Book Of The Heavenly Cow For Free Public Full
Butler Peerwith Connecting Experts Download full-text PDF Read full-text Download full-text PDF Read full-text Download citation Copy link Link copied Read full-text Download citation Copy link Link copied Citations (1) Discover the worlds research 20 million members 135 million publications 700k research projects Join for free Public Full-text 1 Content uploaded by Edward P.Butler Author content All content in this area was uploaded by Edward P.Butler I n certain Neoplatonic philosophers, such as Proclus, Damascius, and Olympiodorus, we find a mode of my thological interpretation we may term theological.This article atte mpts a theological interpretation of the Egyptian Book of the Celestial Cow, a text inscribed in five royal tombs of the New Kingdom.
Although the concept of th e theological hermeneutic comes from Neoplatonic th ought, the point of this reading is not to impose Greek philosophical concepts upon the text, but to borrow Neoplatonic textual strategies the aim of which is to deploy the concepts immanent to a particular body of myth to illuminate myths specifically theological dimension, th at is, the contribution its iconic content and formal narrative structure make to that cultures picture of the dispositions of the Gods in a pantheon and the divine activities constitutive of the cosmos.
The key issues arising in this reading concern the distance between Re and humani ty; the relationship between Re and N n as that between the demiurgic principle and the preconditions of its emergence; the Eye of Re as an hypostatized site of divine agency occupied successively by Ha thor and Sekhmet in the myth; and the meaning of the death or dest ruction of mortals in the myth.
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Rather my aim is to explore a method for the interpretation of my th drawn from the thought of the Platonists of late antiquity.
Aplikasi billing wifi androidI have discussed the theo retical foundations of this method elsewhere, 1 but will summarise those results here.
In this essay, I attempt to apply these principles to the reading of a text unknown to Platonists and unconnected to thei r own, Hellenic traditions.
Pipe by bmx streets updateIf the method is successful, it should help to elucidate the text in a manner which does not constitute a Platonising interpretation.
I wish to emphasize that the choice of an Egyptian text constitutes no claim whatsoever to a necessary connection between Platonism and Egyptian thought.
Nor, if certain Ne oplatonists such as Iamblichus, for example, made specific reference to Egyptian myth, is this any part of the present essays concerns.
Perhaps it would have reduced the potential for such confusion had a text been selected, instead, from the Andes, say, or East Asia.
There still would have been occasion, however, for the misapprehension that my purpose is to uncover some universal theological contents.
This reading seeks to apply formal Neoplatonic hermeneutical principles to an Egyptian text, not to conflate the contents of Neoplatonic ontology and Egyptian theology.
There is no necessity to the application of this he rmeneutic; I will rather explai n why it might be fruitful, and then ho pefully demonstrate its fruitfulness.
Sallustius is not himself an important figure in the history of Neoplatonism, but he expresses concisely certain principles pertaini ng to the interpretation of myth that, I would argue, are largely embodied in the interpretive practices of later Platonists like Proclus.
These later Platonists do not derive these principles from Sallustius.
Rather, Sa llustius arrives at his classificatory structure by applying the fundamental principles of an evolving Platonic understanding in his day of the re lationship between philosophy and theology.
In chapter three of his On the Gods and the Cosmos, Sallustius discusses five types of myth and ways of reading myths, namely the theological, the physical, the psychical, the material, and the mixed.
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P. Butler, Offering to the Gods: A Neoplatonic Perspective, Magic, Ritual, and Witchcraft Vol.
T he Gods and Being in Proclus, Dionysius Vol.26, 2008, forthcoming.
A theological myth, or a myth qua theological, concerns primarily the Gods, a physical myth (myth qua physical) treats of nature in a universal sense, a ps ychical myth of the soul, a material myth of certain concrete substances, and a mixed myth of entities in all these classes.
Sallustius speaks am biguously of types of myths and modes of interpretation, but it is clear from his exposition that the hierarchy is of interpretive method s, that multiple methods can be applied to the same myths, and that the different methods are appropriate to different discursive contexts, the theological mode being particular to the philosopher but al so, on that account, having the highest truth value, if not the broade st.
The broadest truth value, on the other hand, belongs to the mixed mode of interpretation, which integrates interpretation on all the ot her levels, but this is the mode of interpretation practiced in an initia tory context, and thus not easily appropriated.