Biografisch, Pangborn

(1) Edgar Pangborn, “Still I persist in Wondering – Tales of a darkening world”, Dell 1978 – Spider Robinson, “The country called Edgar”; “Yet for all that I think I could make an excellent case for saying that Edgar Pangborn was essentially a science fiction writer. He said again and again in his books that love is not a condition or an event or even a state of mind, But that love is a country, which we are sometimes privileged to visit –and again and again he wrote of the exploration of that fantastic region, of First and sometimes Last contact in that continuum. / His two essential themes were love and human stupidity [perhaps human insensitivity is more correct], and that sharpest of antinomies formed the core of nearly all his work. There are a few dark and anguished stories in this book, but Edgar was one of those rare ones. A writer who not only could perceive the flaws in his species, but could find it in his heart to forgive them. I think he was strong enough to bear his terrible empathy. Though he had have cried out in pain at times, he never gave in, as so many modern science fiction writers have, to screams of rage. He never attempted to renounce his humanity. Not that he could have.

Feodalisme, Spanje

(1) Claudio Véliz, “The Centralist Tradition of Latin America”, Princeton University Press 1980; “The Aras conquered the peninsula in a few years, but it took the Christian kingdoms seven centuries to dislodge hem. That intermittent, at times save, war leftist marketers where on the Spanish world, including, of course, on the development of institutions. In addition to other factors of importance, the order in which different regions of Spain were reconqured determined the eventual political, social, and economic climate. The kingdom of Aragon, comparing roughly what is now known as Valencia, Aragon, and Catalonia was recovered, during the second half of the thirteenth century, and the population was able to direct its energies to the development of Mediterranean trade. Barcelona became the centre of a commercial empire of consequence, and Catalans were the masters of Sardinia, Sicily, and part of Greece, as well as comptrollers of important trading outposts in North Africa, Venice, Genoa, Bruges, and Antwerp. Such diligence and the resulting prosperity nurtured a powerful urban business patriciate, almost a bourgeoisie, which made its opinions count in the affairs of the kingdom, eventually introducing into the political arrangements of Aragon a distinct constitutional system founded on the idea of mutual recognition of rights and responsibilities. It was this that the Catalan Cortes based their traditional power to legislate and even to limit the king’s power to issue legislation under certain conditions. /

(2) Passim: While the kingdom of Aragon went its constitutional way, Castile was engaged in war, either against the Moors or against herself, and torn by internecine feuds that caused as much anarchy and destruction as the intermittent campaign against the foreign invaders. A poor land with pastoral economy, little opportunity, and possibly less inclination to engage in commercial or industrial pursuits, Castile evolved differently from Catalonia. In the Castilian hinterland it was the warlords, note merchants, who were influential, and the crown saw its power circumscribed de facto, not de jure.  Ts was not the consequence of a successful royal resistance to such encroachments, but rather of the reluctance of the warrior-bans to institutionalize their gains partly because of their ignorance or dislike of juridical procedures and also in part because to do so would have established a contractual, legal relationship with responsibilities they were unlikely to accept. / In Castile, as in Aragon, the medieval parliamentary institutions of the Cortes existed, but were seldom summoned as the monarch was not under an obligation to do so. Their influence was minimal, and as nobility and clergy were exempted from financial exactions that could conceivably join them with the representatives of the towns in resisting additional levies by the crown, they did not pose a credible challenge to the power of either the king or the barons. To revoke laws, it was necessary to obtain the consent of the Cortes, but to make new laws, the Cortes could act alone. The Cortes were allowed to address petitions to the monarch but, as Eliot has indicated convincingly, they never succeeded in transforming this in the right to legislate., ‘partly because of their own lack of unity, and partly because of their failure to establish the principle that redress of grievances must precede supply.’ () Passim: Furthermore, the military foundations of Castilian society made it unlikely that the military commanders, nobles, and warlords who wielded direct power under the crown should be particularly inclined to seek juridical ratifications of that power from institutions, such as the Cortes, that represented the live of burgers with limited economic and political influence. Hence, when the barons were able to make inroads into the royal power during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries as a result of the incapacity of the monarch these were not institutionalized and remained de facto usurpations, easily redressed under a strong king, as in fact happened when Ferdinand and Isabella assumed leadership.”

