Verified Petrified Gnosis

Last updated on: February 4, 2015 at 6:41 am by David Pollard

Verified Petrified Gnosis 2015-02-04T06:41:21+00:00 David Pollard

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In the mid-1980’s, a few years before I had ever heard of Unitarians, I was running around with a circle of aspiring witchlets enthusiastically pouring over What Witches Do, and The Spiral Dance, then concocting our own rituals. While I was totally on board with the idea of Goddess veneration, somehow the rituals left me reluctant and uneasy.

Yet there was an aspect to Paganism, that thoroughly grabbed my attention and has never really completely let it go. It was this idea – there’s this town, that 2400 years ago, in one generation, essentially created the core of

photo courtesy of shutterstock

everything that’s good about Western culture: democracy, the Scientific process, theater, philosophy, naturalistic sculpture, humanism, etc. Athens was not a large city – especially in modern terms. At that time, it only had about 50,000 people and when you exclude the non-citizens, slaves and women who didn’t really get to actively participate in civic life, you’re down to only about 5,000 men that did all of this stuff over just a very few decades. What was it that made them so darn creative? And even more importantly, looking at all the problems the world faces today – is it repeatable?

The simple answer is that they didn’t do it all by themselves. The entire Mediterranean basin had been swapping trade goods and ideas for thousands of years, and has continued to do so until this day. To an extent, all the Athenians had to do was reorganize existing Egyptian, Greek and Persian ideas – but there were also a lot of concepts that they came up with totally on their own. Then, when the Athenians were overwhelmed by larger military forces, perceptive rulers in the Macedonian, then Roman Empires recognized that Athens was a great place to steal ideas from, and their schools were a good place to train future leaders. This way, Athens was able to keep it’s “brand” alive and actively promote many of its ideas for nearly a full millennia after they lost their own political independence.

Some of the literary output from those times survive. However, it’s a rather selectively chosen bunch of writings. Given the perishable nature of scrolls and books, until the invention of the printing press, everything had to be hand copied every couple of centuries or so, or it would crumble to dust. Most of the intervening centuries the people doing the copying would be Christian monks, or Islamic scholars depending on where you were. So naturally, texts advocating a polytheist or non-theist worldview were less likely to be copied than texts that didn’t venture into those topics.

Villa of the Papyri

There is one significant exception to this though. Calpurnius Piso, was a wealthy 1st Century Roman who had a villa in Herculaneum that featured an extensive library of several thousand scrolls. When Vesuvius blew it’s top in AD79, his villa was buried by 20 meters of hot ash and everything in it was baked. All his scrolls were still there, but now they looked like crescent rolls which had been left in the oven for a week too long. They can’t be opened and read like a regular scrolls. If you try, they fall apart into ash.

This is where technology comes to the rescue. Even though the scrolls are charred black, if you throw infra-red and ultra-violet light at them, those types of light reflect off differently from burnt ink, than from burnt papyrus – so you get an image. For the scrolls that can’t be unrolled (the vast majority of them) you can do this with a CT Scanner, and create a 3-D image, that you can then “digitally unroll” in a computer. It’s actually more complicated that it sounds though, because the scrolls didn’t bake evenly, so they are twisted, bent and torn. But with patience and steadily improving computer Artificial Intelligence, solving this is a case of when, not if. After all, look at the success we’ve have in recent years deciphering the twisted, microscopic, double-helix of DNA which runs in all our cells.

So what kind of texts are we likely to find, free of the filter of millenia of monotheist copyists?

Piso would probably have not bought or selected his own books, it’s thought that he hired a philosopher friend, Philodemus of Gadara to stock his library for him. If this is the case, this will give Pagan Atheists and Agnostics a lot to cheer about. Philodemus was an Epicurean philosopher, who taught that the universe was more or less an accident that was no providential god, and that the good life was a mixture of pleasure and temperance. It will be even more interesting to see what other scrolls are included. Since this is the only intact library from classical antiquity, we really don’t know what will be included – will it be jam packed with books the buyer thought Piso would agree with, or did he try to create a well-rounded collection of a varieties of schools of thought? We won’t know until the scrolls get deciphered.

This whole drama reminds me of the Five Smooth Stones of Liberal Religion as described by James Luther Adams, a Unitarian philosopher from the mid-20th Century. His idea was that unlike orthodox Christians who considered revelation to be sealed – ie that there would be no new books to the Bible, etc. That revelation and truth are not closed, but constantly revealed. While I don’t know if he meant it at literally as in this instance, the Villa of the Papyri looks like a really good example to me.

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