Posts by Eikadistes

Hermarkhos, Philodemos, and Lucretius tease us with their speculations about the characteristics of the gods, and therein set a precedent among Epicureans to wonder about their form...

I think Demetrios of Lakon wrote a book entitled On the Form of the Gods (is that right?)

Even so, I wonder if the best way to think of the gods is primarily as a pure mental impression, (regardless of the corresponding atomoi that left said impressions.) Excuse some of the idealistic implications of the follow image by Alex Grey, but I feel like this brings together a few elements that I think are key to Epicurean gods: mental experiences, usually in dream-states (...drug-induced?), of divine quasi-humans, and the assigning of names to the category of the divine quasi-humans.

Just some more food for thought. Here's (above) an image that depicts (to me) the gods primarily as mental concepts, rather than as physical object to which mental concepts corresponds.

The Society of Friends of Epicurus accepts a "third interpretation" of Epicurean theology, in addition to the alleged (1) Idealist and (2) Realist camps ... which I'll just gloss over for the sake of not bogging us down into a partisan philosophical debate . This third camp is a (3) Non-Theistic interpretation, primarily represented by those of us who are, to be frank, just sort of turned-off by the entire idea of "God" as it is overwhelmingly presented throughout numerous parts of our culture.

Personally, I feel this, but I'm not sure its the best way to express Epicurus' thoughts on piety.

This brings up another point: various Epicureans have presented the argument that a Creator cannot be a god because a Creator must have been bored, or lonely, or in need of other beings prior to creation; such a state is inconsistent with blessedness. That seems to suggest that the Christian deity does not meet the qualifications for being a true god because of its primordial boredom.

Like I said, I tend to think of gods as being advanced animals, especially because it illustrates the ethics of self-improvement, however, I'm not sure that position is consistent with Epicurean theology. If a Creator cannot be a god because it was once needy, can a quasi-animal be a god if it was once a normal animal, subject to the specter of disease and death? God should always have been blessed.

I cannot imagine a being that has always been blessed, unless, through a pure act of chance, yet a chance so specific and rare that a quasi-animal-being with a quasi-biology forms (like the rarity of dumping a huge bag of Scrabble pieces and it creating the entirety of the Lord of the Rings), and this moment of "emaculate conception" (so to speak...) can be described as a sort of [infinity -1], where the blessed quasi-animal formed before any particular time you can apprehend in time. Yet for that being to breathe quasi-air, have functioning quasi-blood, and to have friends seems to require other conditions that make the "emaculate conception" possibility too unlikely to entertain.

That creates quite a conundrum. How can a blessed quasi-animal always have existed?

Or can it not? (And I might be mis-reading the intent of the anti-Creator arguments)

Quote from Julia

Quote from Root304

I find tech integration and most transhuman concepts beyond healing diseases to be pretty disconcerting.

I find them disconcerting, too – but at the same time, I also find them liberating. I wear glasses, know people with artificial sensory implants (for hearing, for sensing electro-magnetic fields, …), artificial joints, vessels and valves, artificially enhanced attention, executive function and memory.

For sure, from my perspective, I imagine the driving force behind any sort of advanced, technological integration should be the curing of disease and the elimination of aging, not just directionless experimenting (usually unethical) for the sake of experimenting.

Quote from Twentier

How do you anticipate the gods that are compatible with Epicurean theology?

• bio-mechanical extensions that have cured disease and prevented aging.

As Philodemus argues in On Death: "And therefore the greatest good has been grasped by the person who has become wise and lived through a certain amount of time. Once his journey has achieved balance and consistency, it would be fitting to prolong it for an unlimited time, if such were possible; but should his life be limited, this will not be the deprivation of what has already been, but [sc. merely] a prevention of its continued presence."

How about compatibility with other traditions' conceptions of God?

