The Great Divide

by Peter Watson

  The Pythagoreans also knew that the earth was a sphere and were possibly the first to draw this conclusion, their reasoning based on the outline of the shadow during eclipses of the moon (which they also knew had no light of its own). The varying brightness of Mercury and Venus persuaded Heraclitus (very close to the later Pythagoreans) that they changed their distance from Earth. These orbits added to the complexity of the heavens and confirmed the planets as ‘wanderers’ (the original meaning of the word).

  This quest for what the universe was made of was continued by the two main ‘atomists’, Leucippus of Miletus (fl. 440 BC), and Demokritos of Abdera (fl. 410 BC). They argued that the world consisted of ‘an infinity’ of tiny atoms moving randomly in ‘an infinite void’. These atoms, solid corpuscles too small to be seen, exist in all manner of shapes and it is their ‘motions, collisions, and transient configurations’ that account for the great variety of substances and the different phenomena that we experience. In other words, reality is a lifeless piece of machinery, in which everything that occurs is the outcome of inert, material atoms moving according to their nature. ‘No mind and no divinity intrude into this world . . . There is no room for purpose or freedom.’38

  Anaxagoras of Klazomenai was partially convinced by the atomists. There must be some fundamental particle, he thought: ‘How can hair come from what is not hair, or flesh from what is not flesh?’ But he also felt that none of the familiar forms of matter – hair or flesh, say – was quite pure, that everything was made up of a mixture, which had arisen from the ‘primordial chaos’. He reserved a special place for mind, which for him was a substance: mind could not have arisen from something that was not mind. Mind alone was pure, in the sense that it was not mixed with anything. In 468–467 BC, a huge meteorite fell to earth in the Gallipoli peninsula and this seems to have given him new ideas about the heavens. He proposed that the sun was ‘another such mass of incandescent stone’, ‘larger than the Peloponnese’ and the same went for the stars, which were so far away that we do not feel their heat. He thought that the moon was made of the same material as the earth ‘with plains and rough ground in it’.39

  The arguments of the atomists were strikingly near the mark, as experiments confirmed more than two thousand years later. (As a theory it was, as Schrödinger put it, the most beautiful of all ‘sleeping beauties’.) But, inevitably perhaps, not everyone at the time accepted their ideas. Empedocles of Acragas (fl. 450), a rough contemporary of Leucippus, identified four elements or ‘roots’ (as he called them) of all material things: fire, air, earth and water (introduced in mythological garb as Zeus, Hera, Aidoneus and Nestis). From these four roots, Empedocles wrote, ‘sprang all things that were and are and shall be, trees and men and women, beasts and birds and water-bred fishes, and the long-lived gods too, most mighty in their prerogatives . . . For there are these things alone, and running through one another they assume many a shape.’ But he also thought that material ingredients by themselves could not explain motion and change. He therefore introduced two additional, immaterial principles: love and strife, which ‘induce the four roots to congregate and separate’.40

  The Ionian positivists believed that contingency – chance – played an important role in human affairs, that life may have started in the Nile, where they observed that fresh alluvium was laid down each year and, from its thickness, could have been accumulating for 10,000– 20,000 years; they noticed fossils and understood them for what they were; they grasped that weather had natural causes rather than divine ones; and even that natural catastrophes were exactly that.

  They were not as completely modern as all this makes them sound. Empedocles’ thought was characterized (by E.R. Dodds) as a typically shamanistic amalgam of magic and naturalism, and Greek mythology, in its tradition of the separation of the sky and earth, recalls the very earliest myths discussed in chapter two. But in Heraclitus’s idea that humans have the capacity to increase their understanding and the general Ionian belief that man must live in conformity with nature, this was a significant change in humankind’s mental life.41

  One other important aspect of these various figures: Hesiod was a merchant’s son (so he tells us), Xenophon was an aristocrat, Heraclitus, according to some accounts, was a king who renounced his throne, Cleanthes started life as a boxer. In other words, although many of the Greek philosophers were wealthy men, their world was by no means closed; the hierarchy, as befitted (and reflected) a democracy, was not rigid.

