Manu Wrote:
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> Another comment I have pertains to the premise of
> your Opening Post and Headline. I don't think
> proof is needed to show that ancient people were
> not superstitious. I think that goes without
> saying. They were not. Superstition is a type of
> belief which is unreasonable given what should be
> known. For an ancient Egyptian to believe that
> s/he was touched by Shu when the wind hit his or
> her face is very reasonable since Shu wasn't just
> the god of air who made air move, he was
> air. Shu did not cause air to move, Shu moved
> himself. This isn't some kind of modern
> conjecture. This is what Egyptian texts say in no
> uncertain terms, ie in the type of terms you
> demand in which they should be read and this is
> documented. This is the mindset they are telling
> us they had and this is the best we can do in
> trying to understand their writings. I actually
> think this is not too different from what you are
> trying to say. The problem you have created for
> yourself is that you think traditional
> interpretations of their writings are not
> concrete enough to reflect this physical
> perception of the world. You have assumed that
> abstractions and multi-layered semantics cannot
> exist in such a concrete world view. I am
> questioning that logic. If you believe the
> utterance of a word amounts to bringing into
> existence that which is pronounced by it then you
> need a roundabout way to refer to it if you don't
> want to create it in that moment. That isn't
> word-playing in the sense of frivolous
> insinuating. That is mincing words and using other
> verbal techniques to invoke certain meanings (ie
> spells and phonetic activators) and for that there
> is also good evidence in the Egyptian language
> which you need to review. Don't take it from me.
>
> The upshot of this is: Superstition and Word-play
> are modern concepts which hardly apply to the
> ancient Egyptian language as you have, correctly I
> believe, identified but your conclusion from that
> does not follow: They did wish and hypothesize
> (since they had sentence modifying words which
> expressed it), written words had a life of their
> own (Heka eg) and so they did use "implications"
> for practical reasons to navigate between the
> world they could control and that which they
> couldn't. If you can conjure Mafet with a spell to
> kill Apep below the akhet then you don't want to
> use that spell until it's needed, not even by
> accident. That's the basis for roundabout written
> language. It's a necessity of religious life not a
> fancy pastime as we may erroneously assume. That
> is how one can plausibly approach the Pyramid
> Texts and some Egyptologists have done a better
> job than others in getting there, but reading an
> English translation of a German rendition won't.

Thank you.

I consider this a well reasoned argument against my thesis but it is hardly sufficient to explain the writing in its entirety. I'll have to think about this as well. I'll sleep on it.

But I don't believe this argument really weighs very heavily against the contention that the lack of the words of superstition demonstrates the inability to be superstitious. Yes, they could have known the gods were real but there's still the problem that the word "belief" is unattested. They'd still have occasion to believe that Shu kissed their cheek because the sun cheered him or because Tefnut was hot on his heels.

I can't imagine how the lack of an infrastructure of superstition can be irrelevant to their thinking.