I think mostly not:

- Religions that recognize the existence of a cosmic architect (and/or divine providence)

• Incompatible with Abrahamic theology: Judaism, Christianity, Islam, etc.
• Incompatible with Vedic theology: Krishnaism, Shaivism, Smartism, Vaishnavism, etc.
• Incompatible with Indigenous theology: Santería, Shinto, Tengrism, Voodoo, etc.

- Philosophies that promote an eternal soul, immaterial consciousness, or universal mind

• Incompatible with Idealism, Panpsychicism, Subjectivism, and Transcendentalism
• Incompatible with Advaita, Platonism, Shaktism, Stoicism, Vajrayāna, and Yogācāra
• Incompatible with Cartesian Dualism, Yoga, Samkhya, Dvaita Vedanta, Sikhism, and Jainism
• Incompatible with the Āstika schools of Mīmāṃsā, Nyaya, and Vaisheshika

- Traditions that fail to provide any assurance of certainty regarding nature and reality

• Incompatible with Pyrrhonism, Skepticism, and the Nāstika traditions of Ājīvika and Ajñana
• Incompatible with the early Buddhism, Mādhyamaka, and the Socratic Method

- Similar to Charvaka and Yangism in their hedonist ethics and naturalistic physics. But they are atheistic and non-theistic traditions, so they reject any images of God as having validity.

- Somewhat compatible Taoism in terms of spiritual naturalism, and, here, I think we find a mirror in that Taoist deities (in branches that recognize deities) are subject to the supreme nature of the Tao and not rulers of it, just as the Epicurean deities are subject to the forces of nature.

Just some thoughts...

Thank you for the image Kalosyni that is wonderful.

How do you anticipate the gods that are compatible with Epicurean theology?

• I personally imagine a sort of transhumanist depiction of the gods: behold! Human evolution has become re-directed through intentional engineering of bio-mechanical extensions that have cured disease and prevented aging. We live in space stations that are removed from solar radiation and rely upon self-reliant forms of power for energy. Our location in space is deep enough that the expansion of space will forever thicken the walls of our void, and we have everything we need in the closed environment we have created for ourselves as a community of divine friends.

• I also think that "DMT Machine Elves" are compatible candidates for Epicurean deities. I'm not going to spend too much time fleshing out that suggestion ... look it up if you aren't familiar ... just dropping the seed for future reference (I may never revisit).

(Note: constructive criticism and additions to either are invited)

What are your ideas? What is God? (and/or, what is an example of a god or goddess?)

Since knowledge of the divine nature is clearly evident, and universal as far as human animals are concerned, we should be able to ask, "what is your conception of "divine"?" to everyone.

And get a real answer. Like asking "what is your conception of "family" to everyone.

I think I saw that this is purely an automatic, instinctual response to acoustic stimuli:

Beavers start instintincutally damming pathways when they hear running water. If you put a beaver in a suburban house, and run the faucet, it will grab clothes and shoes and toys and dam a hallway.

After all this, and ten years of devoted study, I must say, understanding prolḗpseis is like holding wet soap. It functionally works when you just cup it and apply gently, but when you squeeze it to test its composition, it just slips out of your hand and re-orients itself toward another drain.

Diognes describes prolḗpseis as cog in the wheel of formulating language. Hermarkhos and Philodemos entertain hypotheses that almost make me suspect that a prolḗpseis is a song that we receive on our mental radios from the FM being transmitted from the gods in deep space. And I'm not into that. That frankly sounds oddly mythic, and unnecessarily reliant on metaphor.

I bring up my drug hypotheis with you guys (too) frequently because, honestly ... I'm really just an defacto atheist who thinks religion is really fucking dumb, and I have tried – TRIED, I mean, was raised Methodist, questions God as a pre-teen, dated a Catholic for years and entertained mass, accepted the rituals of Cathoicism, prayed with fraternity at Mosques, worshipped at Buddhist temples, engaged the artifaces of New Age commercialism, dedicated myself to replicating the meditative practices described in Gita and Paramahansa Yogananda's famous book, and re-studied heterodox Christianity with nonjudgmental eyes, and NONE of the provided me with any practice advice, and all of them blinded me to the reality of the genuine religious experience .... until I ate mushrooms. Six grams of psilocybin cubensis will provide any atheist with a fascinating journey through convincing intellectual demonstrations that lead to reasonable religious belief. All natural, all conditioned by chemicals that happened to be released in a young philosopher's brain.

