The Intensely Spiritual Nature of Preliterate Art.
Preliterate peoples created art in imitation of that intuitively perceived divine intent because it was their way of "knowing" that intent. Knowing was intuitive for preliterate peoples, not logical.
Author´s Note
Does this mean that preliterate people never drew or told stories or sang or danced unless they had a vision or heard voices from the Other World?
Of course not. Things like making pottery or minor decorations on wood or animal skins or pictures of a boat or a bow would have been done by imitating what had been done before by other tribe members. Humans are by nature imitators. They can't stop doing it. I do believe, however, that the very first creation of a particular common design or song or story was the result of vision or voice from the Other World, but because these were created on perishable materials, they seldom survived thousands of years of weather damage.
Preliterate humans, however, knew the difference between those common imitations and spiritual imitations of voices and visions from the Other World.
Those were clearly indications of the intent of the Other World and were to be imitated so the tribe could align themselves with that intent and thereby acknowledge that the tribe understood that intent. Petroglyphs (which were very difficult and time-consuming to carve into stone) are examples of this kind of imitation, as were the various type of cave drawings which were obviously drawn in a sacred place as these caves were considered passages to the Other World.
Again, we have to remember that this kind of imitation was a muthos way of saying to the Other World, "We hear your song, O most dark and beautiful, and we are returning it in the only way we know: the way you have shown us."
End Author´s Note
I contend, however, that it was this muthos way of imitating the divine order that brought about the initial carving of the face of the Sphinx and its subsequent phases.
We understand the political forces that brought about the carving of the Lincoln memorial, and we may understand the religious forces that brought about the cathedrals of Europe, but I doubt that our theorists have ever understood the radically different nature of the muthos consciousness that I contend would have brought about the carving of the face of the Sphinx in 6000 B.C..
Once that muthos consciousness is understood, however, and the various artistic and weathering considerations are added to it, my proposal as to the way the Sphinx was carved and why and when is almost inevitable.
With all that said, let's take a look the problems inherent in my proposal of such a phased (or periodic) carving of the Sphinx. If we assume a carving of the initial face c.6000 B.C., this means the Sphinx began to be carved 2800 years before Egypt became literate though the invention of a hieroglyphic language (3200 B.C.).
These dates are critical, because the scenario I am suggesting would only have taken place in a preliterate Proto-Egypt. This is because the cultural/spiritual forces present in preliterate Egypt c.6000 B.C. were radically different from those driving literate Dynastic Egypt in 2500 B.C.. Let me repeat myself on this: the consciousness of preliterate Egyptians and the consciousness of literate Egyptians were radically different.
Another way of putting this is to say that the preliterate mind was interested in artistically imitating everything it had experienced as a way of knowing it, whereas the literate mind is interested in logically examining everything it has experienced as a way of knowing it.
Both I and Julian Jaynes believe that Egypt remained caught between the two ways of looking at the world, the muthos and the logos, i.e., they operated with both forms of consciousness.
This is a very quick explanation of Jaynes' thinking on this matter. To get the whole picture you must read Janyes.
As for myself, I see this split muthos/logos consciousness as the reason why Dynastic Egyptian Balanced Male/ Female spirituality and its highly psychic Pharaonic burial practices developed as they did. This consciousness split is unique to Dynastic Egypt and critical to really understanding why it evolved as it did out of the preliterate Proto-Egyptian culture.
Despite this split (or perhaps because of it) Dynastic Egypt always remained intensely spiritually-driven, perhaps not as purely as in preliterate times, but it was present enough to make Dynastic Egyptian civilization immensely interesting to the later Greek and Roman civilizations, although in practice they seem to have focused mainly on its astronomical, architectural, and governing practices rather than its psychic-based spirituality.
There was one culture however, that was immensely interested in Egypt's spirituality per se, which was the Pre-Hebraic (c.6000-1300 B.C) and Hebrew cultures (c.1300 B.C. and onwards).
Outside of that we don't even know if the various Semitic tribes were really that much different from each other outside of the Semitic language variations that were probably used in a given area of the Levant. By that I mean they didn't see themselves as belonging to a particular country/ region of the Levant as we would do today seeing certain areas as Syrian or Lebanese or Jordanian, etc.
This is the period in which the Biblical stories of Abraham, Joseph and Moses take place. As it turns out, the scholarship indicates that Joseph was much more than a boy with a coat of many colors, because there is good evidence that he is connected in some way to the emergence of the Hyskos empire, which was a non-Egyptian Nile delta empire within Dynastic Egypt from 17001300 B.C.. I'll go into this shortly.
So there is a definite and unique connection between the two that indicates that the connection not only ran deep, but both ways. I intend to go into that deep connection, and it will take a little doing so bear with me.
If you have any initial doubts about the depth of that connection before I spell out the particulars, take a look at these Hebrew sarcophagi c. 1200 B.C.. They look oddly familiar, don't they? The fact that they also resemble the Saul Steinberg's New Yorker cartoons only thickens the brew.
Anyone trying to make their way to the top would have had their work cut out for them and then some, especially since they were non-Egyptians. It could never have been quite the kind of cakewalk it appears to be in the Bible. So how do we explain this kind of reporting? The Bible Writers were scrupulous reporters. What were they up to when they wrote these highly stylized accounts?