Klassieke traditie, literatuur, moderne tijd

(1) Rudi van der Paardt,”Mythe en Metamorfose – Klassieke thema’s en motieven in de moderne literatuur”, Prometheus 1991; “First of all, a passage from Vorlesungen über dramatiche Kunst und Literatur [1809 by August Wilhelm von Schlegel, head of the German romantic school: 'Whatever time the tragedies of Seneca may be, they are exaggerated and cold above all description, without nature in them. character and action, shamed by the most repulsive clumsiness, and so devoid of all theatrical insight, that I believe they were never determined to step out of the schools of rhetoric on the stage. […] Every tragic platitude is exhausted to the last breath; everything is phrase, in which the simplest is already cut up. With dexterity and shrewdness, a gigantic poverty was buried in the mind.' // As a romantic, Schlegel had understandable objections to Seneca, but also in the camp of specialists, the classicists in the nineteenth century were averse to tragedies. One of the greatest in the field, the Latinist J.N. Madvig, in his Adversaria critica, a collection of text-critical essays on Roman authors, wrote the following: 'How gladly I wished, in communicating what I can contribute to the restoration of the text, to the Latin poets who lived after Augustus, with an author which was a little more appealing to acquaintance, and which was a little more familiar to the philosophers themselves than the swollen sophistication of Seneca's tragedies. 1895] about Seneca wrote: 'The tragedies are totally without dramatic life, consisting merely of a series of declamatory speeches, in correct but monotonous versification, interspersed with choruses, which only differ from the speeches by begin written in lyric metres instead of the iambic . To say that the tragedies are without merit would be an overstatement, for Seneca, though no poet remained even in his poetry an extremely able man of letters and an accomplished rhetorician. His declamation comes in the same times from all his puppets: but it is often grandiose, and sometimes really fine.’ 

(2) Passim: The reaction to the nineteenth-century standpoint is introduced with a famous essay by T.S. Eliot in a reissue [1927] of the translations mentioned above, collected in 1581 under the title Tenne Tragedies. In this essay, 'Seneca in Elizabethean Translation', included in his influential Selected Essays, Eliot posits that the negative judgment of his contemporaries [i.e. early twentieth-century people] of Seneca as a tragicus is partly due to the low quality of his Elizabethan imitators. . According to Eliot, the horror of the Renaissance stage has been wrongly projected onto Seneca. Yet, unlike his Greek teachers, he did not stage abominations, for his tragedies were not played, but recited. Eliot thus arrives at a statement that is quoted time and again in Seneca literature, but is often taken out of context: 'In the plays of Seneca, the drama is all in the word, and the word has no further reality behind it. . His characters all seem to speak with the same voice, and at the top of it; they recite in turn.' // And just as further he uses the following equations to illustrate this: 'Seneca's plays might, in fact, be practical models for the modern 'broadcasted dramas'.'”

Religie, Vroege Tribuutheffers, Algemeen

(1) Bruce G. Trigger, “Understanding early civilizations – A Comparative Study”, Cambridge University Press 2003; “People in all early civilizations believed that a supernaturally animated nature sustained human life and that the gods depended on human offerings to replenish their powers. This mutual tendency generated a cosmic cycle to replenish their powers. This mutual dependence generated a cosmic cycle in which energy was circulated from the supernatural ream into the human world and back again. The degree of self-sufficiency attributed to the god varied from the Mesopotamians’ belief that without humans the lesser god would have to cultivate fields and built temples to the Aztec’s conviction that, without an endless supply of human blood, the supernatural forces that sustained the universe would quickly cease to operate. Offers were intend to nourish the gods literally rather than metaphorically and normally consisted of food and drink or the leaves of animals and human beings. Because of their dependence on offering, deities in the early civilizations were not transcendental as they were in most later preindustrial civilization. It was only once the gods were no longer believed to depend on human support that offering them sacrifices became a purely metaphorical or symbolic act / Within that system of belief, farmers created the resources that sustained themselves, the upper classes, the gods and the cosmic order,. Every family made offerings to deities, who often included their dead ancestors, but the upper classes and in particular the kings were especially important intermediaries in convening energy form the human to the supernatural realm. Their ability to accumulate surplus resources on larger scale than anyone else made it possible for them to sustain the gods more lavishly than commoners. They also possessed specialized ritual knowledge about how tip relate to the gods,

