EUANGELION: The Return of The Lost Man

 

I take my hat off to Dia, my friend and fellow blogger at the blog next door, Once Upon a Transdimensional Day, for her most recent post on The Imaginarium. She has taken hundreds of photographs of clouds in New Mexico and written an accompanying poem about the messages they convey. For me, the star of the show was The Last Cloud of August, which appeared over an Albuquerque parking lot two months ago. Dia's post proves that in times of upheaval, the answers are right in front of us; and we can see them in spite of tumultuous emotions, uncertainties and threats: 

"The alchemical term Aqua Vitae is generally applied to distilled ethanol alcohol, but my impression is that, in Hermetic alchemy, this same clear fluid was a metaphor for the purest of life-giving waters... . My personal understanding is that clouds are at that strange nexus on a (circular) consciousness spectrum closest to 'unconsciousness', that is, if we possessed an actual measure.***In any case, clouds are not dead matter.*** We have only to remember the substance of which they're composed. Aqua Vitae, the Vital Water." 

This vital water flows from the soul. We might say it clouds our vision literally and metaphorically as we seek what Dia calls, "aesthetic sentience." But if the clouds are signposts of that mysterious creative sentience, then clouded vision is paradoxically an indicator that we are gaining greater insight.

I would contend to gain higher vision regarding the truths in front of us, we should accept signs of wonder which are all around us.

How do we do that? We have to change how we engage with information. Dia's post was partly sparked by my comment under a post here, Night Tensions on the Island, about the Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus. That 2009 film, half-filmed with Heath Ledger before he died, sits balanced in a watershed moment, the final falling away of what remained of the twentieth century and the true advent of the twenty-first century. It was a period when the world doubled down on futuristic Internet use, while retaining a somewhat naive twentieth-century view of how we could manage that use.

The year 2009 also marked the turning point of the Great Recession. It additionally saw the Internet pivot from Web 1.0 to 2.0. It is no coincidence that Bitcoin was invented right on the same cusp, with the whitepaper published on Hallowe'en 2008 and the network launched in 2009. If you think mysteries do not rule our lives and we only live in a quantified world, when blockchains will underpin the whole mechanical under-structure of AI, don't you think it's a little weird that we still do not know who Satoshi Nakamoto is? 

In the same light, nobody could be more wrong than Yuval Noah Harari, who thinks that biotechnology makes the human experience programmable and removes God from the equation. Ironically, although Internet sleuths attack technocratic philosophers like Harari, they also place too much faith in linear rationalism and analysis. I have been arguing here that for red-pilled netizens, it is time to head for Level Three. We have to leave the red pills and rabbit holes behind. The mind gives an illusion of control over reality. No amount of research, no leak, no hacked dataset, no black-pilling, no pundit or podcast, no political ideology, and no whistleblower's revelation will give us the key to the door through which we have to walk. 

It is not that we should ignore the fact that the Internet has become a sea of data. But we need to address this fact in a different way and see that the rise of technology is part of greater story of our own species and our whole planet. Both technocrats and their critics have a compulsive need to rationalize, count and measure all the information out there. This empirical effort is futile. It will end in defeat. It is beyond the collective mental capacity of the human species to understand the vast depth of that sea. Nor can we count on artificial intelligence models to reliably manage and crunch that data. There is simply too much information to know what is happening through a posteriori investigations.

We have to leave bean-counting behind and consider that we are building hyper-technology so that it will lead us to a moral challenge at the heart of the human condition. We are heading towards the Imaginarium. To navigate the techno-human-planetary crisis successfully, we have to place our faith in the clouds that float across our limited horizons and recognize in their random patterns the oldest human dreams of language, love, memory and experience. In other words, it is possible to recognize small pieces of information as glyphs and intuit, a priori, whole worlds from single examples. This is sacrilege in the rationalist researcher's view, but it does not matter. There are indispensable truths which can be attained in no other way.

From today, one such sign appeared as ran across a single word and investigated its etymology: euangelion or εὐαγγέλιον.

Euangelion is the Greek source of the word evangelical, evangelist, evangelista: 

"this is the etymology for evangelical: evangelical 1530s 'of or pertaining to the gospel' (adj.), also 'a Protestant,' especially a German one (n.); with -al (1) + evangelic (early 15c.), from Old French evangelique, from Late Latin evangelicus, from evangelista (see evangelist). From mid-18c. in reference to a tendency or school in Protestantism seeking to promote conversion and emphasizing salvation by faith, the sacrifice of Christ, and a strictly religious life. As 'member of the "evangelical" party in a church' from 1804. Related: Evangelically; Evangelicalism (1812)."