2. The Pre-Hebraic visitors were attracted to the vast spiritual empire of the Dynastic Egyptians and in particular the person of the Pharaoh, a living God who ruled over Egypt with absolute power.
We mustn' t forget that the Bible Writers were creating the Bible around 700 B.C., long after these events, yet they saw these Pre-Hebraic encounters ( and the stories they created about them) as setting the stage for the eventual creation of the Hebrew nation with its personal, monotheistic God.
So in effect, nothing else mattered except showing these two things about the Hebrew-Egyptian relationship.. After all, by the time of Moses, the PreHebraic tribes were beginning to move towards having an orderly relationship with a single God, something unthinkable in all the other polytheistic, animistic Mediterranean cultures surrounding them.
It was because of this obsession that it would be only natural for the Bible Writers to portray Joseph very calmly walking into the court of the Pharaoh (who is also the living God Horus) and interpreting his dreams, and in the case of Moses, directly challenging his authority, while at the same time ignoring everything else around them, including the Giza pyramids and the Sphinx.
The fact that the Biblical examples I've just used come from the Dynastic period, doesn't discount what I've just said about Proto-Egyptian spirituality. The Biblical examples I've given are simply what has survived historically because of the invention of writing and the particular oral tales selected by the Bible Writers. The fact of the matter is that Dynastic Egypt didn't become an intensely spiritual empire by opening a box of Crackerjacks. That spirituality had deep preliterate Proto-Egyptian roots as does the literate spirituality of every culture. Again, sorry, but that's the way it works.
Author's Note
Perhaps the best description of how deep that spirituality was is this one by Schwaller de Lubicz: Egypt didn't have a religion, Egypt was a religion. In other words, Egypt didn't have the kind of religion where you went to church on Sunday and that was it. Egypt was the church and you never left it. Got it? Dynastic Egypt was nothing less than a muthos imitation of the divine order
End Author´s Note
It was all one long pageant that never ended. Note that the stars are included in the pageant, as are the sun and moon. Nothing was separate in Egypt. The intensity of that spiritual pageant is reflected in the Hebrew obsession with Egypt. Even the infant Jesus has to escape to Egypt to be safe. Egypt was the mother lode. Again, I believe you can get a glimpse of that by reading between the lines of the Bible. When you do, it is clear that these Pre-Hebraic tribes couldn't stop being attracted to Dynastic Egypt's immense spiritual empire and the Pharaoh, a living God, nor could the Egyptians stop being attracted to the superior mental acuity of the PreHebraic tribes.
It developed out of their own preliterate spiritual roots, their early logos consciousness, and their exposure to the spirituality of Egypt, most especially the Pharaoh, a living God.
I believe the core spiritual attraction for the Pre-Hebraic tribes was the Pharaoh, a living God. To gaze upon, or stand before, or speak to such a God would have been a a heady experience for any preliterate Hebrew tribes moving, however blindly, toward a single God.
Although we are talking here about the interaction between the Pre-Hebraic tribes and the Pharaohs of literate Dynastic Egypt in the period 3200-1300 B.C., I believe that even in very early preliterate times, say around c.60005000 B.C., that some of the Pre-Hebraic tribes were experiencing the evolution of an early stage of logos consciousness and may have begun to have vague thoughts of one, not many Gods, as that is the nature of logos consciousness: to seek unity out of the many.
I say this even though this was also time when the preliterate Pre-Hebraic tribes still possessed muthos consciousness and were still driven by a polytheistic spirituality.
This is going so far back into the darkness of preliterate times, however, that there is no hard evidence of such early Pre-Hebraic movements toward one God except the peculiar nature of the Biblical visits themselves in 2000-1300 B.C., which were always focused on the living god Pharaoh to the exclusion of everything else. You could say that these Biblical visits were demonstrations to the living God Pharaoh of the superior mental capabilities of the Pre-Hebraics.
There is the problem, of course, that the earliest recorded interaction (Joseph, c.1700 B.C.) is hardly close to the 6-5000 B.C. period we'd like to investigate.
Yet, there is enough smoke around Joseph's interaction with the Pharaoh c.1700 B.C. (namely, the establishment of the 400 year, non-Egyptian Hyskos Empire in the Nile delta) to convince me that Joseph's Pre-Hebraic interactions with Egypt were not the first. It was one of many is the most likely case.
I'll say more shortly about what this establishment of an non-Egyptian empire within Egypt means, especially in terms of what it tells us of the military and organizational capability of the Pre-Hebraic tribes immigrating into the delta c 1700 B.C., which I contend reflects their possessing an early form of logos consciousness that made them mentally superior not only to the preliterate Nubians immigrating into the Nile delta c. 6000-3200 B.C , but also to the literate Dynastic Egyptians, who I contend never fully gave up their muthos consciousness.
What I mean by that is that The Covenant can be seen as an agreement between God and the Hebrews aimed at insuring that God would act reasonably in His interactions with the Hebrews. In a manner of speaking, The Covenant made the Hebrews and God contractual equals under the law, each being bound by the conditions of the agreement.
Author's Note