(2) Passim: The ritual activities of the king were viewed as crucial for maintaining the universe. Kings, not priest, were responsible for offering major sacrifices. When priests sacrificed on behalf of the king, they did so as his substitutes or agents. Major sacrifices we usually made in ritually exclusive settings, such as the interiors of temples and on elevated temple platforms –places accessible only to rules, priests, and members of the upper classes. Public participation in state-sponsored ritual involved mass dancing, singing, and participation in religious dramas that celebrated the natural changes and human activities associated with the annual seasonal cycle. These rituals sought to renew the world and reinforce the social order by strengthening relations with the gods and revitalizing the inverse. / While beliefs concerning what was appropriate for sacrifice and how sacrificial rituals should be performed adverse dorm one early civilisation to another, the basic concepts concerning sacrifice were the same. Since these ideas differenced significantly from contents of sacrifice in less complex societies and could not have diffused from a single point of origin among all the early civilisations, they must have been formulated separately in individual early civilizations. They appears, however, to have been typical of all societies prior to the desacralization of nature that took place in most Eurasian civilizations in the middle of the first millennium B.C. in simpler societies, where all social relations  tended to be modelled on kinship ties, relations between the humans and the natural/supernatural sphere were formulated in terms or requests for parental benevolence from the supernatural or the need for humans to sustain and obey the spirits of deceased ancestors who controlled the fertility of the land. In early civilisations views of the supernatural as real or metaphorical kin gave way to belief that the god constituted a superior social status. The understanding of the supernatural that developed in early civilizations therefore seems to have resulted from the working of a relatively uniform set off belief about the supernatural in earlier societies to reflect the more hierarchical structure of societies that we no longer being held together at the highest levels by kinship relations.

(3) The conceptualization of sacrifice in the early civilisations must have developed from earlier beliefs concerning reciprocity and exchange between human beings and the supernatural. These beliefs were, however, radically reformulated as a consequence of the evolution of complex system of taxation and tribute. Sacrifice in early civilizations represented a projection into the supernatural realm of the observation that farmers materially supported the upper classes, who in turn maintained the larger political and social order that was essential for a complex agricultural economy to function and for farmers to prosper. Such projections made sense to both farmers and rulers, who viewed each other as components of in-egalitarian societies for which no viable alternative could be imagined. Rulers were accepted as necessary to maintain political stability; hence, by extrapolation the role of the gods was to maintain the cosmic order and to do this, the deities required material support. If rulers became too exploitative or permitted the upper classes to appropriate too many resources from farmers for their own use they endangered not only the production of food but also the continuation of the cosmic order. Thus religious beliefs helped to curb exploitation by the upper classes on the ground that restraint was necessary to nourish deities and keep both the political and the cosmic system working. /