If prolḗpseis are just "common sense" human concepts, like "justice" or "divinity" or "time" then ... fuck it, right? Who care what they really are, or where they came from, or how they work. They simply are, like color. Wavelength measures in nanometers or not, we know what color is because DAMN there is it. Likewise, people talk about the gods, when I drop LSD, I feel downright blissful and holy and oceanic and incorruptible and pure and utterly godike, and I want to know.

Or is this just his response to Plato's belief in innate ideas that precede birth and have a more fundamental reality than death. These are the "idea"-level of human existence, and Epicurus is just trying to contextualize them in mental processes to the best of his linguistic creativity. It this is the case, prolḗpseis isn't technical we just mean "notions" or "ideas" or "concepts" that are on-point when it comes to being reflective of the place, person, objects or process to which they refer.

As far as the gods go, they've been here, they're here, they'll be here ... it's on the cash in my pocket I use to buy weed, it was in my 9th-grade biology class when we talking about Darwin and Mendel, it gets a tax break on every street corner in Central Florida, like ... we can't escape it. They are self-described godly people, who believe ungodlike things. F$%@ 'em.

But back to LSD ... I don't mean to bring it up as an abstract point of show-and-tell or as a fringe theory (like the simulation fantasy that has encapsulate undisplined minds) ...but really, I'm asking my Epicurean friend who accept Epicurean theology: do your guys have experiences in your mind with a humanoid figure that you have seen in very unique dreams? (maybe a new thread Cassius ). I never have, of hundreds of recorded dreams. I have a few figures that I identify as "God", but my personal definition in "what 'God' is" is a "Helper" or a "Guardian", which is, according to Epicurus, is a false conception that comes from culture, not natural impressions.

Fair enough. Even so, I have *never* dreamed of a blissful humanoid. I've seen *some* interviews with people on DMT who describe Machine Elf Faeries that are eerily similar in description to Epicurean detities, but still ... I am constantly fighting the feeling that Epicurus walked about from church feeling re-charged and inspired, and I've just felt guilty and ashamed, and I have, for a deacde now, really struggled to understand this principle for what it means to my life.

I wish we had his letters to Metrodoros about his struggled conception of divinity. Did Metrodoros share similar gripes as do it? Did any other Epicureans say, "look ... BRILLIANT argument to the bozo thesists about their circular reasoning to provide them with a genuine challenge ... but we don't believe in ... like ... okay, so, for real, we just think Apollo is dumb and we eat food and discuss physics and the nature of human desires ... we don't get on our knees, slit a lamb's throat, paint our face with blood, and then assume that this act will somehow reinforce our psycho-social health, that's, ugh, gross, right?" Or if Epicurus really did practice the Dionysian mysteries with regularity, was his god the intoxicating feeling of empathy and warmness in non-alcoholics that was personified as a jolly god?

I really want to flesh this out, because, for me personally, if Epicurean theology isn't consistent, a few other key parts of the philosophy begin to unravel, the more I see it.

In summary, trying to digest the various intersection that prolḗpseis seems to demand between developmental psychology, descriptivist linguistics, the development of religion, the anthropology of spiritual practice, social norms and ethics, and the neurological architecture of psychedelia...

