Barbara Walker: A grab-bag of wrongs, again

Brother

English "Brother" stemmed from Sanskrit bhratr, "support." [1, article "brother"]

 Brother and bhratr both stem from Proto-Indo-European *bʰréh₂tēr, rather than one from the other. This also signifies that this word is at least as old as the earliest branch's splitting off among the Indo-European languages. भृति - bhRti indeed is Sanskrit and means support, but bhratr is a separate word, भ्रातृ. It would have helped me to verify that if she had used a reasonable transliteration scheme or at least stated somewhere what scheme she uses. 

Worth noticing is that Ancient Greek also had a cognate, φράτηρ, although its meaning had shifted to clansman. However, this should be seen in contrast to Walker's more specific claims. The same article starts out with the following:

The Greek word for brother was adelphos, "one from the same womb," derived from the matrilineal family when only female parenthood was recognized. 

[1, article "brother"]

If adelphos was old enough to go back to such times, we would expect it to appear in some other Indo-European branch as well, which it does not. Even the groups most closely related to Greek - Armenian, as far as we can tell - has its word for brother derive from *bʰréh₂tēr.

Walker, throughout her work, maintains a view of history wherein patriarchy entered the world with Brahmanism which through its offshoots Judaism, Christianity, Buddhism and Islam suppressed matriarchal traditions everywhere. I think it is safe to assume her assumption that brother stems from India is a consequence of her belief that Brahmanism is the source of patriarchy, whereas the Greeks in this case somehow retained the more original word. No, it is unlikely the word 'brother' and its cognates have spread from India in order to cover up a matrilineal view of brotherhood. She does not state this outright, but considering the great obsession the entire encyclopedia showcases with Brahmanism being an important culprit in suppression of the matriarchy even outside of India - and positing that any number of PIE words are really of sanskrit origin, I find this a reasonable attempt at parsing her intentions.

Horseshoe

[...] 

Greeks assigned the yonic shape to the last letter of their sacred alphabet, Omega, literally, "Great Om," the Word of Creation beginning the next cycle of becoming. The implication of the horseshoe symbol was that, having entered the yonic Door at the end of life (Omega), man would be reborn as a new child (Alpha) through the same Door. [1, article "Horseshoe"]

Fascinatingly enough, this alphabet was not holy enough to prevent additional letters being added beyond omega, nor was it planned from the beginning to contain omega as its final letter: omega is not part of the original greek alphabet, but was added due to the appearance - through sound changes - of a distinction between long and short o. The etymology she gives - great om - also is false, as 'great O' is more honest. Again, Walker keeps trying to inflate the role of Hindu concepts in Indo-European culture.

Houri

 Persian-Arabian heavenly nymph, sexual angel, or temple prostitute; cognate with the Greek hora, Babylonian harine, Semitic harlot, or "whore." Houris were dancing "Ladies of the Hour" who kept time in heaven and tended the star-souls. [1, article "Houri"]

"Semitic" harlot? I guess there is a typo or something there, as harlot is not a semitic word. Besides, "whore" stems from Proto-Indo-European *karo, whereas English hour and Greek hora is from proto-indo-european *yer, *yor (year, season), the English being a loan from Greek (ὥρα). I've been trying to find harine in relevant dictionaries but been unable to do locate it, Google books gives short snippets from relevant literature indicating entire different meanings - indicating that probably, Walker has relied on unreliable sources again.

[1] Barbara Walker, Woman's Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets

On Evolutionary Models in Religious History

In one of the earliest posts on this blog, I mentioned the model common in 19th and early 20th century academic study of religion - a kind of naive evolutionary model.

Originally, religions started out similar to those of the most 'primitive' peoples, after which they evolved into increasingly superior forms of religion: polytheism, henotheism, legalist monotheism, etc etc. Oftentimes, the hierarchy was pretty obviously something along the lines of primitive peoples → early civilized peoples ( → hindus?) → greeks → jews → Christians, and sometimes even → protestants. (I would genuinely not be surprised if some early 20th century scholar even had → anglicans or → lutherans in there as a final step, although not explicitly by that name, I would expect them to have used obfuscating terminology such as  "national liturgical monotheism with a trinity", so as to avoid being too obvious about what they were trying to go for, and some bogus justification for why having the king as the head of the church is superior to either the pope or no head of the church at all.)

Darwin did us a great favor, but evolution was not well understood by those who adopted it as a model either in or outside of biology for about a century. Most seem to have been convinced that evolution is a progress towards objectively superior and that evolution explains the appearance of more intelligent species, more powerful societies, better races, better religions, etc. They understood fitter as objectively and unquestionably superior. A great testament to how good a model evolution is, is that even though most who worked with it were misinterpreting it, they still got a lot of things right. However, these bad understandings of it also had some very significant unfortunate consequences.

The sources Acharya relies on are not sources that adhere to the mistaken view - that much must be granted. However, the intellectual baseline against which they work was that view, and their reaction is generally not the cleverest. If you work under the assumption that a mistaken view must be countered by the exact opposite view (but retain the same conceptual apparatus - with ideas like 'superior', etc), you will have a bad time.

Robert Tulip, at Murdock's forum freethoughtnation, responded to my mentioning the flaws of the outdated model thus:

Miekko notes that conventional Christianity in the 19th century argued for social evolution of religion from animism up to monotheism. But Miekko, perhaps because his expertise is in computer science rather than comparative mythology, appears oblivious to the fact that the authors Acharya quotes, especially Massey, argue strongly against this conventional evolutionary model of religious culture, and in fact see Christianity as a degradation from an earlier higher culture. So Meikko’s stated reason to ignore Acharya’s use of older scholarship is completely wrong and irrelevant. This sort of ad hominem is just comical - ‘don’t read Massey because he lived at a time when other people believed dogmatic errors.’[1] 

Massey would have been revolutionary had he realized there's a better option than just reversing the idea of progressive improvement on some absolute scale. Yes, criticizing the prevailing model at the time was justified - in fact, most evolutionary models of the time really suffered from intellectual shortcomings of the time. However, one model being wrong does not make every alternative view right!

I will attempt to describe a more modern view of evolution - where a population of organisms adapts the cards it has been dealt in response to its environment (or changes in the environment) through natural selection. I will then describe analogously a similar model for religions. This model is a great improvement over both Massey's and his opponents - neither can we or do we need to posit that Christianity is superior to Judaism, which in turn is superior to paganism, nor do we need to posit that Judaism, Christianity and Hinduism are degenerate forms of a superior ancient religion. The conclusion will be that inferiority or superiority are not very useful concepts (I will grant that some very remarkable cases do justify being considered inferior, such as suicide cults), but that religions over times have changed due to environmental (including the memetic/intellectual, political and natural environments) pressures, and adapted to fill their niches. Religions have different pressures on them than biological life does: misunderstanding and reinterpretation are two obvious ways for mutation to be introduced, ...

Great minds of the 19th and early 20th century thought and even to this day some idiots think that evolution provides a reasonable way of classifying, say, humans into groups by comparing how 'primitive' or 'advanced' we are. There are also many who believe mankind is on the verge of some 'evolutionary step' - and this is based on the dumb notion that evolution somehow is predetermined or that it has some intended end-point and that this somehow happens in huge leaps - that there is an objectively measurable path from inferior to superior, and that all organisms either ascend this scale or flunk out and remain at their inferior step on the ladder.

Evolution has one main effect over time: favoring, over time, traits that benefit the reproduction and survival of populations in the environment they finds themselves in. This is, of course, a kind of improvement, but the improvement is not an improvement towards some kind of objectively universally superior class, but towards just being improving chances of survival and reproduction in a given environment.

Before trying to establish an evolutionary model with regard to religions, let us consider what an 'ultimately fit life form' would be, in terms of evolutionary fitness:

• it would live and procreate with a minimal waste of resources
• it would be simple - the fewer the involved components, the less the risk of malfunction during operation, or of mistaken copies in reproduction
• it would procreate quicker than any other possible set of molecules
• when procreating, it would create accurate reproductions of itself
• it would have these properties in all circumstances where life can exist at all
• it would not easily be killed by any processes

Nothing guarantees that all these can even be achieved by one single life-form, and some may actually be impossible to combine with others - I find speed of reproduction and precision unlikely to have any really good combinations, likewise

Now, let us consider religions: religions are an artefact of human intellectual life. As such, we first need to think about the manners in which a religion is transmitted from one adherent or generation of adherents to the next, as well as the implications this system has.

Humans themselves are results of biological evolution, which gave rise to neural networks in our bodies (the brain). This thing is an embodiment of a relatively generalizeable pattern-matching algorithm (and therefore also a kind of memory storage thing), and it is fairly useful to have one. Alas, neural networks are not particularly good at distinguishing coincidences from correlations. This means a non-pattern may be identified as a bona-fide pattern. Another thing that can happen is that a complicated pattern is not recognized as one at all. 

Further, evolution created language, which is a way for one neural network to exchange relatively complicated information with others, in a somewhat insecure manner:

The protocol by which the information is transferred is not perfect, it is not fixed, it takes crazy effort to ensure that both parties in an act of communication have the exact same implementation of the protocol, there is no way of being entirely sure that what is being communicated is actually received, parsed or stored perfectly in the receiving brain anyway, mostly because the channel over which the information is transferred as well as the organ that stores it are noisy, complicated things, and the basic structure of neural networks has some flaws in the first place.