(4) Passim:  Cross-cultural uniformities in the religious beliefs of early civilisations resulted from analogous reflections on the taxation systems that were generically cosmic realm. Essentials were assigned to farmers as producers of food for the upper classes and the god, to the human upper classes for maintaining to the god for maintaining the cosmic order on which all life depends. The labour to produce the food that was needed to do this. Therefore they were answerable to the god for their testament of farmers, just as farmers were answerable to the gods if they did not regularly produce food surpluses. Shalins has maintained that religious beliefs were the dominant forces of symbolic production in the early civilizations. They provided powerful concepts that helped to regulate political relations among classes in societies that had grown too large and too complex to be manageable by notions of real or metaphorical kinship. / The concept of sacrifice thus supplied the equivalent of political constitutions for early civilizations. While farmers and other lower-class people were explicitly excluded from decisions about how society a to be governed and denies the right to criticize the actions of the upper classes overly, their duty to ensure the continuity of the political and cosmic orders by feeding the upper classes and the resources was balanced by the need for the upper classes to make sure that that farmers had the social peace and resources they needed to produce enough food to sustain the cosmic order. The failure of either farmers or the upper classes to respect and sustain the other threatened the functioning of the universe. / The common features of belief about sacrifice in the various early civilisations therefore appear to have been more than passionate, epiphenomenal reflections of an effective ecological adaptation. They represented a meagre understanding of the nature of social relations in early civilisations and of the lines to which one class could exploit another without endangering the whole system. Ideas about sacrifice and cosmic order n early civilization constituted an implicit discourse on political power that mediated class relations and limited dangerous behaviour in the form of either lower-class rebelliousness or the overexploitation of farmers by the upper classes. /

(5) Passim: Whatever beliefs about the cosmos or the gods may have been shared y the societies that developed into early civilizations major features of the religious beliefs of early civilizations were shaped y thinking, about economic and political institutions that did not exist prior to the development of these societies. This process illustrated the capacity of widely separated groups of societies. These processes illustrate the capacity of widely separated groups of human beings at a particular level of development to transform common experiences into similar understandings of the supernatural. The development of these concepts also proved as an astonishing demonstration of the ability of the human mind to construct analogous religious concepts under similar economic and political conditions and to use these ideas to stabilize convergent forms of social organization. This suggests that practical reason played a more extensive and important role in formulating general patterns of religious beliefs than cultural particularism allows.”

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 (6) Bruce G. Trigger, “Understanding early civilizations – A Comparative Study”, Cambridge University Press 2003; “Cosmologies exhibited many similarities. The universe was conceptualized as series of superimposed levels: a single terrestrial plane, one or more sky realms above, and one or more underworlds beneath.The sky and underworldplandes wer the exclusive reals of th god and the dad, whie the earth was shared by living people and the supernatural. These levels were interconnected, most often at the centre and around the edges of the terrestrial realm, to the hills, trees, caves, and temples. The gods as super materiel energy were able to move throughout planes, converting life-giving powers from the purely supernatural realms to the human one and back again. / The earth was generally believed to be a flat plane, round or square in outline, at most a few thousand kilometres across, and surrounded by a salt-water ocean. Each early civilization and usually each city-state believed itself to be located that eh centre of the terrestrial plane, which had been created especially for its benefit. The terrestrial plane was often thought to be divided into quarters either according to the cardinal directions or at the points that marked the regions, and setting points of the sun at the summer and the weather solstices. This model took account of the geographical knowledge of the world that was possessed by well-informed people who lived in early civilization. Such information declined exponentially beyond the borders of each early civilization. Knowledge of particular seas or oceans was extrapolated as signifying that the world was surrounded by salt water. / Lacking the contribution of practical knowledge, stories about the celestial and underworld levels showed much less cross-cultural uniformity. While the Mesoamerican civilizations postulated thirteen sky reams and nine underworlds associated with specific deities and the Chinese likewise imagined multiple levels, the Egyptians and the Mesopotamians postulated only one major supernatural realm in the sky and another beneath the earth. /

