran from the direction of the East, which has an inferior race and race of Wrath. They have uplifted banners, they slay those living in the world, they have their hair dishevelled on the back, and they are mostly a small and inferior race [..] the race of Wrath is miscreated and its origin is not manifest. Through witchcraft they rush into these countries of Iran which I, Ahura Mazda, created.454

According to the last Zoroastrians still around, the Indian Parsis, Zoroaster was a Mazdayan priest at the court of Vishtaspa (Greek Hystaspes), the father of Darius I. This makes him a contemporary of Confucius, Buddha and Jeremiah, all prophets who answered the environmental crisis of the seventh century BCE by shifting attention from expensive ritual feasts to individual behaviour and reflection, and their trade from the temples to the markets. As many other prophets, Zoroaster was made a poor herdsman in a humble tribe, suddenly hearing a voice out of the void - but voices usually come from people, and new ideas often come from foreign people. In the real world prophets are found on busy crossroads, not in barren solitude.

The protest against ritual feasts is illustrated in the Ahunavaiti Gatha, with a story about an ox begging Ahura Mazda for protection against its immanent slaughtering:

To Ahura with outspread hands we twain would pray, my soul and that of the pregnant cow, so that we twain urge Mazda with entreaties. Destruction is not for the right-living...455

Ahura Mazda eased the fear of dying on the altar by creating fat and milk for nourishment. Then he sent Zoroaster to teach that slaughtering had become unnecessary, and ox and cow were saved from the altar. The offering fire, and no longer the offering, became a symbol of the new religion: sacred fire and sacred light. Just like the biblic prophet Jeremiah, Zoroaster was at first a bad speaker, but was bestowed by the Lord with the charm of speech. Even more, Jeremiah introduced the Mazdayan religion at the court of Zedekiah, the regent of Israel:

Thus saith the Lord [..] he that goeth forth to the Chaldeans shall live…456

Jew, Christian and Muslim legends speak about encounters between Jeremiah and Zoroaster. A Muslim story says Jeremiah cursed Zoroaster because he was such a terrible pupil, and as a consequence Zoroaster became a leper.457 Jews and Christians have repeatedly identified Zoroaster with Baruch, the scribe of Jeremiah. Pope Clement I identified Zoroaster with Ham, a son of Noah.458

Essential to Zoroastrian mythology is the battle between the good Ahura Mazda and the evil Ahriman. This battle will last for nine thousand years and will be won by Ahura Mazda. Both Ahura Mazda and Ahriman were originally forefather gods. Ahriman clearly descends from a vegetation god of a farming community: in the golden epoch of history, he cared for ‘water, fire, plants and the earth’. Ahura Mazda originally was a nomadic warrior god. Their conflict was nothing but an instance of the century old struggle for living space between the settled farmers and new immigrants, and is found in many Mesopotamian legends, of which Kain and Abel are te best known in the West. In essence this conflict is still going on with Israel settling on Palestine land, using religious arguments.

As the nomadic party of Ahura Mazda won influence and settled, both gods were respectively pictured as light and dark, truth and lie, day and night, good and evil. Ahura Mazda had created a world in which there was only Truth, in which the sun stood forever still at high noon. Humans belong to his good creation, but no poisonous animals or demons. Ahriman, together with his demons and all vicious creatures, tried to destroy the good creation, but since Ahura Mazda is the Lord of Knowledge he already knows that the good creation will win. In the mean time each person has to make a choice between both sides. A rock inscription in Behustun near Hamadan reveals how Darius employed the ideology of Lie and Truth for goals of political propaganda - albeit with a little flaw, because he boasts to have defeated many kings, but at the same time claims that the defeated were not kings but impostors:

This is what I did by the favour of Ahura Mazda in one and the same year after that I became king. Nineteen battles I fought; by the favour of Ahura Mazda I smote and took prisoner nine kings. [..] These are the provinces which became rebellious. The Lie made them rebellious, so that they deceived the people. Afterwards Ahura Mazda put them into my hand; as was my desire, so I did to them.

Dualism was in the first place a political premise. ‘Truth’ was no longer an attribute of reality, but became a hallmark for carefully selected ideas and actions.

Fusion and diffusion of Indian and Egyptian imageries

The expansion of the Persian Empire caused new imageries to merge into this world-image. Scholars added Egyptian awareness of historical time and individual judgement after death; they borrowed the notion of resurrection from warring tribes in Palestine and Mesopotamia; and they transformed the Indian concept of the all pervading and embracing substratum behind the cosmic diversity and transformation, into the imagery of the Boundless Light.