Humans started telling stories and behaving in ritualized manners. The stories that were easy to pass around and remember got reproduced, as were the stories that inspired people to retell them often enough for them to be remembered. The stories that they felt were boring or not awe-inspiring enough or irrelevant or had some other flaw working against them did not reproduce as efficiently. The rituals probably went through a similar evolution, and soon enough, they also got a symbiotic relationship - this is something Dawkins and Harris have explained in their books fairly convincingly.

Dawkins seems to think religion mainly is a memetic parasite - a symbiosis of memes (a symmemesis?) that uses us as a host. I would suggest religion often actually forms a symbiosis with us (a symbiomemesis?) - although it may be difficult to measure whether some behavior or belief is beneficial or not, unless the results are very obvious. The results may also be different under different circumstances - a belief or behavior that was beneficial in the American midwest 2000 years ago may not have been very beneficial in Rome at the same time.

Not only stories and rituals evolve like this, though, but also rules. Rules may have an even greater impact on life - a rule that strengthens a community or increases the number of offspring, improves chances of offspring survival, reduces likelihood of cultural assimilation, etc, etc is more likely to survive than one that doesn't - and a community that has such a rule is more likely to prosper or at least survive as a distinct community than one without. Here we are not talking about which community is superior, but which ones are likely to survive, or even prosper in some environment. Of course, the effects of a rule may not be immediately obvious, and in some of the more complicated rule-complexes - say, orthodox Judaism - the effects of the hundreds of rules probably are difficult to assess. Some such rule systems also may not work in isolation - Judaism as the rabbis devised it has a lot of things that are downright meaningless unless there are other religions and ethnicities around.

I will present a list of religious rules in orthodox Judaism that may have contributed to Judaism surviving quite a long time in adverse conditions:

•  Sabbath vs. Eruv: increases the likelihood that observant Jews live close together

The eruv is a legal fiction, whereby the idea of domain is changed under sabbath. In a place without an eruv, carrying non-clothing articles over the borders of your own premises is not permitted, hence bringing a book or anything to the synagogue, for instance, is forbidden. In a place with an eruv, life on the sabbath is much easier. Observant orthodox Jews prefer living in places with eruvs over places without it for this reason.

•  Kosher: shechita makes it likely that observant Jews will move close to other observant Jews, and also channels some of the money of the community back into the community, and creates a professional class of kosher butchers, creating employment in the community.
•  the rules of tefillin, mezuzot, torah scrolls, etc: channels money back into the community, also creates a professional class of scribes that preserve certain traditions and also are likely to invest time and effort into some religious-intellectual pursuits, creating some religion-oriented employment in the community.

Tefillin are small boxes containing small portions of Torah written in adherence to strict scribal rules, and used in daily prayer. The mezuzah (literally 'door-post') is a small portion of Torah written in adherence to similar rules, that is affixed to the door post, often in an ornamental container. Every synagogue should have Torah scrolls to use in Sabbath and Wednesday services. Scribal work on one takes quite some time. Further, scribes often produce the ketubah, the often ornamental and beautiful marriage contract a couple are supposed to sign when getting married. Further, the mezuzah and tefillin parchments need to be maintained - if letters start flaking off they may have to be rewritten or the entire parchment replaced, the tefillin boxes may have to be repaired, the ketubah may need similar maintenance, etc. Similar maintenance applies to the Torah scrolls - whose quality is continually investigated during the weekly readings of the Torah portions.

•  The huge ruleset in general and the perception that the rules are important create some employment in the community, although it may be seen in terms of charity to students of torah rather than as employment per se.

There are several traditions of giving charity to poor students of Torah, and such. Although not employment as such, it probably has given some poor Jewish men at times the opportunity to attain enough of an education to achieve higher social standing in the Jewish community, through intellectual pursuits. Employment as rabbis may even have been possible for some of them.

•  payos, kippos, clothing styles, various rules that may set Jews slightly at odds with surrounding non-Jews: creates a slight us-vs-them feeling on both sides of the dividing line, which increases the likelihood of endogamy and other behavioral patterns that strengthen the likelihood for community survival. On the other hand, it increases the likelihood for the community to come to a violent end - but most of the time, the benefits have been greater than the risks. 

•  sabbath: at times probably has reduced the chances for observant jews of obtaining employment outside of the community, thus knitting the community tighter by increasing the chance that Jewish employers have had potential employees from their own community, and that Jewish seakers of employment have found Jewish employers.

Religions are the result of their context - the external and internal challenges that the community meets, the solutions that the previous challenges have caused to emerge (which may become new internal challenges!), and so on. 

Let us go back to the thought experiment about a perfect life form - as the thought experiment goes on. The perfect religion, of course, would have the following properties:

• it would be true
• it would procreate efficiently (easy to convince new adherents to join, easy to learn, increases likelihood for offspring (who easily can be indoctrinated with what happens, in this case, to be true)
• it would convince people who previously held different opinions
• it would resist mutation (difficult to misunderstand, applicable in sufficiently diverse conditions that the environment will not cause central parts of it to have to change - if your religion considers the eating of a specific kind of herb important, tough titties if the herb goes extinct or you live somewhere the herb cannot grow or your whole ethnicity that just converted to the religion are lethally allergic to it, any such problem will cause some mutation. )

It seems unlikely such a religion can exist. But religions can satisfy some of these demands. Let's first throw out the truth-requirement. If the religion per se permits wide variation, resisting mutation may not be a requirement at all - most mutations are likely to hit on already occurring versions. Mutation may also adjust how other mutations are counteracted or embraced. Whether evangelism is a necessary feature varies: most religions that do not evangelize do remain small (Judaism, Zoroastrianism, Druze, Sikhism etc), some religions that do evangelize are not very good at it, some religions that do not proselytize much are large - Hinduism.

However, all religions are somewhat accidental compilations of behavior-patterns, doctrines, and ideas. So were the religions of the far past, as are the religions of the present. The belief that some religion of the far past was superior to later religions is superfluous - probably, throughout time, all religions have been results of beliefs and behaviors adapting to circumstances, as well as resulting from circumstances, and it is very arrogant and dumb to think that we can establish which of these religions was the best at coping with its circumstances.

What really forces us to commit Massey's model to the garbage heap, though, is the lack of genuine evidence for such a 'superior proto-religion'. If all we have in favour of a hypothesis is untenable conjecture in combination with a mistaken model, Occam's razor barely needs be invoked.

[1] Robert Tulip, forum post at freethoughtnation.com, http://freethoughtnation.com/forums/viewtopic.php?p=26962#p26962 retrieved at April 13th, 2013.

Linguistics: Language Complexity and its origins

I previously pointed out some notional difficulties with linguistic complexity - difficulties in exhaustively measuring it, difficulties in defining it, etc. Nevertheless, it is undeniable that languages do have something we reasonably can call 'complexity' - and that this complexity appears on several levels. How does this complexity come about?

We first need to look at the context in which a language normally exists: the brain and the speech community.  The brain, obviously, is what produces linguistic utterances - and other brains parse these utterances. I think we can meaningfully say that grammar (as well as lexicon, as well as stylistics, as well as ...) all boil down to one thing: patterns. 

Side-track 1: Neural networks

Neural networks, as it happens, are pretty good at some things. Among them is pattern recognition. And since patterns are a relevant thing, we should probably start with them. Neural networks are a well-known and researched general architecture for pattern recognition. Our brains are, as it happens, instances of neural networks - probably the most complex known examples, in fact.

Most readers probably have not read a lot about them, so I figure a short introduction is called for. I like to go for the excessively abstract when describing things - along the styles of "imagine an arbitrary multiset". I realize this does not work for most readers, so I will try to avoid it.

Imagine a simple sensory organ (oh man, there I go), where there are several sensors that pass on a signal if they are triggered. Different sensors react to different types of stimuli, or stimuli of similar kinds of different qualities, or even the same kind of stimuli - but by virtue of being at different locations they still convey different information onward. Each sensor, when the right stimuli is present, sends a signal. Let us assume the signal is binary - yes or no.

Let us further imagine that there are a bunch of things - we call them nodes - that receive these signals and sometimes also pass them on, along directed vertices (that is, lines from one node to another). These form a huge network, where each node can send (henceforth fire) to other nodes, and likewise receive from other nodes. The node cannot, though, decide which nodes to fire to - firing always transmits on all outwards vertices.

Every vertex is ascribed a weight. The weights of all simultaneously firing vertices reaching a node is added up (or multiplied or had some function applied to it), and if the sum (or product) exceeds some treshold, the receiving node also fires.

Now, this would be a static neural network - whenever the source sends a given signal, exactly the same things transpire down the line in the network. (Well, unless there is some loop where signals cause some feedback - but we could consider those loops a type of source as well, so we ignore those or consider them a special case, for now at least. The brain does have loops, though.)

So, we add this mechanism: a firing node increases the weight of whichever incoming vertex also carried a firing signal, and decreases the weight of whichever incoming vertices did not simultaneously fire. Essentially, if node A fires after it received signals along vertices a,b and d, from then on, it will listen more closely to those vertices.

The exact function by which the weight is changed affects the neural network's properties - most texts I have read on this uses sigmoid functions of varying steepness. In the brain, the function probably also varies with age, diet, part of day, what part of the brain it is happening in, etc. I am not very knowledgeable about the biological mechanisms involved, but I would figure there are various biochemical components involved. (Complications can be added, but these do not alter the fundamental computational power of the network - only changing details of the implementation. Certainly such changes affect efficiency on specific problems, but a problem-agnostic architecture should preferably be as simple as possible. An example of such a complication could be adjusting downwards the weight of firing vertices when the recipient node is not triggered. Another architecture has a second kind of vertex too - a blocking vertex. A firing signal sent down a blocking vertex prevents the recipient node from firing.)