• The experience of "the divine" is universal for hominids (even the ancient ones).
• Ancient hominids received clear insight into "the divine nature" through dreams.
• (They had the benefit of not being confused by institutionalized mythology.)
• (Also, dreams are the clearest and most reliable source of the concept of "divinity")
• The true concept of "divinity" is synonymous with the notion of blissful humanoids.
• The true concept of "divinity" is antinomic with the notion of blissful humanoids.
• We can use this true notion as a criterion to measure allegations of "divinity":
• (a) Identifying a needy creator as "divine" contradicts the meaning of the word "divinity".
• (b) Identifying a happy meta-creature as "divine" is coherent with our concept of "divinity".
• Cults and religions developed from the concept of indestructible, happy humanoids.
• Most cults and religions identify their "divine beings" as being troubled humanoids (see: Homer, Hesiod, Bhagavad Gita 11:32; Gen. 19:24–25; Mark 11:12-25; Surah Ali 'Imran112)
• (In fact, all of the mainstream spiritual traditions have deviated from this universal truth)
• This deviation is harmful to our spiritual health, and a huge source of human misery.
• We should avoid this spiritual harm (the effects of impiety) by practicing genuine piety.
• Genuine piety corresponds with a correct understanding about the true notion of "divinity".
• A pious person should reject the belief in a cosmic architect, an eternal soul, a universal mind, or any other propositions that describe "the divine" as having fluctuating disturbances.
• These beliefs (mystical and supernatural) are sources of fear and uncertainty.
• The Good Life is antithetical to holding beliefs that stimulate fear and uncertainty.
• A clear understanding of piety/theology if fundamental to living a happy life.
• This clear understanding is apprehended through the preconception of "divinity".
• Having accurate knowledge about what the "preconception" of "divinity" is is key.
• Evidently, (as true as the sky is blue) the prólēpsis of divinity = never-ending happiness.
• Any being who is ceaselessly satisfied is a god or goddess.
• A ceaselessly satisfied being would not subject itself with earthquakes and storms (so it would live beyond the atmosphere of a world); it would not suffer the disadvantage of not having an opposable thumb or a lack of speech (so it looks like us); yet unlike humans, it would not suffer disease (so its physical nature must be only superficially resemble ours). It would not trouble itself with loneliness (so it would live among friends); and the divine society would not allow external forces to disturb their history (they are hidden in all ways but thought).
• By nature, we cannot be gods ... but by practicing a righteous ethic, one that is characteristic of their form, and by emulating their models of perfection, we become godlike.
• Through devotion to good habits (those like the gods), we inherit the benefit of their model.

Another intriguing example of prolḗpseis comes from Philodemos' On Piety, where he writes, “For [the] All [pân] […] is thought of, just as Time [khrónos] is defined, as being a naturally formed generic conception [prólepsin]” (Col. 66.3-6). I find this interesting because Philodemos makes a comparison between "the universe", "time" and "the god(s)". For one thing, each of these prólepsin feature instances of an infinity in one way or another: everything is spatially boundless, the universe is temporally endless, and the gods are indestructible. For another thing, each concept is somewhat abstract (due to their not being able to be fully experienced) yet is implied as necessarily real. Case in point, Philodemos records Epicurus as having explained in Book 32 of On Nature that these "naturally formed" impressions are "apprehended with clarity", and yet, Philodemos later admits that "no one furnishes in abundance demonstrations for the existence of gods".

I am struck by the variety of ways in which prolḗpseis is employed:

Sometimes, prolḗpseis seems to be used within the domain of memory, as mental impressions or representations that have been formed from personal experience, sort of like mnemonic scars; sometimes, we express prolḗpseis is as a function of linguistics, as a necessary condition for communication, as a common idea to which a word refers, like how two people with different forms of colorblindness can both share the common idea of a "rainbow", or the fact that people who have lost their ability to detect sounds can still hear their favorite songs in their head. Othertimes, we refer to prolḗpseis as a feature of developmental psychology, where it acts as an intellectual category required for children to develop pattern recognition. Elsewhere, prolḗpseis exists within the domain of dreams, as mental apprehensions, uncensored from the editor that is the ego.