  As ever, we do well not to make more of Ionian positivism than is there. Pythagoras had such an immense reputation that he was credited with many things he may not have been responsible for – even his famous theorem, which may have been the work of later followers. And these first ‘scientists’ have been compared to a ‘flotilla’ of small boats headed in all directions and united only by a fascination for uncharted waters.

  THE ORIGIN OF PHILOSOPHY

  The birth of reflection in Ionia, what some modern scholars call Ionian Positivism, or the Ionian Enlightenment, occurred in a dual form: science and philosophy. Thales, Anaximander and Anaximenes can all be regarded as the earliest philosophers as well as the earliest scientists. Both science and philosophy stemmed from the idea that there was a cosmos that was logical, part of a natural order that could, given time, be understood. Geoffrey Lloyd and Nathan Sivin say that the Greek philosophers invented the very concept of nature ‘to underline their superiority over poets and religious leaders’.42

  Thales and his immediate followers had sought answers to these questions about natural order by observation, but it was Parmenides, born c. 515 BC in Elea (Velia) in southern Italy, then part of Magna Greciae, who first invented a recognisably ‘philosophical’ method, as we would understand that term today. His achievement is difficult to gauge because only about 160 lines of a poem, On Nature, have survived. But he was a great sceptic, in particular about the unity of reality and the method of observation as a way to understand it. Instead, he preferred to work things through by means of raw thought, purely mental processes, what he called noema. In believing that this was a viable alternative to scientific observation, he established a division in mental life that exists to this day.43

  Parmenides became known as a sophist. To begin with, this essentially meant a wise man (sophos), or lover of wisdom (philo-soph), but our modern term, philosopher, conceals the very practical nature of the sophists in ancient Greece. As classicist Michael Grant tells it, sophists were the first form of higher education – in the western world at least – developing into teachers who travelled around giving instruction in return for a fee. Such instruction varied from rhetoric (so that pupils could be articulate in political discussion in the Assembly, a quality much admired in Greece), to mathematics, logic, grammar, politics, and astronomy. Because they travelled around, and had many different pupils, in differing circumstances, the sophists became adept at arguing different points of view, and in time this bred a scepticism about their approach. It wasn’t helped by the sophists’ continued stress on the difference between physis, nature, and nomos, the laws of Greece. (It was in their interests to stress this division because the laws of nature were inflexible, whereas the laws of the land could be modified and improved by educated people – i.e., the very students they taught, and received income from.)

  The most renowned of the Greek sophists was Protagoras of Abdera in Thrace (c. 490/485–after 421/411 BC). His scepticism extended even to the gods. ‘I know nothing about the gods, either that they are or they are not, or what are their shapes.’ Xenophon was also sceptical: he asked why the gods should have human form. On that basis, horses would worship horse gods. He thought there might just as easily be one god as many. Protagoras is probably best remembered, however, for another statement, that ‘the human being is the measure of all things: of things that are, that they are; and things that are not, that they are not.’44

  This is how philosophy started, in particular how the concept of nature became inte
gral to the great changes brought about in Greece during the Axial Age – democracy, science, secularisation. The Greek Axial Age would be political, scientific and philosophical, not religious.45 This is why there are three great philosophers whose names everyone knows: Socrates, Plato and Aristotle.

  ‘MONEYTHEISM’

  As was mentioned earlier, people had begun using ingots of precious metals in exchange for goods as early as the third millennium BC, in Mesopotamia, when uniform weights of gold and silver, known variously as minas, shekels or talents, came in were very useful when large warehouses of goods were being traded.46 But gold remained much too scarce for the average person wanting to sell, say, a basket of wheat, or buy a goatskin of wine. Money proper was invented only once, in Lydia, in what is now Turkey but was then a small state adjacent to Greece, which was the first beneficiary of this revolutionary innovation.