Now, the cleverness of the system described above may not be obvious at first sight - and I know I am not good at explaining these things.

The system above only observes whether signals cooccur often enough to exceed some treshold when added up. If they do, their assigned weights are increased. Some things will coöccur by coincidence, whereas some things will coöccur by correlation. E.g. 'twinkle twinkle little' tends to correlate with 'star', because, quite obviously, these are the lyrics of a somewhat popular lullaby. However, the neural network can also be unlucky - and have some non-correlating things often appear in the input data, by coincidence. "Locally", the nodes do not have the power to reason as to whether two signals they have seen coöccuring are coincidences or genuine correlations.

There is no flawless approach to weeding out coincidences from correlations. Good updating functions, however, may help a bit. A function that increases the value of incoming vertices drastically will obviously start considering many coincidences as though they were bona fide patterns; on the other hand, a function that increases the value very conservatively may not even accept genuine correlations until they have occurred very often - and if the event is infrequent, the network may never adjust itself into recognizing it as a pattern. Meanwhile, the way vertices are decreased is also important - a false positive that only is recognized by the neural network for a short while is not a problem in the long run; if the weight of vertices that do not co-fire - or even worse, incoming vertices that fire when the target node does not - are adjusted down quickly, this probably will remove false positives, but it may also remove genuine positives.

Details in how the senses work are somewhat unnecessary - and often, the way we now consciously think of some things - language, things according to what class we assign them to (cup, glass, pitcher, beaker, chalice, ... and the various objects that may be in more than one of these classes), etc, there has often already been a bunch of layers of neurons acting on it. When you hear a word, first it passes through several layers of neural networks - one parses pitch content, another parses relative pitch contour, another parses and classifies the acoustic events as phonemes, another parses and classifies these phonemes as morphemes, and does guesswork that corrects possible mishearings, another parses and tries to reconstruct the syntactic structure that generated the sentence in another mind.

Each of these can gainfully be described as pattern recognition: recognizing speech sounds requires recognizing sounds with some vague similarity as far as their acoustics go, as well as having recognized which kinds of variations in these patterns are to be expected. Recognizing a word is recognizing a pattern of sounds; error-correction recognizes various other information as indicating that maybe this other word (or even maybe it's this word, which at least is a word unlike the audio information that actually entered the process) is the one heard, as these words and extralinguistic facts - things we have seen or know by other means - tend to pattern together.

The unit of recognition is the whole pattern, not the parts of the pattern - if pieces are amiss or wrong, if the pattern is recognized we are likely to recognize the whole pattern, rather than the mistaken details in it. And probably, some neuron activity may contribute to another neuron that also gets already processed signals stemming from the same sources, so there is a fair share of things, ultimately, that complicate the matter.

However, what "a whole pattern" is depends on the size of the "circuitry" we are discussing - when you hear someone say something, there are parts of your brain that react to patterns in the intonation, there are parts that react to the acoustics of really short samples, there are parts that react to the acoustics of a set of the samples (and recognize that yeah, this is Eric's voice), there are parts that react to the speech sounds (this is a d, this is an ɪ, this is an s, this is some noise I couldn't recognize, this is an z, ...), there are parts that react to the series of speech sounds (this is dɪs ?z, and because this pattern is similar enough to ðɪs ɪz it will by fortunate accident be identified as this is), there are parts that react to the words in the previously identified sentences, and that parse the grammar. This, in turn, also interacts with other things stored in the neural network, such as things the listener knows about the speaker that may affect what he is saying at the moment, and so on - of course depending on whether the relevant parts of the neural network have been forming connections between them and so on.

I do acknowledge that the above bit does not explain how and why a neural network also produces linguistic content. A longer essay on mirror neurons, and on the interactions of different other parts of the brain, and the evolutionary pressures that have caused those parts of the brain to trigger certain things would be needed to explain why neural networks also have behaviors, instead of just identifying a pattern and sending out a positive or negative conclusion to a final node.

It is worth noting that linguistics is split on . Chomskyists hold that the neurons of the brain come, to some extent, preprogrammed. This means that it is easy for a human to learn language, because there are already some basic patterns embedded in our brains - all we need to do is know which ways these patterns are implemented. One such pattern is supposedly the object, i.e. verbs often can have an argument that is, in some sense, a primary complement. Objects but not subjects being universal could point to objects being such an embedded notion. (I have seen other sources maintain that only subjects are universal, so do not quote me on either of these.)

However, I will not present any arguments in favor of whether such a language organ is present in the brain, or the brain more generally just happens to enable language without a portion devoted to the purpose, but I will admit that I do find the Chomskyite school on the topic to be more convincing. Linguists do not seem often to explicitly talk about neural models of language - however, this is mostly the result of the analysis being a bit more abstract and more general models of computation suffice. Ultimately, detailed analysis of neural networks is cumbersome, and this may be why their study is not common in linguistics departments. They do have applications in computational linguistics, though.

Side-track 2: The speech community

A language without a speech community is a dead language. The speech community consists of the speakers of some language. For most of the history of mankind, all actual linguistic context has been rather fresh off another neural network.

This means what one should look at is the effect of having a lot of neural networks - all with slightly unique architecture - the neurons are probably not perfectly identical in the first place, the information that has entered the network differs, etc. It should be obvious different individual networks will have identified different patterns - as well as having different false positives as well.

However, as the same patterns that are used to recognize language also are used to produce language, these patterns will be present in the linguistic data that we are exposed to throughout our lives. Thus, there are definite patterns in the language we hear - simply because these patterns appear from other pattern-matching neural architectures.

As previously stated, it is somewhat likely different individuals' have slightly different setups in their brain. Thus, some patterns that exist in the population may not exist in other members of the population. Meanwhile, some may have identified the things differently.

Consider, for instance, the development of the word beads. To what extent the meaning shift that occurred was the result of intentional metaphor or not, it is quite clear at one point in the history of English, nearly everyone understood bead as referring to prayer, whereas at one later point, nearly everyone understood it as referring to small, round solid objects. Over time, a mistaken pattern got so popular, it replaced a previous one. Identifying what referent a word had was reinterpreted. Those who counted their prayers so often were counting them by counting a kind of round solid object, that observers took the word to signify the round solid objects, because of a rather obvious coöccurence.

Neural networks explain both how grammar is passed down the generations, and how grammar changes as it is parsed slightly differently down the lines. How do accidental patterns create grammar though?

If a certain tendency for collocation has appeared - some words or morphemes tend to occur in sequence or near each other under certain circumstances - this easily is understood as expressing circumstances along those lines. If others pick up the pattern, this grammaticalizes, and suddenly there is grammar. All grammar in all languages probably originate with this phenomenon, but later, influence between languages also has added some to the mix.

Of course, some individuals may not have grammaticalized the same patterns, and we do find some variation in how subcommunities of a speech community - and even individual speakers - understand and use constructions. Many dismiss this as speaking sloppily or being ignorant, but a lot of neural network effort has gone into generalizing other underlying patterns. Can we really say one generalization is better than another? Which one is better - one that is more consistent with other patterns in the language? One that is more elegant? One that is more parsimonious? Turns out the standard language sometimes expects a more parsimonious pattern, and sometimes a less parsimonious pattern (see, e.g. begs the question, where the standard language expects a very unnatural and often not very obvious interpretation!).

Ultimately, a population of neural networks exchanging messages in a flexible protocol which adjusts for the properties of both the neural network and the medium over which the signal is passed (audio through air or text on various materials or morse beeps over electric lines or so on) is a sufficient explanation for how grammar appears. The neural networks identify patterns - even unintentional patterns- and generalize them. Sometimes, the identification goes wrong. If many speakers do this misidentification, it is likely the entire language changes with them - in reality, we should probably think of any specific language as some kind of average of how the population parses and generates the language.

Further, lots of grammar ensures some grade of redundancy in the language - and this is useful to ensure that the language has some persistance over a noisy channel, as the world does happen to be such a noisy channel. Some grammar - verb conjugations, case agreement, noun gender, etc, probably is the result of elements being repeated that can help guess the intended meaning even if noise happens to eat some important syllables; if there's fifteen words in the language that begin with ka-, and you don't hear the rest of the word, but some other word gives away that the word also is of, say, neuter gender, it is likely that the neural network can exclude many candidate words if the context otherwise wasn't enough to exclude all but one.

We do, in fact, mishear a lot more than we think, and our brains use cues along these lines to reconstruct the data. In a language without redundancy, the amount of times people in our surroundings would keep going "what?", "excuse me, what'd you say", would probably cause us to repeat poignant information that helps this - hence, e.g. the widespread use of double negation throughout languages in the world. If such repetition gets turned into a pattern, and this pattern is worn down by sound change, it easily is turned into regular morphology. Other reasons probably also underlies the appearance of grammar, though, such as the Chomskyan notion of part of the brain constituting a language organ with certain pre-wired settings conductive to learning language.

The Christ Conspiracy: Chapter 10, pt 5

A nice thing about using 19th century sources if your intent is to make it difficult for readers to trace your sources, is that they often lack the textual apparatus we take for granted these days that help looking things up. I am really thankful some of these texts now exist online in searchable electronic form.

