Thomas Yaeger's Blog, page 6

Books by Thomas Yaeger

The Sacred History of Being (2015).

Formerly argued by classical scholars to have been first discussed by the ancient Greeks in the middle of the first millennium B.C.E., the articulate concept of Being can now be traced as far back as the middle of the second millennium, and the state of Assyria. 

The Greeks themselves had several stories about the origins of philosophy, a discipline which essentially deals with abstractions, including that it originated elsewhere, but that is not...

Books by Thomas Yaeger Free for One Week Only!

All four of my books sold through Smashwords will be free from Christmas day 2019 through 1st of January 2020, during the Smashwords End of Year Sale. 

The catalog goes live at 12:01 am Pacific Time on Wednesday, December 25 and expires 11:59pm on Wednesday, January 1, 2020.

Clicking on the image of each book's cover below will take you through to the Smashwords page for it. Clicking on the title will taken you to a blog page giving further details.

Accessing the books requires a minimal...

Reality and Perception in Plato's Academy

[a letter from June 3, 2019, written to a scholar interested in how reality was understood in the ancient world before the Greeks. There is quite a lot of evidence for that understanding in existence, in philosophical texts from the classical world, and also in literature and art from Greece and elsewhere. The clear commonalities present in ancient iconographic evidence have scarcely been addressed so far - present in Egypt, in Mesopotamia, in ancient Anatolia, in Europe, and beyond. But they...

Around Black Athena (1990), Seminar Two (Tim Cornell)

This is an extract from my notes made at the second seminar in the series ('Representations of Carthage'), held on the 25th January 1990 in the Institute of Archaeology at UCL. There is a full set of notes for the entire seminar series, except for the first, which I missed because I didn't catch sight of the poster in time (no web in those days). The volume is under pressure from other work in progress, but it will eventually arrive. TY.
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The Esoteric Conception of Divinity in the Ancient World (full text)

This article was first published in the Newsletter of the Bibliotheca Philosophica Hermetica in December 2015. In October 2019 the website went down, and hasn't come back up. So I'm posting the full text of the article here in the meantime. It covers both the subject of The Sacred History of Being, and also something of how the book came to be written. In 2018 the article was published as a chapter in Man and the Divine.

TY, October 30, 2019.


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An Appetite for Knowledge

I have argued elsewhere that ideas of Being, of the nature of reality, and the divine, were once understood in terms of conjectures about the reality (or otherwise) of the one and the many. These conjectures follow on from the initial question, which is: why is there something rather than nothing? Plato’s argument, following on from propositions made by Parmenides, who declared that we should look only to the one, and that only the one truly is real, is the most sophisticated of all discussio...

Pythagoreanism, the Divine, and the Nature of Eternity

[I compiled this paper in December 2017 to provide background detail for a speculative discussion of ancient patterns of thought outside Greece, and in particular in connection with thought in Britain before the arrival of the Roman legions. This question is worth looking at since we are told by a number of ancient writers that there were certain resemblances between the ideas and beliefs held by the priests in the British Isles, and those associated with the followers of Pythagoras.

That was...

Pythagoras and Transcendentalism

Abstract: This paper explores the idea that there is a connection between some core Pythagorean mathematical and geometrical concerns, and ideas of divinity and Eternity.  On the basis of a close examination of Pythagorean ideas in the 1stmillennium, for which we have extensive documentation, It is suggested that this connection is a logical one.
Key words: Pythagoras, Philosophy, Religion, Number, Mathematics


1 The Longevity of Ideas
We often underestimate the longevity of patterns of...

Kingship in Ancient Assyria

[This is a chapter from Echoes of Eternity. Of interest to those interested in the origins of the discussion of ethics and morality. Did Socrates initiate interest in these questions? Did Aristotle build his discussion of ethics on ideas in his own head? A close look at the ideas of kingship and divinity in the Near East, in the centuries before classical Greece, suggests otherwise.]


The Excellence of the King
Throughout the texts and inscriptions and iconography we are presented with images of...

Wearable Fictions, Phenomenology, and the Grammar of Human Thought

'Fish Magic' (Paul Klee, 1925)
Some notes on The Shrine in the Sea, which eventually became The Sacred History of Being, written while waiting for a delayed flight to Bristol from Edinburgh, 3rd March 03 (four hour delay in total). Not everything which is scribbled during an airport delay is perfectly coherent by itself, so I've introduced some qualifications and expansions in square brackets, where necessary. There is more scope for writing about Robert Graves' White Goddess, but that is for...