It seems clear why there are various "camps" in terms of "interpretations" of Epicurean theology: the criterion of prolḗpseis, itself, has so many applications: Is the concept of "god" more like "divinity" or "blessedness" (or "justice"), as in, a prototype against which new examples can be judged? As in Star Trek V, where the crew meets a supreme being, but ultimately decides that this being cannot be God because it is willing to inflict pain? Or is the concept of "god" more like "human" or "living being" (or "animal") as in, a sort of "who" or "it" that a human infant could observe and (as pre-verbal infants do) point at with their chubby digits to indicate "That! There! It!" Is there a period in the development of young children prior to receiving their conception of "god"? Or is it conditioned by the very genetics that deal the cards of our neurology?

Here again, I really, REALLY want to consider that Epicurus would have mentioned, at least once (humor me here), that he, himself must have, as a conservative practitioner of Eleusian and Dionysian rituals (which, again, he, himself, seems to have attended with enthusiasm) ingested chemicals that were intended to induce an altered state of consciousness, a state that people throughout millennia have recognized as being exceptionally noteworthy and positively transformation. So, it is ultimately geared toward improving the circumstances of one's life. The experience of certain, psycho-active chemicals can reliably reproduce "the experience of God" when administered to Christians in laboratory conditions (among other faiths). Epicurus and his associates would have been aware that intoxicants were capable of inducing dreams that host godlike characters and fill participants with an overwhelmingly, undeniable sense of bliss.

I would be very surprised if Epicurus did not "see" Zeus at least once during his rituals.

I would be even more surprised if Epicurus (purposefully, it would have to seem) omitted any mention of the private, mental experiences people experience after ingesting entheogens in his writings. It would seem strange for a person in that context to not draw a connection between intoxication, good dreams, the feeling of bliss, the rituals of religion, and discussion about theology. Epicurus seems to have thought that pre-civilized humans developed conceptions about "the gods" (including, I have to assume, a being that would later be called "Zeus") in their dreams, independent of each other. They then developed spoken words they could share with one another to refer back to "that-memorably-strange-recurring-Zeus-experience". After time, they realized that "memory of the Zeus-experience" made them more observant of their own behavior. So, life improved.

As someone who writes every dream I have, and every dream I can recall (and have continued to do so for over 15 years), and as being that same someone who has experimented with psychedelics, may I just say that psychedelics are a much more reliable way to experience anything remotely "religious". Most of my (and probably your) dreams are anywhere from mundane to bizarre to incoherent, whereas your average trip is always memorable and meaningful.

Ultimately, I think what I'm getting at is that a prolḗpsis needs a stimulus. So what was the stimulus? The prolḗpsis of "the gods" must have been stimulated by a powerful agent capable of inducing an exceptional, purely-mental experience, significant enough to re-direct the trajectory of a person's life. So what are our candidates for the stimulation of spirituality? Religious institutions are one, and their forms of indoctrination are powerful, but they aren't always reliable at inducing profound mental experiences. (A lot of religious people just show up at church like they would show up at work or school, as purely a social obligation.) Dreams are another, and can be memorable and inspirational, but, as mentioned, usually just recycle mundane, daily experiences; dreams are only as reliable as showing the image of gods as they are showing the image of unreal monsters. But certain psychedelics are powerful, reliable, and psychologically transformational; "pre-civilized" humans who foraged for food were not choosers (they were opportunistic), so when it came to diet, mushrooms were/are nutritious, ubiquitous, visually-arresting...

I guess what I mean to say is this: we were tripping before we were assigning words to objects, so by the time we developed spoken/written language, the "weird-experience-after-eating-mushrooms" (or walking past a volcanic vent, or eating fermented fruit, or walking past a forest of burning cannabis plants, or eating alkaline barks, or consuming ergot that would have grown on stored grains, or..., etc.) demanded a word to go along with it, and I think that the words we use, like "god", "divine", and "blessed", are in the same spectrum as the words Epicurus meant when he referred to ancient peoples' dreams. I suppose, also ... perhaps, some of the discussion we have about Epicurean theology is taking place in a bubble of the English, Spanish, German, Italian, and Greek-speaking scholarship from societies that are propagandistic and prohibitionary against chemicals that would have been exposed to the human ecosystem for hundreds of thousands of years. To be frank, I think we all overlook the influence the drugs had on early religion (the real kind).