Murdock goes on, making rather unsubstantiated claims about the content of the Bible:

 As noted, by the time of reformer king Josiah, the kings of Judah reportedly erred terribly when they established the worship of the heavens, even though their predecessors were applauded for doing the same:

And he deposed the idolatrous priests whom the kings of Judah had ordained to burn incense in the high places at the cities of Judah and round about Jerusalem; those also who burned incense to Baal, to the sun, and the moon, and the constellations, and all the host of heavens. (2 Kings 23:5)

 [1, p. 137]

I do challenge Murdock to inform us where these predecessors were applauded for doing so. I seem to recall both the deuteronomist historiographer and Chronicles being pretty endless lists of kings doing what was evil in the sight of the LORD, with the occasional exceptions who still failed to entirely satisfy the demands. Among these evils are generally mentioned the sacrifices at the high places - a designation used for cultic places on hilltops. 

It is evident that there are a number of characters or factions in the OT depicting themselves as "the Lord," since in one book, the heavens are to be praised as creations of the Almighty himself, but, in another, to do so is considered idolatrous. 
[1, p. 137]

Here it is worth noting - as I have pointed out in previous posts, that she provides no explicit examples of exhortations to praise the heavens. Rather, the praise - in the biblical versions of these texts - is directed at God, and the heavens are rather provided as examples of his power. Certainly these texts may be adaptations of earlier texts with explicit sun worship. The fact that the sun worship has been removed from them does tell us something about the authors, though, and that is quite explicitly that they do not approve of sun worship.

Murdock goes on interpreting a number of texts from the Old Testament to demonstrate the presence of astrotheology. These examples include Ezekiel, Jacob's sons, Jacob's ladder, Moses and the tabernacle, Joshua, Esther, king Ahaz and Daniel. Her reasoning repeatedly is based on flawed logic, and at times even on pretty clear fabrications. I will point out a sample of flaws below:

BIBLICAL DIVINERS AND ASTROLOGERS 

In addition to these examples of astrology in the Bible can be found a number of references to esteemed biblical characters using the "arts of divination" to their and their Lord's benefit. Naturally, where characters are favored by biblical writers, these astrological and magical arts are perfectly good, but when used by those not favored they are "evil." Regardless of this prejudice, there is no doubt that "good" biblical characters practiced the magical arts. In fact, in the earliest parts of the Bible, divination is praised as a way to commune with God or divine the future (Genesis 30:27). Indeed, the word "divination" comes from the word "divine," which is a demonstration that divination was originally considered godly and not evil. [1, p. 139]

This etymology is irrelevant when trying to figure out what the stances of the Biblical authors were. 'Divination' has a clearly latinate origin, the Hebrew writers used words that had nothing with God to do - קסם ,מקסם, נחש (naħaš, miqsam, qasam/qesem) among others. Why an etymology originating half a Mediterranean away can be used as evidence regarding the value that something held in the eyes of biblical writers is never made clear. The main word used for it in the greek portions of the Bible as well as the Septuagint is, by the way, closely related to a greek word for 'mad'. (Also, naħaš can signify observing in general, see e.g. 1Ki 20:33, although the pi'el form, used in the account with Laban, seems more limited to supernatural practices.)

It is clear, of course, that the biblical writers seem to have approved of some particular types of soothsaying practices and disapproved of others. The reasons for this disapproval (and approval) probably is religious (and obviously irrational) in nature. Maybe they disapproved of the doctrines that informed some of the soothsayers' predictions or whatever, but that is the usual way of political religion and thus nothing particularly remarkable. We can see the same thing in modern religious movements, and need not presume any conspiracies to explain it. Indeed, Genesis 30:27 is among the older parts of the Bible per the documentary hypothesis, and the development where some manner of soothsaying practices originally were accepted but soon earned the ire of the writers of the Biblical books is entirely possible - downright very likely correct.

However, the argument from etymology she uses still fails so spectacularly that one is left to wonder what she was thinking.

Divination does not fall out of favor until later books, eventually being considered as "sin" in the first book of Samuel, in which the Israelite king Saul uses a diviner to "divine for me by a spirit and bring up for me whomever I shall name to you." [1, p. 139]

It would be interesting to have a timeline specifying when Murdock thinks the different books of the Bible were written. The dating of this particular bit of Samuel and the various places in the priestly and deuteronomist parts of the Torah that specifically condemn various practices along these lines - Lev 19:26, Lev 19:31, Deut 18:10-11 - seems to be pretty close, but the Book of Samuel and Deuteronomy probably had a shared author. This only amounts to evidence that as Judaism developed, its view on such things grew increasingly negative.

MOSES AND THE TABERNACLE

 For centuries, the character Moses has been held in high esteem, his every word studied and each move charted. Yet, few have understood the true nature of his "covenant with the Lord," as reflected by the esoteric or mystical meaning of Moses's tabernacle, which, in fact, is the "tent of the sun." Respected Jewish historian Josephus, who was an initiate of several secret societies, elucidates upon Moses's tabernacle: 

And when [Moses] ordered twelve loaves to be set on the table, he denoted the year, as distinguished into so many months. By branching out the candlestick into seventy parts he secretly intimated the Decani, or seventy divisions of the planets;

[1, p. 140]

Compare exodus 25:32: And six branches shall come out of the sides of it; three branches of the candlestick out of the one side, and three branches of the candlestick out of the other side.

Whence Josephus got his idea that there were seventy parts is not clear to me - probably some later tradition - but it is not present in the Bible. This does not tell us much, except that Josephus idea was not the one intended by the authors, and that Murdock's attempt at figuring out what the biblical authors intended really is based on shoddy ideas of what the biblical authors even wrote. Yes, Josephus did subscribe to some kind of astrology-based interpretation of the biblical narratives. Does this mean that the authors of the pentateuch did so? If they did, can we really know what astrological doctrines they subscribed to? Can we know whether a certain passages refers to that set of beliefs or to some other part of their doctrinal system? One thing is clear though: we cannot take some arbitrary other tradition and claim that this tradition is what these authors had in mind, especially if this other tradition is mistaken as to what the biblical tradition contains in the first place.

JACOB AND HIS SONS AND LADDER 

[...] As to their zodiacal designations, Jacob's first-born, Reuben, is Aquarius, the "the beginning of my strength ... unstable as water." Simeon and Levi, "the brothers," are Gemini. Judah, the "lion's whelp," is Leo. Zebulun, who "... shall be for an haven of ships," may correspond to Libra, "the ship sign, or arc, or ark." Issachar is a "strong ass, crouching between the sheepfold's burdens," possibly corresponding to the bull of Taurus, the "workhorse." Of Jacob's son Dan, Anderson relates:

"Dan shall be the serpent by the way, an adder in the path that biteth the horse heels, so that his rider shall fall backwards." This is ... the scorpion, or serpent, and alludes to that constellation which is placed next to the centaur or armed horseman, or Sagittarius, which falleth backwards into the winter solstice of [Capricorn].

Jacob's son Gad is a reversal of Dag, the fish god, possibly representing Pisces. It was said of Asher that he would have "rich food" or "fat bread;" thus, he would correspond to Virgo, the bread-giver or fall harvest. Naphtali is "a hind let loose," representing Capricorn, the goat. Joseph, who was fiercely attacked by archers, is Sagittarius. The son of Rachel, the "Ewe", Benjamin, the "ravenous wolf" who "divides the spoil," would be Aries, who "comes in like a lion" and divides spring and winter. According to Andersson, the "fruitful bough" of Joseph representing his sons, Ephraim and Manasseh, could share the "portion divided between them" of the "double-sign" of Cancer. Joseph himself, of course, is "an interpreter of dreams and a noted magician" with a magical "silver cup," by which he divines. 

[1, p. 140]

So, hinds are goats, Dag is Gad, a ravenous wolf is a ram is a lion, and donkeys are bulls. I find it likely we are dealing with pareidolia again. However, in case there is astrology involved in this, it is very possible the redactor just failed to notice it and included the blessing anyway. Still, the above segment may really be the most convincing example of astrology in the Old Testament that has been shown this far, with the exception of certain details in Job.

Jacob's ladder with the 72 angels ascending and descending represents the 72 decans, or portions of the zodiac of five degrees each. [1, p. 142 ... my bolding, as I find this example a particularly important instance of her misleading the reader.]

Nowhere is the number of the angels mentioned in the original text:

Gen 28:12 And he dreamed, and behold a ladder set up on the earth, and the top of it reached to heaven: and behold the angels of God ascending and descending on it. 

Of course, the number in her claim may derive from some later text commenting on it - some midrash, perchance? If so, though, scholarly practice would be to indicate that source. Otherwise, what she has done there is close to pure fabrication.

The same ladder story is found in Indian and Mithraic mythology, as Doane relates:

Paintings representing a scene of this kind may be seen in works of art illustrative of Indian Mythology. Manrice [sic] speaks of one, in which he says:

"The souls of men are represented as ascending and descending (on a ladder), according to the received opinion of the sidereal Metempsychosis."

... And Count de Volney says:

"In the cave of Mithra was a ladder with seven steps, representing the seven spheres of the planets by means of which souls ascended and descended. This is precisely the ladder of Jacob's vision."

 [1, p. 142]

The typo - Manrice instead of Maurice - is Murdock's, though it is understandable given that Doane's book uses a font where the difference is difficult to spot. However, this does tell us Murdock has not investigated Maurice's book at all; considering it is a significant portion of this quote, that is weak.