  There is no mention of money in Homer, nor do markets feature as places of importance. Markets did exist – in Mesopotamia, China, Egypt and several other parts of the world – but it was only in Lydia, between 640 and 630 BC, that their kings recognised the need for very small and easily transported ingots ‘worth no more than a few days’ labour or a small part of a farmer’s harvest’. The ingots were of a standard weight and were stamped with an emblem – a lion’s head – that verified their worth, even to illiterates. In doing so, the Lydian kings, in Jack Weatherford’s words, ‘exponentially expanded the possibilities of commercial enterprise’ and transformed the world, opening up fresh dimensions for new segments of the population.47

  The first coins were made of electrum, a naturally occurring mixture of gold and silver, which made redundant the need to weigh the gold or silver each time, something that the less well off couldn’t do because they could rarely afford weighing scales. The opportunities for cheating were also reduced.

  The innovation sparked a trade explosion in Lydia and also saw the introduction of the retail market, where anyone could bring goods they wished to sell. Marketing became so important to the Lydians that Herodotus called them a nation of kapeloi, meaning both ‘merchant’ and something altogether less wholesome. But the advent of money sparked widespread social changes, not least in the status of women who, through their crafts, for example, accumulated their own wealth and were now able to select their own husbands. New services also were introduced as a result of money – the first known brothels were built in ancient Sardis, and gambling was invented.

  Money and markets spread quickly across the Mediterranean but it was the Greeks who profited first and most. ‘With the spread of coins and the Ionian alphabet, a new civilisation arose in the Greek islands and along the adjacent mainland.’ Coins provided a stability to commerce, it was easily stored and transported, and made possible the organisation of society on a much more complex scale than is possible in kinship-based communities, the use of money not requiring the face-to-face interaction and the intense relationships of kin-based societies. Money made possible more social ties but in making them more widespread, faster and more transitory, it weakened traditional patterns.48

  The impact of coined money was political but not only political. In Solon’s reformation of the traditional basis of status, money was instrumental in democratising the political process. More than that though, the vibrant spread of commerce among the Greeks, which this transformation inspired, produced a raft of new temples, civic buildings, academies, stadia and theatres, along with a glorious body of art, philosophy, drama, poetry and science. In parallel, the centre of the classical Greek city moved from the palace or temple to the agora, the marketplace. Wealth generated by commerce stimulated the proliferation of leisure time, so that the elites could expand their civic life in such forms as sport, philosophy, the arts and good food. Then there was the fact that the money system brought with it the need for a new kind of mental discipline – people needed to count and use numbers long before they became literate. Counting and calculating produced a tendency towards the rationalisation of human thought that, says Jack Weatherford, ‘shows in no traditional culture without the use of money’. Thinking became less personalised, he says, and more abstract. The exactitude in the money culture forced a decidedly logical and rational intellectual discipline not needed before.

  A knock-on effect that was no less important was that the marketplaces of the Mediterranean were the focal points for discussing a new kind of religion. The Greek tongue spoken in the agoras from Iberia to Palestine was not the classical Greek of Aristotle, nor yet the ancient Greek of Homer. Instead, it was a ‘pidginised shop Greek’. And this was the language that the followers of Jesus used to spread their ideas. In cities such as Ephesus, Jerusalem, Damascus, Alexandria and Rome, the early Christians wrote down their stories in this market Greek. Originally lampooned as ‘God’s poor Greek’, these writings became the New Testament.

  The combined effects of money and markets, in a process some have termed ‘moneytheism’, went further. Before the Greek commercial system swept the Near Eastern world, each country had its own gods, each different. The near-universal commercial culture, however, opened the way for the rise of a common religion, available equally to all people. ‘Christianity blazed through the cities of the Mediterranean as a totally new and revolutionary concept in religion.’ It was a uniquely urban religion with none of the fertility gods or weather gods of the sun, wind, rain, and moon normally associated with farmers. Christianity ‘was the first religion that sought to leap over the social and cultural divisions among people and unite them in a single world religion’. In doing this, the early Christians were acting in much the same way as merchants were using money to create a universal economy.

  Monotheism, money, the alphabet (and the ‘linearity’ that went with it), plus the concept of ‘nature’ as an entity in itself, separate from humanity . . . none of these phenomena ever emerged in the New World. The trajectory they propelled is continued in chapter twenty-two.