The multiplicity and inconsistency resulting from this Asian-African exchange stimulated incessantly provoked new explorations and speculations. The unique historical importance of this encounter is blurred today, because much of it survived only in religious texts and semantics. Eternal hell-fire, its index fossil, has spread from Zoroastrianism to Buddhism, Hinduism, Christianity, Islam… But while coercive religions only repeat rigid formulas, the resulting progress and knowledge tend to hide their inspiration behind always renewed visions and semantics.

Scientific progress (astronomy, history, biology, medicine, algebra)

Persian cosmology was built following hierarchical rules: the seemingly weak stars are the nearest to earth, then follows the moon, and the highest place is taken by the sun459. Above the sun is the Boundless Light, the abode of Ahura Mazda, a region existing forever before gods and creation, and at the same time the light of day we live our usual lives by. The Boundless Light reminds of the oldest Indian Upanishad: ‘darkness is verily death, light immortality’.460

In Egypt earth – Geb – was presented as a valley surrounded by mountains holding up the sky: the most important of those mountains were called Bakhu, from which the sun rises, and Manu, in which the sun sets. Geb was depicted as a man resting with an upright knee and elbow, representing those mountains. The Persians adapted this Egyptian imagery and represented earth with a saucer shape surrounded by mountains, living and growing remnants of an animistic past:

The mountains have grown forth in eighteen years; and mount Alburz ever grew till the completion of eight hundred years; two hundred years up to the star station, two hundred years to the moon station, two hundred years to the sun station, and two hundred years to the Boundless Light. [..] The other mountains have grown out of Alburz, in number 2244 [..] Alburz is around this earth and is connected with the sky. The Terak of Alburz is that through which the stars, moon, and sun pass in, and through it they come back. Hugar the lofty is that from which the water of Aredvivsur leaps down the height of a thousand men. 461

The heavenly bodies were taken to be solid objects: Lucretius wrote that the Babylonians believed the moon was a sphere of which one half was painted with light. Thales made use of Babylonian knowledge to predict the solstice of 585 BCE, and to win his reputation as the first philosopher.462 The movement of the heavenly bodies was explained by turning rings of fire. Anaximander attested to have learned this theory:

From this arose a sphere of flame which fitted close round the air surrounding the earth as the bark round a tree. When this had been torn off and shut up in certain rings, the sun, moon and stars came into existence463.

Dark bodies circulating below the sun and the moon were believed to cause the eclipses, a view later defended by Anaximenes.

Thales, Anaximander and Anaximenes were the first natural philosophers of Greece. They all lived in the Asian city of Miletus, which came under the Persians in the sixth century BCE, during their lifetime.

The biblical prophet Ezekiel also proved to be educated in Babylonian cosmology, but rendered it with an animistic hint:

The appearance of the wheels and their work was like unto the colour of a beryl [..] they were so high that they were dreadful; and their rings were full of eyes round about them four. And when the living creatures went, the wheels went by them. 464

Professor Martin West comments:

We are told where Ezekiel saw these things: near Babylon, in 593 and 592 B.C. There, in Anaximander’s youth, the invisible machinery of heaven revealed itself to an astonished priest. Within half a century the Milesian saw it too, and we may imagine that it struck him with the same awe. 465

Evidently Jewish prophets and Greek philosophers loved to give names to their adversaries, but hated to harm their visionary reputation by revealing their sources.

The Egyptian awareness of historical time stimulated Persian scholars to search palaces and temples, and gather thousands of tablets with lists, myths and legends. The Greek Herodotus, hailed as the father of history in the West, called the Persians his superiors. The Zand-i Vohuman Yasht presents, in the first chapter, the history of the world as a tree with four branches, one of gold, one of silver, one of steel and one of iron. Ahura Mazda – the Lord of Knowledge – explained the meaning of this vision to the prophet Zoroaster. In the second chapter the same list is repeated but three more epochs - of brass, copper and tin – are inserted between silver and steel.

The paradisical golden epoch is when

Ahriman and the demons rush back to darkness, and care for water, fire, plants, and the earth of Spandarmad becomes apparent.

In the epoch of silver, demons are separated from men and the Mazdayan religion rules the whole of Iran. The epoch of steel is marked by the persecution of heretics, and

that which was mixed with iron is the reign of the demons with dishevelled hair of the race of Wrath, when it is the end of the thousandth winter of thy millennium, O Zartosht the Spitaman!466

The golden, silver, bronze and iron reign inspired Hesiod as well as the authors of the Bible. Genesis copied from Zoroastrianism not only the tree of knowledge and paradise, but also invoked a time when giants or gods ‘came in unto the daughters of men’ just as the Persian Ardashir, in the silver epoch, ‘separates the demons from men’. The Babylonians inspired the Bible books Daniel and Revelation. In Daniel the hero explains a dream of King Nebuchadnezzar according to the Zand-i Vohuman yasht:

Thou, O king, [..] art this head of gold. And after thee shall arise another kingdom inferior to thee, and another third kingdom of brass, which shall bear rule over all the earth. And the fourth kingdom shall be strong as iron [..], whereas thou sawest iron mixed with miry clay, they shall mingle themselves with the seed of men. 467

Via the Bible, Mazdayanism influenced Christianity and Islam. Jehovah’s witnesses still go from house to house to inform us that history will soon arrive at the end imagined by Mazdayan priests. The Babylonians inspired numerous world systems, and eventually Hegelian Atlantic ideology.