What Doane is trying to show here is that the ladder-motif is used when discussing the idea of reincarnation. The seven steps in the Mithra example may very well represent the seven planets, and if there is a seventy-two angels motif elsewhere that might very well represent the zodiac in chunks of five degrees. However, the biblical version does not have the seven steps, nor does it have the seventy two angels.

Doane does, by omission, do some violence to his quote from Maurice as well. Maurice says the following:

The passages presented to the reader in the preceding section are not the only ones in which the gradual ascent of the soul through through[sic] the planets, or spheres of purification, is plainly imitated in the Geeta. They are, however, sufficient for our purpose; and in proof that the Indians actually had, in the remotest æras, in their system of theology, the sidereal ladder of seven gates, so universally made use of as a symbol throughout all the East, I have now to inform the reader of the following circumstance: -- there exists, at present, in the royal library at Paris, a book of paintings entirely allusive to the Indian mythology and the incarnation of Veeshnu, in one of which is exhibited this very symbol, upon which the souls of men are represented as ascending and descending, according to the received opinion of the sidereal Metempsychosis in Asia. [2, pp 258-259]

Maurice tells us that in one volume, there is a depiction of souls of men ascending and descending a ladder. Doane's quotation can give the impression that this is a common motif in Hindu depictions of reincarnation, something Maurice's writing does not establish very strongly.

If the ladder motif has a common origin, can we assume the particular details - number of angels, number of steps, if such details do exist and have any significance - were part of the original meme? Can we assume it was originally used to express reincarnation? As we have scant textual evidence from Mithraism, we do not know how - nor even if - the ladder motif was used in any narratives in the religion, and as we are not provided with any Hindu source for the ladder motif either, we cannot compare the narratives in which they are used, thus making it well-nigh impossible to determine whether there is any possibility that there even is a shared motif there.

Reincarnation does occur in some kabbalistically inclined varieties of Judaism, and there is a rich literature devoted to explaining how this or that group in the biblical narrative is the last generation before the flood being reborn to earn redemption or be punished or such. Reincarnation clearly has appeared in abrahamic religions. Doane, however, is trying to convince the reader that Biblical theology presupposes reincarnation. Does it? If it does, there is a decisive lack of concern for it in the biblical text. It is likely the concept entered into Judaism later, or simply that the Biblical authors did not particularly care for or about it.

 There is no internal textual reason why Jacob's ladder would have anything to do with reincarnation given either - there is nothing about the context that even hints at there being some hidden doctrine to it.

In addition, the name "Jacob" is a title for a priest of the Goddess Isis, which is fitting, since she is the Queen of Heaven who rules over the night sky, or Set the supplanter. [1, p. 142]

 The bit '"Jacob" is a title for a priest of the Goddess Isis" has for a reference Karl Anderson's Astrology of the Old Testament, page 66. As other references she has made to that work agree in page number with the edition I am using (and also that used by google books, which I sometimes use when searching these works), I am pretty certain the error here is not due to she and I using different editions, but due to this not being in Karl Anderson's book in the first place. 

JOSHUA/JESUS, SON OF NUN 

Joshua or Jesus, son of Nun (the "fish"), was the second great prophet after Moses, leading the Israelites to the promised land in Jericho, first encamping at Gilgal, or Galilee. Like Jacob, Joshua also sets up twelve stones representing the tribes and the signs of the zodiac. [1, p. 142] 

Nowhere in the Biblical account does Jacob set up twelve stones [edit: I noticed there's been a typo here, as I previously apparently have written that Joshua did not set up twelve stones; Jacob nowhere is said to set up twelve stones, and I was surprised when rereading this that I had not caught the error previosuly], although he repeatedly does set up stones, making the astute reader wonder whether Murdock knows the biblical narratives at all or whether she is making stuff up. (Yes, Joshua does indeed set up twelve stones. If those stones existed, this narrative may very well have the function of co-opting them into the biblical religion. This seems to be the simplest explanation as far as I can tell? Jacob, however, does no such thing.)

Of course, Jacob is probably a mythical figure with no real historical existence - he is a mythical tribal ancestor. The stone pillars, later ascribed to Jacob, may very well have existed, and ascribing them to the tribal ancestor would be a way for the biblical author to establish legitimate Israelite/Judean claim to the land where the stone pillars stood.

It is said that in Joshua's day, the sun stood still, an event about which has been put forth much tortured speculation as to how and when it could have occurred. In reality, it occurred quite frequently and still does, at the solstices, as the meaning of the word "solstice" is "sun stands still," the time when "the sun changes little in declination from one day to the next and appears to remain in one place north or south of the celestial equator." [1, p. 142]

The story given in Joshua, is of course, impossible. But the literal details prevent reading it as though it were about the solstice - Jos 10:13-14 "And the sun stood still, and the moon stayed, until the people had avenged themselves upon their enemies. [Is] not this written in the book of Jasher? So the sun stood still in the midst of heaven, and hasted not to go down about a whole day. And there was no day like that before it or after it, that the LORD hearkened unto the voice of a man: for the LORD fought for Israel." Hasted not to go down about a whole day, the moon stayed, and no day like that before it or after it. The author is describing something that does not happen yearly - and the moon does not stand still during the solstices either! 

Of course this did not happen, but trying to read it as symbolic of the solstices is weird: the remarkableness ascribed to it as well as the uniqueness makes it unlikely the author was describing something that happens twice a year. (But rather an imagined situation that just never happened in real life, but would have been impressive and downright dreadful if it had occurred.)

The sun also stood still at the death of Krishna, centuries earlier: "1575 years before Christ, after the death of Cristna (Boodh the son of Deirca), the sun stood still to hear the pious ejaculations of Arjoon." This solstice motif likewise appears in the mythologies of China and Mexico. [1, p. 142]

The claim that the solstice motif appears in Mexican and Chinese mythology - Murdock refers to Doane, who refers to Higgins. The Krishna claim also refers to Higgins. Higgins refers to Kingsborough for the Mexico claim, but only by his name, and not by page number or chapter or anything. Kingsborough is rather unreliable, as is Higgins. Still, as we can find - a long chain of difficult to look up references-upon-references.

As to Joshua and various other aspects of the Old Testament, Higgins sums it up: 

The pretended genealogy of the tenth chapter of Genesis [from Noah on down] is attended with much difficulty. It reads like a genealogy: it is notoriously a chart of geography. . . . I have no doubt that the allotment of lands by Joshua was astronomical. It was exactly on the same principle as the nomes of Egypt, which every one knows were named astronomically, or rather, perhaps, I should say, astrologically. The double meaning is clear . . . Most of the names . . . are found in the mystic work of Ezekiel. . . . [Genesis tenth] chapter divides the world into 72 nations. Much ingenuity must have been used to make them agree with the exact number of dodecans into which the great circle was divided.

 [1, p. 143]

How difficult is it really to list 72 tribes and relate them to each other in arbitrary ways (and ignore all other tribes). Much ingenuity is not required. Just a list of 72 tribes! Reading the text in Higgins - without ellipses - does not make it any clearer what significance he thinks Ezekiel has in the context. Also, the clear double meanings are asserted, but not shown. This is a typical instance of Higgins' frustratingly plodding style.

DANIEL 

In the famous scene where Daniel interprets the dreams of Cyrus and Nebuchadnezzar, it is implied that while the others who attempted to do likewise were astrologers, soothsayers and the like, Daniel himself was not. On the contrary Daniel too was an astrologer, and we also discover he is not a historical character, as Walker relates:

Writers of the Old Testament disliked the Danites, whom they called serpents (Genesis 49:17). Nevertheless, they adopted Dan-El or Daniel, a Phoenician god of divination, and transformed him into a Hebrew prophet, His magic powers were like those of the Danites emanating from the Goddess Dana and her sacred serpents.He served as court astrologer and dream-interpreter for both the Persian king Cyrus, and the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar (Daniel 1:21, 2:1) indicating that "Daniel" was not a personal name but a title, like the Celtic one: "a person of the Goddess Dana." 

[1, p. 143]

I fully agree that Daniel was not historical (but how can a non-historical person have been an astrologer, when the myth about him clearly implies he was not?). Murdock's argument for his ahistoricity is deeply flawed, however.  "We also discover he is not a historical character, as Walker relates:" implies Murdock believes the following text is sufficient evidence of his ahistoricity:

Dana

Eponymous Great Mother of the Danes and many other peoples, such as the Danaans, the Danaids, the biblical Danites, and the Irish Tuatha Dé Danann, "people of the Goddess Dana."¹ The Russians called her Dennitsa, "Greatest of all Goddesses." [...] Writers of the Old Testament disliked the Danites, whom they called serpents (Genesis 49:17). Nevertheless, they adopted Dan-El or Daniel, a Phoenician god of divination, and transformed him into a Hebrew prophet. His magic powers like those of the Danites emanated from the Goddess Dana and her sacred serpents. He served as court astrologer and dream-interpreter for both the Persian king Cyrus, and the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar (Daniel 1:21, 2:1), indicating that "Daniel" was not a personal name but a title, like the Celtic one: "a person of the Goddess Dana." [3, p 206-207]

We may observe that the reasoning in it is deeply flawed.
Apparently, Barbara Walker believes that since people often functions as the plural of person in English, any word that can be translated people also can be translated person. (Or, at least, that this line of reasoning applies when desired to apply.) Tuatha dé Danann, in fact, is morphologically plural. It is clearly a mythical(?) ethnicity, and (probably) not a title applied to some persons. Another reasonable translation of the phrase would be 'tribes/peoples of Dana' - this translation not being susceptible to Walker's distortion.