(7) Passim: The understanding of the earth and the cosmos may also have been influenced by by-stories held in earlier, les complex societies. Mircea Eliade [1953 maintains that all early cultures believe in a multisided universe, a vertical axis mundi, both separating and joining the different levels, accessibly between the natural and supernatural levels, and the importance of shamans for communicating between them. Unfortunately, we would need more detailed and systematic information about small-scale societies to evaluate these claims. Eliade is even partially correct, however cross-culturally uniform belief that had existed prior to the development of early civilizations would help to account for many otherwise inexplicable cross-cultural uniformities in the cosmologies of early civilizations.  / Myths concerning the creation and transformations of the universe were cross-culturally more varied than cosmologies. A crucial factor shaping these myths was measurement of time. Early civilization tended to group days into short periods of from four to ten days or longer periods of twenty to thirty days, and various approximations of the sidereal year. These units facilitated adoptions to seasonal changes as well as the organisation of labour, markets, and tax collection. While the improved record-keeping of early civilizations encouraged greater awareness of longer time-scales, there was much variability of time as moving in cycles of days, years, and longer units associated with disintegrations and renewal the cosmic order. Other early civilizations, such as Egypt, Mesopotamia, and that of the Yoruba, appear to have lived at the stable of self-renewing cosmos had been created at some point in the past and would last indefinitely. It is clear that ideas concerning the origin and functions of the universe were far more speculative and less subject to empirical constraints than formulations dealing with the layout of the earth’s surface. The over importance accorded to cyclical processes in all three New World civilizations probably arose from shared cultural traditions, which is the case of the Maya and the Aztec are well documented. /

(8) Passim: It has been suggested that the Egyptians believed the cosmic order to be more stable than the Mesopotamians did, because Egypt was ecologically more stable than Mesopotamia. Recent research on the ecology of these civilizations ahs cast out in these interpreting, showing the ecology of these civilizations has cast doubt on this interpretation, showing significant instability in Egypt as well; and the fact remains that the supernatural punishment envisioned in Mesopotamia were rarely ecological disasters. Alternatively, it has been proposed that because of their greater political stability, territorial states encouraged cosmos belief in an orderly cosmos more than city-states, which were frequently battling on another for hegemony. The Maya, the inhabitants of the Valley of Mexico, and the Mesopotamians viewed the rise and fall of individual city-states as events decreed by the gods or inherent in the structure of the universe. Then the Inca’s seemed to have viewed the universe as similarly y unstable, although it is maybe because they and their subject in the Central Andean Highlands had only briefly constituted a territorial state. Moreover, the Maya who thought that the fortunes of city-states were unstable because of ever-shifting relations among cosmic powers, believed that the natural order was stabile for period lasting at least five thousand years, and the Mesopotamians the Yoruba, no less than the ancient Egyptians, appear to have believe the cosmic order would endure far longer/the observations recluse any simple correlation between beliefs about cosmic instability an city-state or territorial-state forms of political organization Such beliefs appear to have been shaped by various combinations of ecological and political factors. Instability was attributed to supernatural punishment of specific human acts as well as to forces inherent in the supernatural order.”

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(7) Ian Morris, “Why the West rules for now – The patterns of history and what they revealed about the future”, Profile Books 2010; ”Despite having so much in common, the Uruk expansion in Mesopotamia after 3500 BCE and the Upper Egypt in expansion after 3300 had different consequences. First, just as Narmer/Menes/the Scorpion King was subduing Lower Egypt around 3100 BCE, the Uruk expansion was abruptly ending. Uruk itself burned and most of the new sites with Uruk-style material culture were abandoned. Why is a mystery. When texts start recording more information, around 2700 BCE the southern Mesopotamians, now claiming themselves Sumerians were divided into thirty-five-city-states, each with its own godlike king. Uruk’s unravelling left unified Egypt as the major Western core. / Why Egypt and Mesopotamia diverged remains unexplained. Maybe Egypt, with its single river valley and delta, a few oases, and desert all around it was just easier to conquer and hold than Mesopotamia, with its two rivers, multiple tributaries where resistance could fester and surrounding hills full of viable rivals. Or maybe Narmer et al just made better decisions than the now-nameless king of Uruk. Or maybe some entirely different factor was decisive. [I will come back to this question below]. / There is a further big difference between Mesopotamia and Egypt. While Sumerian Kings claimed to be like gods, Egyptian kings claimed to be gods. The movie and TV series Stargate, spun off from von Däniken’s books, offer a simple explanation: Narmer and company really were spacemen, while Uruk’s kings were merely friends of spacemen. But appealingly straightforward as that is, there is just no evidence for it and quid a lot suggesting that the pharaoh’s [as Egypt’s kings were called] in fact worked very hard to promote the image of their own divinity.”