Babylonian anthropology has striking affinities with the Egyptian elements of personal being. In the Persian teaching humans were composed of five or six parts.

One part, Tanu, is the body, similar to the Egyptian Khat. The Ahum is the vital force of an individual, and reminds of the Egyptian Ren. The Daena is shaped during lifetime as the sum of a person’s thoughts, words and deeds. It is similar to the Ab of the ancient Egyptians, which was located in the heart. The Baodah is translated as knowledge, and reminds of the Egyptian Akh. The Urvan is the image of the deceased. It resembles the Egyptian Ba, but while the Ba is devoured forever if it does not pass Judgement, the Urvan will live forever - either in paradise or in hell. The Urvan has to cross the Bridge of Judgement after death as a flimsy double of the living body. It is the forebear of the personal soul in Christianity and Islam. All humans and all animals have an Urvan except the poisonous ones, because they belong to the demon world of Ahriman.

Finally, no being can exist without its personal Fravashi (or Fravartis in the gathic dialect), an enigmatic spirit of tremendous importance for the history of thought, reminding of the animistic totem and of the Egyptian Ka, and yet very different. It is not entirely accurate to call the Fravashi a composing part of any being: it is rather a totally new type of 'form force', motionless and at once full of power, waiting forever until the time has come to animate and guard its prearranged individual being – or even its Urvan.

Originally the Fravashis were forefathers spirits akin to the Iranian Pitarah or Indian Pitri, and as such are still worshipped by the last remaining Parsi of India. In the New Stone Age, forefathers, if worshipped properly, protected their living offspring, while in many cultures some of them became outstanding legendary heroes:

the good, strong, beneficent Fravashis of the faithful, who form many battalions, girded with weapons, lifting up spears, and full of sheen; who in fearful battles come rushing along where the gallant heroes go and assail the Danus.468

At a certain moment those distant heroes evolved to individualized guardians of life and death. A hymn prayed at the fourth dawn following a person’s death, begs the Fravashis:

come to meet the soul of the blessed one, and make the immortal soul pass over the Bridge of Judgement easily, happily, and fearlessly! [..] And the Fravashis of the righteous will bring to the soul of the blessed those blessed aliments that are made at the time of Maidyo-zarm.469

An Avestan litany of hundreds of incantations shows that Urvans, Daenas, Baodahs, the waters, plants, the sky, fires, heavenly bodies, heroes and even the gods, among which the creator Ahura Mazda himself – show that everything has its individual Fravashis:

I desire to approach with my praise those Fravashis which have existed
from of old, the Fravashis of the houses, and of the villages, of the
communities, and of the provinces, which hold the heaven in its place
apart, and the water, land, and cattle, which hold the children in the
wombs safely enclosed apart so that they do not miscarry.470

The Bundahishn describes the Fravashis as ‘unthinking and unmoving, with intangible bodies’, brought in existence three thousand years before creation. In the Boundless Light they wait silently, and only dash into action one by one, on the moment that this one foetus is conceived, or that one seed springs, or that one cabin is built, for which this one fravashi has been waiting for three thousand years, and will forever remain dedicated: every detail of the whole world, as it was from creation and will be forever, lays waiting as an embryonic existence or prototype, long before it enters reality.471

In the Bundahishn, as rewritten in the ninth century CE, the Fravashis are created by Ahura Mazda, but in the thousand years older Frawardin Yasht, Ahura Mazda has a Fravashi himself. This difference reflects the important divide between a monotheistic universe watched over by a detached supergod, and a universe regulated by natural causes, in which gods have to be explained as all other manifestations. Beings lacking Fravashis are unpredictable; fravashis allow a more scientific approach to beings unpredictable before, iand replaced vague speculation and frank mythology by observation and classification.

Before the fravashis, positive descriptions could not really be trusted, because the subjects must not stick for long to a description recorded here and now. The magical powers of fickle gods and demons, keeping everything in motion, always worked out in unexpected ways. Science needed not reliable theories (theories never are reliable for long), but reliable subjects. Mazdayan scholars crossed this divide and provided a universe filled to the top with tangible beings, and the Fravashis evolved to fixed definitions, to ideas, substance, class, nature, cause.