The argument basically contains several unsupported facts about connections between Dana and the tribe of Dan and a non-existent Phoenician God (as in Dan-El is an ancient Phoenician protagonist of a story, not a God. The story probably did contribute to the Daniel narrative. Walker should have actually studied these things instead of pulling them out of thin air, though.)

It is difficult to discern what Murdock's main point here is supposed to be. A point I am fully in agreement with is that the book of Daniel did not predict anything - but in fact was written after the facts, and interpretations that make later events seem to be in fulfillment of it generally are based on misreading and pareidolia. It is also clear that Daniel was in part a polemical work where many of the points probably had a function in a theological struggle within 2nd temple Judaism, probably soon after Maccabeean times.

[1] D.M. Murdock, The Christ Conspiracy
[2] Doane, T.W., Bible Myths and their parallels in other religions
[3] Barbara Walker, The Woman's Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets

The Christ Conspiracy: Chapter 10, A study in eisegesis, pt 4

This post is a bit shorter, but I figure shorter posts may be a better idea for this blog. I go on commenting on the text of the chapter as earlier. I will try and produce sources for whatever claims I make - in this case, though, most claims regard the nature of poetry and metaphor itself, so I may actually need to rephrase it later on if I get around to actually reading up on those topics. Another claim I make regarding Jewish calendar disputes probably needs some sources - alas, I cannot recall at the moment where I read what I read on it. This project really makes me regret never having kept a detailed log of all books and papers I ever have read.

In Psalms 19, we hear about the heavens "telling the glory of God ... there is no speech, nor are there words; their voice is not heard; yet their voice goes out through all the earth, and their words to the end of the world." To the unitiated, this sounds strange --how can the heavens tell the "glory of God?" [1, p 134]

Psalms, naturally, is poetry. Poetry does weird things with words, we can compare, e.g. Psalms 22, where the narrative tells us the author is compassed by dogs and bulls, and the lion's jaw is apparently also a concern. Or how can Psalms 19:9-10, be? "the judgments of the LORD [are] true [and] righteous altogether. More to be desired [are they] than gold, yea, than much fine gold: sweeter also than honey and the honeycomb." I doubt anyone ever has seen or heard of a judgment having a flavor! Any other number of similar rather odd similes, metaphors and so on occur in poetry. Indeed, they may even be hallmarks of poetic styles in various languages.

And how do their "voice" and "words" go out to the end of the world without speech or words? The word for "voice" in the Hebrew is properly translated as "line." This line or lines are the cosmic rays coming off the various planetary bodies, lines that were perceived by the ancients to penetrate the earth as well, a perception that caused them to be anxious about establishing the "kingdom of heaven on Earth" by emulating what was happening in the heavens. Anderson explains the importance of the lines or rays:

Among the Eastern nations it was taught that all spiritual life first came from the sun, and its magnetic descent to the earth, becoming earth-bound, or dwelling in the earth, and after passing through a series of evolutions, and different births and changes from the mineral, vegetable and animal kingdoms, ascending or descending the scale [like Jacob's angels], according to the good or evil magnetic rays at its births and its various probationary existences, at last purified and intellectually refined, and master of itself, the pure Ra, or astral body, at last was drawn back into the bosom of the father, sun, from whence it was first originated.

Thus, astrology, or astrologos in the Greek, has been considered the "word of God," as is evidenced by the biblical singing stars and heavens passing along their "voice" and "words" through the earth. [1, p. 134]

Murdock over and over again emphasizes how much in ways of metaphor there is in the Bible. Yet she goes for a remarkably literal interpretation of some of it - the lines spoken of as going out have to be actual lines that do go out in some manner. Poetic metaphor (and other literary tropes) can and does regularly use even more distorted ways of expression.

Nowhere does she really establish that which she claims to establish here above - she has given no evidence that astrology was considered the word of God - she has provided a bunch of opinions, and from this, she somehow establishes that astrology was the "word of God" ...
Of course, including a quote from a 19th century astrologer does make it all the more convincing (the nested quote is from Karl Anderson, on whom I have written a separate post. Worth noting here is that Anderson does not provide sources for his claims regarding ancient beliefs, so I am at an impasse regarding verifying whether he had any actual primary sources at hand.).

The Psalms passage continues: "In [the heavens] he has set a tent for the sun." This "tent" or "tabernacle" represents a holy sanctuary or house of worship; thus, the heavens are truly the temple of the sun, as well as of the other celestial bodies. This heavenly temple was, however, continuously recreated all over the planet, as continues to this day, unbeknownst to the masses. [1, p. 134]

Just as likely, this might be a description of how the Psalmist conceives of the act of creation: for the creator, making the heavens - whatever structure he ascribed to it - was as easy as setting a tent is for a man. Here, eisegesis is all we (can?) get. And a huge helping of it. Of course, my interpretation might also be eisegetical - but my interpretation is favored, unless other convincing evidence is provided, by Occam's razor.

From these various biblical passages, it is obvious that the Lord is not only the architect of the heavens but is pleased with both his stellar creations and his ability to command them. That being the case, it is equally obvious that astrology is not evil, unless the Lord is evil, an idea widely subscribed to by the Gnostics, who made the assessment that anyone in charge of this chaotic and crude "lower" world must be a villain. But if "God" is good, then "his" creation must be good, and the biblical writers make it clear that astrology and the zodiac are their Lord's creation. [1, p 135]

Here, Murdock fails at logic. Being proud of something does not necessitate, by logic, that one also be happy with each use it is put to. Astrology being evil would not imply god being evil, and even if it did, this does not mean that the authors of the Bible necessarily realized that such an implication existed - humans can and do, after all, believe things that are illogical - assuming the biblical authors to be perfect logicians is not justified. Even if it were that the biblical writers thought that astrology is their Lord's creation it does not follow that they also thought it was good (see, e.g. how they also assume God created all living beings, yet forbade the eating of certain kinds of living beings for the Jews). Besides, the vast majority of biblical references to the significance of the heaven only seems to refer to it as a rather huge time-keeping device (and an impressive one at that), rather than as a thing with particular mystical significance.

Even then, a lot of the conclusions in this particular paragraph do not follow from the assumptions, and it is not clear the assumptions are all that well-founded. Finally, the reference to the gnostics is kind of weirdly placed and seems to have no actual reasonable role in there. Finally, it seems more like an attempt to make Christian readers subscribe to the idea that maybe astrology is all right after all, surely god must permit it, which would seem a weird thing to place in a scholarly book on religious history!

The Hebrews were also "moon-worshippers" in that many of their feasts and holidays revolved around the movements and phases of the moon. Such moon-worship is found repeatedly in the Old Testament (Ps. 8:13, 104:19; Is 66:23), and to this day Jews celebrate holidays based on the lunar calendar. At Isaiah 47, these moon-worshippers are equated with astrologers, i.e., "... those who divide the heavens, gaze at the stars, who at the new moons predict what shall befall you."
The Jewish nighttime worship is also reflected in the noncanonical Epistle to Diognetus, an early Christian writing which further demonstrates that astrology was important to Christians, as, while the author obviously does not like the way in which the Jews are consulting the heavens, he does consider the "cycle of the seasons" to be "divinely appointed":

As for the way [the Jews] scrutinize the moon and stars for the purpose of ritually commemorating months and days, and chop up the divinely appointed cycle of the seasons to suit their own fancies, pronouncing some to be times for feasting and others for mourning . . .

[1, p 136] 

I am inclined to think the Epistle to Diognetus is referring to the practice in rabbinic Judaism to adjust the calendar in order to avoid long stretches of sabbath and high holidays. However, certain movements of second temple Judaism disagreed with this practice, and had different ways of resolving the problem of these long stretches: a year of 364 days, for instance, is divisible by 7, and thus a holiday on a set date will recur on the same weekday every year. That particular year-length is repeatedly lauded in 1 Enoch 82:5-6 among other verses. However, after a few decades, the calendar will go out of synch with the seasons. How this was handled by those groups is not known today, as their records have been lost.

We do know, though, that at various times there has been disagreement over the practice of adjusting when Rosh Hashanah will occur - Karaites, Samaritans and various second temple era movements appear to have opposed the practice using no light terms. An early Christian likewise finding the practice objectionable would not be surprising if his religious tradition had any connection to those second temple era movements or their descendants. I should probably look into the Epistle to Diognetus quote in its original form for this, but the translation suggests disapproval of some kind of adjustment anyway: "chop up the divinely appointed cycle of the seasons to suit their own fancies, ..."

We should also note how negative statements about astrology in the Bible is seen as proof of biblical theology being astrological. Whenever she lists a verse without quoting it, it is worth checking what the verse actually says. Generally, they do mention the sun or the moon, but seldom in terms that suggest worship.
Psalms 8:13 does not exist, although I guess Psalms 8:3 is what she meant. That particular verse functions to as a way of saying that God is seen as powerful enough to control and create celestial bodies - what significance does man have to him?