  • 20 •

  SHAMAN-KINGS, WORLD TREES AND VISION SERPENTS

  As we have seen, in chapter 17, in the first millennium BC, in the New World, there were two prominent civilisations: the Olmec in Mesoamerica and the Chavín in South America. Numerically at least, this compared poorly with the civilisations of North Africa, the Mediterranean, Near Eastern, Indian and Chinese civilisations of the Old World, not to mention the several pastoral nomadic cultures. In the next thousand years, however, during the first millennium AD, the New World went some way towards making up this deficit. Between AD 1 and AD 1250, many cultures flourished up and down the Americas.

  The Nazca culture was one of several traditions which preceded and in many ways set the stage for the Incas. Several of the cultures we shall be examining, which dominated the coastal areas and the highlands for many centuries, collapsed in sudden decline as the forces of drought, earthquake and/or El Niño devastated political and economic conditions without warning. This is a pattern we shall see time and again.

  The Nazca comprised a confederation of minor kingdoms that flourished from the Chincha River in Peru, south to the Acari Valley, near the southern border of what is now Peru, and Chile. Nazca populations were relatively small because the rivers of the area were small, without much run-off, but the people responded to frequent drought by building long (500 metre) tunnels to feed aquifers that brought water to specially built storage tanks. In this way, between AD 1 and 750 they developed an elaborate pottery and textile tradition, which combined cotton and alpaca wool. In 2009 Lidio Valdez, of the University of New Mexico at Albuquerque, reported the ‘unprecedented finding’ of dozens of decapitated heads buried inside a carefully located structure at the site of Amato, an early intermediate site in the Acari Valley. Several of the heads were associated with cervical bones showing cut marks, wrists and ankles that were tied together, and ‘parry fractures’ on the skulls, strongly indicating ‘outright violence’ and conflict, that fitted with walled settlements and buffer zones between them.1
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  Above all, however, the Nazca are famous throughout the world for their ‘lines’, great designs on the desert floor that, to an extent, remain a mystery to this day. This part of the desert is covered with a relatively fine layer of sand and small pebbles, which the Nazca were able to clear away to create their lines. Some are scrawny, some are as wide as an airport runway, some run for five miles in dead straight lines whatever the terrain, flat or hilly. Some are triangles, some are zigzags, some are spirals, some make no sense on the ground but when seen from a helicopter reveal themselves as birds, as monkeys, as spiders or plants – there is even a whale. How and why would the Nazca wish to create images that can only be seen properly from the heavens? Were they there for the benefit of the gods in the sky?

  Many archaeologists have tried to understand the lines and their meaning. One theory was put forward by Paul Kosok, originally a professor at Long Island University in New York state, after he had observed, by chance, the sun setting at the exact end of one of the lines near the village of Palpa. This suggested to him that the lines had an astronomical function, an idea that was carefully followed up by his German colleague, Maria Reiche, who had been in Peru working for the German consul. She spent years measuring the alignment of the lines, often over-nighting in the desert among her beloved formations. She concluded that the layout of the lines reproduced ancient constellations of the stars and that their positions on the ground point to areas of celestial activity above the distant horizon. From her researches, she argued that the original Nazca first built models of the great designs, then used lengths of sisal cord to arrange them on the desert floor (this is how they knew what the large figures looked like from above).2 Later researchers did not entirely support Reiche’s work – few alignments could be linked to the state of the heavens at the time the Nazca flourished. It was not until the 1970s that archaeologists discovered drawings on the ground that occurred outside Nazca territory, elsewhere in the Andes, showing animals, humans, or abstract symbols. All these have now been widely studied and have been found to extend over more than 800 miles of terrain, some of which are dead straight for as much as twelve miles. Some radiate from hills, some lead to well-watered areas (and may, therefore, have served as pathways), and many figures were drawn over by later lines, as if they were of only transitory importance. Some are believed to show transformed shamans in the process of acting as intermediaries between the two realms of the Nazca world.3