Conscious of the huge variety of plants, Babylonian scholars pondered over their evolution and the origin of their medicinal powers:

The arch-angel Amerodad, as the vegetation was his own, pounded the plants small, and mixed them up with the water which Tîstar [Sirius] seized, and Tîstar made that water rain down upon the whole earth. On the whole earth plants grew up like hair upon the heads of men. Ten thousand of them grew forth of one special description, for keeping away the ten thousand species of disease which the evil spirit produced for the creatures; and from those ten thousand, the hundred thousand species of plants have grown forth. From that same germ of plants the tree of all germs was given forth, and grew up in the wide-formed ocean, from which the germs of all species of plants ever increased.472

Animals, as well as plants, were grouped in classes (kardak), genera (khadunak) and species (sardak). Some of the divisions are encountered again in Biblical food prescriptions:

First, those suitable for grazing were created there from, those are now kept in the valley; the second created were those of the hills, which are wide-travellers, and habits are not taught to them by hand; the third created were those dwelling in the water. As for the genera, the first genus is that which has the foot cloven in two, and is suitable for grazing; of which a camel larger than a horse is small and new-born. The second genus is ass-footed, of which the swift horse is the largest, and the ass the least. The third genus is that of the five-dividing paw, of which the dog is the largest, and the civet-cat the least. The fourth genus is the flying, of which the griffin of three natures is the largest, and the chaffinch the least. The fifth genus is that of the water, of which the Kar fish is the largest, and the Nemadu the least. These five genera are apportioned out into two hundred and eighty-two species. 473

As everywhere plants were gathered for their medicinal properties, and the legendary plant of youth – the tree of life - provoked the same popular imagination as the philosopher’s stone in Medieval Europe. Vast pharmacopoeias described healing spices, lotions, salves, syrups, suppositories, enemas, even instruments and surgical precepts. As the most advanced medicine thrived at the courts, exchange among civilizations was only natural. When Pharaoh Amenophis II, who lived in the fourteenth century BCE, or the Hittite king Hattusilis III in the thirteenth century BCE, became ill, they had Babylonian doctors at their bedsides – and there is no reason to doubt that the same also happened the other way around.

Exotic animals and plants have always been gifts appreciated by kings, and the scholarship necessary to keep them in good health usually came with accompanying servants. Yet the hanging gardens of Babylon, built by Nebuchadrezzar to please his Median wife who longed for her green homeland, surpassed everything known, and became one of the Seven Wonders of the World. They were stacked on terraces and drenched by artificial rivers, cascades and ponds, in their turn nourished by chain pumps. Beasts of prey were safely housed in the lowest parts of those gardens on a regime of two goats and two slaves daily. It was in such a pit that the biblical Daniel survived to defame science and glorify faith.

In those gardens the composer of the first Book of Kings witnessed the scholars he used to fashion the wise Solomon by means of scientific interest in strange plants and animals. Solomon was indeed presented as a genius of ancient science. In our age of rigorous scientific methods, this hoax has never been criticized:

And he spake of trees, from the cedar tree that is in Lebanon even unto the hyssop that springeth out of the wall: he spake also of beasts, and of fowl, and of creeping things, and of fishes. And there came of all people to hear the Wisdom of Solomon, from all kings of the earth, which had heard of his wisdom.474

In Babylon, much like in China, progress was made in abstract algebra. Babylonian scholars mastered exponents, quadratic equations and compound interest. They also adapted the Egyptian hours and days, and added minutes, months and weeks. Biblical creation started on the first day of the first Babylonian week, and was accomplished at the very first day of rest. Babylonian weeks repeated from there for all times, eventually replacing random temple feasts by weekly Sabbaths.

The world started to evolve towards a world which, literally, could be counted upon.

The repute of Babylonian scholars reached as far as medieval Europe, where they became known as the sometimes revered, sometimes feared class of Magi or Chaldeans. In the seventh century CE, a puzzled Saint Isidore of Seville wrote that the Chaldeans had the power to change human beings into swine, wolves, and owls. One millenary later Thomas Hobbes still insisted that ‘the Gymnosophists of India, the Magi of Persia, and the Priests of Chaldaea and Egypt are counted the most ancient philosophers’. This obvious conclusion was still drawn by most scholars in Hobbes’ days, but completely disappeared from our academies since the advent of racist theories in the nineteenth century CE. Since that time it is unbearable that non-Europeans attributed to the growth of human knowledge. And Europe had no other candidates to play the role of the first mover of knowledge than the Greeks. Yet the Magi influenced Greek thought, stood at the cradle of Jesus Christ, inspired the Italian renaissance and enabled Atlantic Europe.475