Psalms 104 is a list of both mundane, miraculous and celestial things God has control over and does not as such worship the sun or the moon or phrase anything as though the moon or sun were the object of the worship - unless also the cedars of Lebanon are objects of the same worship. Finally, Isaiah 66:23 talks of the moon partially as a unit of time, and partially - and this partially does support her case - for some ritualist reason (whatwith rosh chodesh-observances).

Again, her pattern of tendentious interpretation of sources combined with a generous helping of downright worthless sources is repeated.

Sources:
[1] D.M. Murdock, The Christ Conspiracy, 1999.

Barbara Walker: Baal-Hadad

tCanaanite Lord of the Hunt, slain by priestesses of Asherah, who buried him in a bog (earth-womb) and resurrected him after seven years, the standard term of kingship in primitive Palestine.¹ He was mated to Asherah as Lady of the Pomegranate at Hadad-Rimmon, and his name was borne by two biblical kings, Ben-hadad and Hadad-ezer (Zechariah 12:11).

1. Hooke, M.E.M., 87.

[Walker, "Baal-Hadad"] 

A sampling of the source - Hooke's Middle Eastern Mythology (the sample including every line including the word "seven" or "year" or "king" or "kingship") - shows that he nowhere says anything about the standard term of kingship in primitive Palestine. In addition, her restatement of the story of Baal-hadad is severely misleading:

In this myth the handmaidens of the goddess Asherah, the Lady of the Sea, and of Yarikh, the moon-god, are sent to entreat the help of El against the attacks of monstrous creatures sent by Baal which are devouring them like worms. El tells them to go into the wilderness and hide themselves, and there give birth to wild beasts with horns and humps like buffaloes. Baal-Hadad will see them and chase after them. They do so and Baal is seized with desire to hunt the creatures to which they have given birth. But the chase proves disastrous to the god; he is caught by the monsters and disappears for seven years, sunk in a bog and helpless. During his absence things fall into chaos on earth. [Hooke, pp. 86-87]

It would also have been relevant to point out that both the biblical kings were kings of neighbouring nations, so their names cannot be seen as indicative regarding the beliefs of the biblical authors.

Sources:
Walker, Barbara. Woman's Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets; again, page numbers are omitted as the articles are in alphabetic order.
Hooke, S.H., Middle Eastern Mythology, pp. 86, 87, available on archive.org

The Christ Conspiracy, chapter 10: A study in eisegesis, pt 3

This post alas got too long for the blogger editor to work correctly with - the word wrap gets borked if I include the whole post, so ... I will have to further subdivide this chapter, as there is a significant amount of problems with it, and including all of them and explaining the problems will take time. I will post sections of it as they get finished. Alas, some of the borked word-wrap is still present in this post, and it seems 

Murdock goes on to present what to her passes for evidence of implicit (as well as explicit) astrotheology in the Bible. This is not the heart of her argument, but it's one of the main arteries.

The Bible is, in actuality, basically an astrotheological text, a reflection of what has been occurring in the heavens for millennia, localized and historicized on Earth. This fact is further confirmed by numerous biblical passages concerning the influences of the heavenly bodies, but it also becomes clear through exegesis of the texts from an informed perspective.[1, p. 128]

The evidence for this that she presents is highly selective. In the narratives of the deuteronomist history, she finds a handful of things which she manages squeezing an astrological interpretation out of - Joshua stopping the sun, Ezekiel's wheels, the prevalence of nighttime worship in Judaism. A prime example of the lack of substance in this eisegesis can be found here:

In fact, as noted, the polytheistic Hebrews and Israelites worshipped a variety of Elohim, Baalim and Adonai, many of which were aspects of the sun, such as El Elyon, the Most High God. In addition, at Amos 5:26 is a verse concerning the mysterious "Kaiwan," the "star-god"of the house of Israel. This star-god is El, the sun, or Saturn, the "central sun," whom, as stated, the Hebrews worshipped, as reflected by their sabbath on Saturday. [1, p. 136]

Problems that beset this passage are numerous: Kaiwan is a hapax legomenon - it occurs once throughout the Bible; we know very little what it signified in Biblical Hebrew. True enough, comparative evidence from related languages do support the claim that Saturn is a reasonably likely referent for the word. However, in trying to figure out what biblical theology is, we should actually see what it says about this Kaiwan.

וּנְשָׂאתֶם אֵת סִכּוּת מַלְכְּכֶם וְאֵת כִּיּוּן צַלְמֵיכֶם כֹּוכַב אֱלֹהֵיכֶם אֲשֶׁר עֲשִׂיתֶם לָכֶֽם׃

unśatæm ʔet sik:ut malkəķæm w^æet kiyun şalme:ķæm koķav
ʔ^æloheķæm ʔ^ašær ʕ^aśitæm (cheapnis transliteration, admittedly, and inconsistently jumping between some scandinavian transliteration scheme and some more international ones)

fast-and-dirty translation: and-carry-qal.perf.masc.2pl the booths/tents of Moloch-your and Kiyun images-your of (a) star of your god(s) which you have made for yourselves. Turned into somewhat passable English: and/but you carried the booths of your Moloch and Kiyun, images of a star of your gods who you had made for yourself.

It gets interesting once you get to the next verse, though, as it is made quite clear the author disapproves of these deities, and I will cheat and just quote the KJV:

Therefore will I cause you to go into captivity beyond Damascus, saith the LORD, whose name [is] The God of hosts.

Making the author's disapproval quite clear. Of course, the Bible is a product of tension between some religious reformers (and internally between them), and the folk religion of the Israelites. We would be surprised if this tension was not visible - if there were no tension, there would have been little reason to write the angry message present in many of the prophets in the first place, for instance. Now, Murdock's stunt here is to pretend the things the biblical authors ranted against are the things the biblical authors believed. By ignoring the context, Murdock can pretend that the Bible supports astrology much more than it really does. She repeatedly pulls this stunt - it pays off checking every verse she mentions but does not quote, as there often is a reason she does not quote it. But even further than that, actually thinking about why the text includes references to things such as these often has quite the opposite meaning from what Murdock reads into it.

As history, these various biblical tales are no more factual than the stories of the Greek gods or the Arabian knights. As allegory, however, they record an ancient wisdom that goes back well beyond the founding of the Hebrew nation, into the deepest mists of time. [1, p. 129 ]

I agree with the first part here, and so do many modern scholars - there is little in the Bible that is accurate history (see, e.g. Silberman's The Bible Unearthed). To what extent the stories encode something hidden, it is likely that whatever was hidden in that case is irretrievably obfuscated by now. Murdock's interpretations of it seem no better than any other pareidolia taken far enough.

In ascertaining the astrology of the Bible we should first properly define the word astrology. Although many people think astrology is meaningless mumbo-jumbo, it is not merely casting horoscopes but is in fact a science, as "astrology" means the study of the celestial bodies (astronomy) and their influences on each other and on life on Earth. The only difference between the well-respected astronomy and the vilified astrology is that astronomy charts the movements and constitution of the celestial bodies, while astrology attempts to determine their interrelationships and meaning.  [1, p. 129]

Is this an overt admission of belief in astrology? I do agree that if we are to go looking for astrology, we should agree on what it is. However, she does not really define it here - which is what she claims to set out to do - but rather only presents an apology for it. Are theories of gravity and electromagnetism astrology? After all, the former can be used to study and predict movements of celestial bodies (and how they affect each other), and the latter can be used to explain how photons from certain celestial bodies affect the life cycle of plants and animals as well as cause very intricate reactions on your retina! (Which, of course, is a subset of life on Earth, which is affected in extensively detailed ways when you look up at the starry night sky.) What does "interrelationships" or "meaning" signify in this context - does Murdock ascribe some kind of objective semantic content to the movements of the skies? There are several significant differences between astronomy and astrology that Murdock ignores here: astronomers use the scientific method to test their theories, astrologers (generally) do not.

Astronomers attempt to explain their observations - and they manage to do so, using science that has been tested elsewhere (and their observations, in turn, can be used to test scientific theories, see e.g. the use of a solar eclipse to test Einstein's theory of relativity). Astrologers on the other hand explain their claims (and come up with excuses when empirical tests reject their claims) by referring to untestable phenomena that have not been verified in laboratories. No astrologer this far has given any realistic explanation as to how the stars would affect life on earth in any way even remotely similar to the way astronomists interact with other sciences. See, e.g. how Karl Anderson keeps referring to magnetism, yet never shows any understanding whatsoever of magnetism as a phenomenon. Real interaction with a science requires actual  understanding of it, something astrologers seldom even have the faintest interest for.

... which in turn was not possible without the understanding that the earth was round and revolved around the sun, crucial information suppressed by the conspirators, to be seemingly rediscovered late in history. Such information, however, has always been known by those behind the scenes. [1, p. 130]

See this.

As time went on, this science became increasingly complicated, as the infinite stars were factored in and as the heavens changed. Recognizing the interaction between the planetary bodies and their influence on Earth, the ancients began to give the heavens shape and form, persona and attitude. [1, p. 130 ]

I would love to know what influence, beyond the obvious sun-related influences (seasons, light in the day) and moon-related influences (tides, somewhat light nights) Murdock is referring to. Maybe it is how when both venus and mercurius are in taurus, sagittarians get skeptical of bullshit or whatever, who knows?