Might have gone off topic there. Thanks for the share, Don!

Quote from Don

it's honestly been awhile since I considered it.

Me, too.

I had once supposed that "ἐπιβολὰς τῆς διανοίας" was a direct synonym for "προλήψεις", but I have since come to see an "προλήψεις" as just one type of "ἐπιβολὰς τῆς διανοίας", some of which are canon (like a raw, mental impressions), and some of which are vain (like astrological predictions).

If that taxonomy is reasonable, then, applied to the divine nature, the true "προλήψεις" are naturally-occuring icons (in dreams) that once inspired ancient hominids to plant the seeds of spirituality that would eventually develop into national cults. Some of the "ἐπιβολὰς τῆς διανοίας" about the divine nature are coherent with the basic nation of a "divine creature", such as the proposition that Hermarkhos and Philodemos seem to insist, that (1) the blessed figures of our natural aspirations correspond with metacosmic waveform creatures whose bodies pump ghostly blood and respirate imagination, or also (2) the coherence of admirably "godlike" human (i.e. Epicurus) who are near-enough to the general notion of the "προλήψεις" of a "god" that the concept becomes present and useful and meaningful in the way that word-making first naturally develops. Likewise, some "ἐπιβολὰς τῆς διανοίας" are vain, like the beliefs that (a) magic genies grants personal favors, or that (b) the divine nature is punishing you by willing Mercury into retrograde, which mysteriously, metaphysically drops your credit score.

Quote from Bryan

Excellent work on your website, Twentier, thank you! The only books I have on Philodemus' Rhetoric are Hubbell's translation (that Cassius shared) and Clive Chandler's work on books 1 & 2, did you use/find any other sources?

Thanks, Bryan! I appreciate your feedback.

I've only used Hubbell's translation as my resource.

I've also transcribed it as HTML:

ΠΕΡΙ ΡΗΤΟΡΙΚΗΣ

SELECTIONS FROM ON RHETORIC BY PHILODEMUS OF GADARA BOOK I “Some sciences depend entirely on natural ability and need but little practice; some accomplish…

twentiers.com

Halfway through Book VII of Philodemus' On Rhetoric, I came across the following, surprising quotation:

"Rhetors prefer to live in a democracy, the worst form of government."

I am well aware of Plato's authoritarian politics ... Philodemus seems to identify "The People" with "a vicious mob".

Granted, this is taken out of context, as are many of Philodemus' fragments.

Still, it makes me wonder more about Philodemus' political positions, particularly his sympathy toward Julius Caesar. He has a lot to say about civic engagement in On Rhetoric.

Quote from Remus

This confirms, once again, that everything sounds better with a posh English accent.

Cellar door

There is an added irony, noting that tattoos in ancient Greece would have been partially reserved for slaves given that Epicurus declares that we "must be the slave of Philosophy" (U199).

Quote from Remus

Your post made me curious about tattoos in Ancient Greece. It seems they were taken as a sign of “Otherness.”

https://greekreporter.com/2023/07/15/tattoos-ancient-greece/

Indeed, ΔΕΡΜΑΤΟΣΤΙΞΙΑ seems to have been reserved as a punitive measure to identify slaves and criminals, both in ancient Greece as well as Persia (according to Herodotus, who records Greek soldiers as preferring death over being tattooed i.e. defeated and captured by the Persians). On the other hand, their geographical neighbors, the Thracians, Scythians, and Celts used the practice as a form of self-expression, as did/do Polynesian peoples, from whom we inherit the word "tattoo."

There are some colorful anecdotes about the battle of Thermopylae: https://www.actasdermo.org/es-dermatostik…578219021002456