Thomas Yaeger's Blog, page 7

The Ka and Totality in Ancient Egypt

This is a speculative essay on the meaning of the Ka in ancient Egypt from May 1988. I'd forgotten that I'd written this, and I'm surprised to find that I'd written on this subject so long ago. The essay is written on the simple premiss that the Egyptians asked themselves the same fundamental questions about the nature of reality that the Greeks did (i.e., 'why is there something rather than nothing?' and 'is reality one, and if it is one, why are there many?' And so on).The most fundamental...

Cosmotheism, Totality, and the Transcendental (Complete)

[This text originally appeared on my blog in four parts, as: 'Philosophical Thought in Greece and Babylonia' I-IV, during the winter of 2018-9. The parts are now stitched together. A fifth part is now underway (December 2019), which will bring the essay to a conclusion]  
  There were many more subjects dealt with in my first book (The Sacred History of Being) than the chapter listing suggested. It was designed to be worth reading, but it isn’t constructed as a through...

Cosmotheism, Totality, and the Transcendental

There were many more subjects dealt with in my first book (The Sacred History of Being) than the chapter listing suggested. It was designed to be worth reading, but it isn’t constructed as a through narrative. It can be read like that, but the structure is actually fugal: echoes of the same ideas come up throughout the text in different guises.
One of these ideas is the significance of what is ’whole’ in ancient thought, and the role it seems to have played in the development of anci...

Abstraction and the Instantiation of Divine things in Mesopotamia

My work The Sacred History of Being is cited in an article by the writer Ben Thomas - "The God Enki and the Ocean of Everywhen" - on his website 'The Strange Continent'' (published August 3, 2017). This is a fascinating article which is well worth checking out - the link to the full article is at the foot of this post. We've been corresponding occasionally over the past few years, mostly about Mesopotamia and Mesopotamian modes of thought. The argument of The Sacred History of...

Dolorosa

Something a bit different. This picture was taken in central Madrid in the summer of 2010. Quite a striking window display. Thanks to Remedios Melero (University of Valencia), who took me on an extensive walking tour.

The music track (14:14 minutes altogether) was written in 2008, and the two were joined on July 15, 2019. Full stereo.

25 per cent discount on books by Thomas Yaeger during July 2019. At Smashwords only.

11th Annual Smashwords 2019 Summer/Winter Sale!
July 1, 2019 - July 31, 2019
All four of my books sold through Smashwords will be  discounted during the month of July, so this is a chance to pick up a bargain! The catalog for the sale goes live at one minute past midnight on July 1 Pacific time, and expires 11:59pm on July 31. 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...

VenusPeter's review of 'The Sacred History of Being'

A review of The Sacred History of Being at WorldCat:
The Sacred History of Being.
by Yaeger, Thomas
eBook : Document

Sometimes scholars do not see what is before their eyes, or they see what they are trained to see. The Sacred History of Being begins with an account of the author becoming aware - over many years - of the limitations of modern scholarship concerning the ancient past. There are so many unexamined assumptions in the relevant disciplines which make it nearly impossible to make sense...

Is the History of Human Thought Upside Down? Writing to an Egyptologist.

I wrote to this particular Egyptologist because I found that Daniel Richard McBride, the author of 'The Egyptian Foundations of Gnosis', had been a postgraduate student of his. McBride's work is truly extraordinary, and approaches the nature of Neoplatonic philosophy in a way no-one ever has before. Or at least since the Neoplatonists themselves, who, in late antiquity, understood ancient religion in both Egypt and Assyria as the product of philosophical thought. Iamblichus, author of the
The...

Writing to an Egyptologist

I wrote to this Egyptologist because I found that Daniel Richard McBride, the author of 'The Egyptian Foundations of Gnosis', had been a postgraduate student of his. McBride's work is truly extraordinary, and approaches the nature of Neoplatonic philosophy in a way no-one ever has before. Or at least since the Neoplatonists themselves, who, in late antiquity, understood ancient religion in both Egypt and Assyria as the product of philosophical thought. Iamblichus, author of the
The Mysteries o...

Plato and Cosmic Mind

I was digging through my archives today, to find a draft paper I wrote some years ago. I found along the way this draft letter, intended for the attention of book publishers. I wrote this on the 10th of June 2012, when the completion of The Sacred History of Being was some way off (the end of 2014). However, this text does describe the final version of the book pretty well, and points to a significant issue in the modern interpretation of what Plato was saying. 
***
To: [as appropriate]
Dea...