Murdock does not just make outlandish claims, she also goes on to ram down open doors. As a great surprise she springs on us that Christians in the past thought the Bible contained allegories. This must be maddeningly uncomfortable a truth for anyone without any familiarity with patristic thought or most brands of theology:

Other early Christians also knew about the allegorical nature of the Bible, but their later counterparts began in earnest the profitable push for utter historicization, obliterating millennia of human study and knowledge, and propelling the Western world into an appalling Dark Age. St. Athanasius, bishop and patriarch of Alexandria, was not only aware of the allegorical nature of biblical texts, but he "admonishes us that 'Should we understand sacred writ according to the letter, we should fall into the most enormous blasphemies.'" In other words, it is a sin to take the Bible literally! [1, p. 132]

Murdock has probably not verified whether St. Athanasius said that though, as the source she gives is Pike's The Morals and Dogma of Scottish Rite Freemasonry, which provides no further source. In addition, on the very same page Pike showcases really outdated ideas of the age of the Zohar, accepting an early 1st millennium age for it ("The source of our knowledge of the Kabalistic doctrines, are the books Jezirah and Sohar, the former drawn up in the second century, and the latter a little later;" [2, p 266]) For a very short sample of claims, it seems Pike's accuracy is low. May be the present sample just was unlucky, but ... I cannot read every book Murdock has consulted for her work. However, as Pike does not use much in ways of sources, I find he cannot be held a reputable source on anything.)
Whether Christianity really propelled the western world into the Dark Ages is questioned by several historians and other causes have to be considered as well - the great migrations of the time, various problems with the Roman Empire itself, etc. Certainly Christianity contributed to the appearance of the Dark Ages, but exactly how large the share of the blame it should be appointed is hard to estimate. Further, how such a push for "utter historicization" that she posits could have propelled the western world into the dark ages is rather left unclear, as she provides no explanation. Would the dark ages have been avoided if medieval Christianity believed Jesus was a supernatural being who never walked the earth?

What profit does historicization confer on the clergy that absence of historicization would deprive them of? The idea that historicization was carried out for some kind of profit also seems suspect. In part, relics are indeed a profit-bringer that historicity helps create and justify, but it would seem the later habit of canonizing untold numbers of believers would have made it possible to create such an industry without a historical savior. Also, compare how common ritual non-relic holy objects are in Judaism, and the amount of money invested in mezuzoth, tefillin, tallit, ... one would think that such a system would be more gainful for conspirators wishing to profit off a religion, compared to the relatively little market for relics: once a relic is sold, its resale value plummets, it sits somewhere in a church, and so on. Tefillin and tallitoth, on the other hand, get worn out, and mezuzoth need to be checked for flaws regularly as well. Unlike a relic, though, that is a feature: you need new tallitoth, new tefillin, new mezuzoth, ... or reparations if possible for the tefillin and mezuzoth. There is no Catholic rule requiring that you have to buy a new finger from S:t So-and-So whenever the previous one has been worn out.

Christian father Origen, called the "most accomplished biblical scholar of the early church," admitted the allegorical and esoteric nature of the Bible: "The Scriptures were of little use to those who understood them literally, as they are written." [1, p. 132 ]

Tracing this down is interesting, as the quoted bit is from Higgins' Anacalypsis, part II (page 270). And the quote is not present in the source he provides. The essential meaning is there, so it is possible he was using some other translation that does translate it like that, though. Again, more primary sources would be called for. However, Murdock's wording skates very close to implying that this indeed is what Origen says, whereas it actually is (again, modulo translation) Johann Lorenz von Mosheim summing up his views of Origen's teachings this way. Mosheim may very well be right, but certainly Murdock would benefit from having read more recent sources - quoting a polemicist who quoted a polemicist does not inspire confidence. Google scholar does identify a handful of other books using the exact same wording, but none of the results can be considered to be anywhere near primary sources: three 19th century books on prophecy, Anacalypsis and Murdock.

In fact, in examining biblical texts closely, we further discover that various places and persons, portrayed as actual, historical entities, are in fact allegory for the heavens and planetary bodies. In reality, virtually all Hebrew place-names have astronomical meanings. [...] Contrary to popular belief, the reverence displayed by other peoples for "God's heavens" is also exhibited by the Israelites, whose very name, as we have seen, is astrotheological. [1, p. 132 ]

I have previously pointed out that the claim that Israel is an astrotheological name is flawed.  I have also pointed out that the source for identifying Hebrew place names with astronomical things is flawed.

Despite the negative comments and exhortations found in the Bible against astrology, star-gazing, soothsaying and divination, we discover various passages that clearly refer to these magical arts and their objects of reverence with fondness. In fact, at several points the heavens are personified and appear as wondrous characters whose praises are sung by biblical characters, in precisely the same manner as their Pagan counterparts. [1, p. 132]

We will see that what Murdock means by this ignores what the verses in question say (at least most of the time). But I am getting ahead of myself.

The author(s) of Job is one such character, and it is in this book we find unambiguous references to astrology. In Job, "the Lord" personifies the "morning stars"- "the sons of God" - and has them "joyfully crying out." In trying to make Job feel small and obey him, the Lord presents a list of his own godly attributes, including the ability to command the happy heavens:
 [1, p. 133 ]

Commanding the heavens would be a pretty impressive feat, and it is quite possible the Jewish redactors who finalized the Hebrew version of Job intended that kind of meaning - God is more powerful than the Pleiades, and he controls Orion, he is the one who leads Mazzaroth (a constellation) and guides the Bear, he knows the ordinances of the heavens, et cetera. Meanwhile, this also establishes that God is not ruled by the Pleiades, Orion, Mazzaroth or by the Bear: they are his underlings, and subject to his control. Murdock instead reads this as agreeing that the stars and constellations are seen as divine. However, indeed, the author of Job does seem to agree with the notion that the stars had an influence on the affairs on Earth:

Can you bind the chains of the Pleiades, or loose the cords of Orion? Can you lead forth the Mazzaroth in their season, or can you guide the Bear with its children? Do you know the ordinances of the heavens? Can you establish their rule on the earth? (Job 38:31-33)
 [1, p. 133]

This is pretty much the only such stance attested in the canonical bible, although more such stances can be found in later Jewish literature. (E.g. intertestamental as well as early rabbinic and kabbalistic work.)

The Pleiades factor into Judaism more than is admitted, as some of the numerous "sevens" mentioned throughout the Bible refer to these "sisters," as Walker relates:

[The Pleiades] were probably represented in pre-patriarchal Jerusalem by the holy Menorah (seven-branched candlestick) symbolizing the sevenfold Men-hora or Moon-priestesses, as shown by its female-genital decorations, lilies and almonds (Exodus 25:33).

 [1, p. 133 ] 

How does something that is not spoken about or by and large ascribed any significance factor into something? If an idea or thing influenced the development of a cluster of ideas, and later on disappeared from that cluster of idea, what sense does it make to claim the thing or idea factors into it at this point? As for the significance of seven in Biblical thought, who knows - might just as well be the number of stars in some other constellation, or the Pleiades may have been seen as signifying something else than a number of sisters, or it might have been the number of something that was not in the sky. Pareidolia hits hard, again.

Also in Job, a book replete with celestial imagery, the author portrays the Lord as he who "described a circle upon the face of the waters at the boundary between light and darkness. The pillars of heaven tremble...his hand pierced the fleeing serpent." In mythology the heavens are depicted as an "abyss of waters," so this scripture is reference to the zodiacal circle, "described" or drawn by God. The "boundary between light and darkness" is, naturally, the horizon, and the trembling "pillars of heaven" are the same held up by Samson, the "bright sun." In addition, "his hand piercing the fleeing serpent" could refer to the Egyptian god Set/Seth, the constellation of Serpens, or the sky itself; however, this last part could also be translated as the "crooked serpent" who does not flee but is formed by the Lord's hand, representing Scorpio.
 [1, p. 133 ]

I do not see why the reference to "the face of the waters" has to be understood as a reference to the zodiacal circle - it seems more reasonable to see this as a reference to the early cosmology of the middle east peoples[4, chapter 1], viz. a flat world whose landmasses are surrounded by water. Such an interpretation even more naturally fits the idea of horizon as boundary. There is no way to verify or falsify whether Murdock's interpretation is accurate, and that is a problem - it can just be a fanciful interpretation or the actual meaning of the text here. I remain unconvinced, as I find other interpretations with a less explicit astrological meaning more convincing. It may just describe the immense powers a creator commanded when constructing the universe, or it may hint at astrological significance of constellations.

Of this mysterious and clearly astrological work attributed to Job, Anderson says, "... the whole book is a complete description of the Masonic ceremonies or Egyptian Masonry, or trial of the dead by Osiris..."

So, Job's book has parallels in a movement with medieval roots. The inquisitive mind naturally wonders which direction the influence may have taken! Anderson only asserts this, and does not show that this is so, nor does he provide any sources for his claim. [3, p. 113]

As to the sources she uses in this chapter, thus far, many of them are highly questionable in quality: None out of Pike, Anderson, Higgins and Hazelrigg are reliable scholars. Again, some claims that definitely would demand sources (even if they are true) are unsourced, and we are left just to believe on Murdock's authority (e.g. Kaiwan being El being Saturn). In further installments of reviews of this chapter, the sheer amount of eisegesis will be more apparent.

[1] D.M. Murdock, The Christ Conspiracy
[2] Pike, The Morals and Dogma of Scottish Rite Freemasonry, LH Jenkins, 1928
[3] Anderson, Karl; The Astrology of the Old Testament
[4] Schiaparelli, Astronomy in the Old Testament,  available at http://archive.org/stream/astronomyinoldt00schigoog#page/n16/mode/2up