In short, "The term evangelical is derived from the Koine Greek word euangelion, meaning 'good news,' in reference to the message of salvation through Jesus Christ. ... From the same as euaggelizo; a good message, i.e. The gospel -- gospel. ... The Gospel ... includes the entire Bible, i.e. it is not limited to how a person becomes a Christian."

I looked at the classical sources of the word. It does not just mean 'gospel,' or 'good tidings,' or 'good news,' and its meaning in the pre-Christian era obviously had nothing to do with later Christian connotations:

"STRONGS NT 2098: εὐαγγέλιον εὐαγγέλιον, εὐαγγελίου, τό (εὐάγγελος (cf. εὐαγγελίζω)), Hebrew בְּשׂורָה and בְּשֹׂרָה; a reward for good tidings (cf. τά διδασκαλία, the fees given the διδάσκαλος), Homer, Odyssey 14, 152; Cicero, ad Att. 2, 3 and 12; 13, 40; Plutarch, Demetr. 17; Ages. 33; the Sept. 2 Samuel 4:10. good tidings: Lucian, asin. 26; Appendix, b. civ. 4, 20; Plutarch; others; plural the Sept. 2 Samuel 18:22, 25, common text; but in each place εὐαγγελία should apparently be restored, on account of 2 Samuel 18:20 ἀνήρ εὐαγγελίας."

Odysseus returns home. This is an adapted image with several sources. Source.

 Let's look at Homer's Odyssey 14:

"Then the much-enduring, goodly Odysseus answered him: 'Friend, since thou dost utterly make denial, and declarest that he will never come again, and thy heart is ever unbelieving, therefore will I tell thee, not at random but with an oath, that Odysseus shall return. And let me have a reward for bearing good tidings, as soon as he shall come, and reach his home; clothe me in a cloak and tunic, goodly raiment. But ere that, how sore soever my need, I will accept naught; for hateful in my eyes as the gates of Hades is that man, who, yielding to stress of poverty, tells a deceitful tale. Now be my witness Zeus, above all gods, and this hospitable board, and the hearth of noble Odysseus to which I am come, that verily all these things shall be brought to pass even as I tell thee. In the course of this self-same day Odysseus shall come hither, as the old moon wanes, and the new appears. He shall return, and take vengeance on all those who here dishonor his wife and his glorious son.'"

So the word 'euangelion' does not just refer to good news or good tidings, although that is its basic meaning as used by Cicero (see here and here). It refers to the good news that a man will return to his home after a long journey, after he was presumed to be lost. It also places that return within a certain destined time frame.

The word also can be contextualized in terms of good news after an agonizing wait or long delay, and there is a feeling of relief around it. From Plutarch's Demetrius 17:5, in the 1770 translation by John and William Langhorne, we see good news regarding the Battle of Salamis in 306 BCE:

"The king by this time much alarmed, and having no longer patience, went to the door to meet him. A great crowd was gathered about Aristodemus, and the people were running from all quarters to the palace to hear the news. ... When he was near enough to be heard, he stretched out his hand, and cried aloud, 'Hail to king Antigonus! we have totally beaten Ptolemy at sea; we are masters of Cyprus, and have made 16,800 prisoners.' Antigonus answered, 'Hail to you too, my good friend; but I will punish you for torturing us so long; you shall wait long for your reward.'"

This is a more precise 1920 translation from Bernadotte Perrin:

"Accordingly, when he had come near, he stretched out his hand and cried with a loud voice: 'Hail, King Antigonus, we have conquered Ptolemy in a sea-fight, and now hold Cyprus, with twelve thousand eight hundred soldiers as prisoners of war.' To this Antigonus replied: 'Hail to thee also, by Heaven! but for torturing us in this way, thou shalt undergo punishment; the reward for thy good tidings thou shalt be some time in getting.'"

ὡς οὖν ἐγγὺς ἦλθεν, ἐκτείνας τὴν δεξιὰν ἀνεβόησε μεγάλῃ τῇ φωνῇ ‘χαῖρε, βασιλεῦ Ἀντίγονε, νικῶμεν Πτολεμαῖον ναυμαχίᾳ καὶ Κύπρον ἔχομεν καὶ στρατιώτας αἰχμαλώτους μυρίους ἑξακισχιλίους ὀκτακοσίους.’ ὁ δὲ Ἀντίγονος, ‘καὶ σύ, νὴ Δία, χαῖρε,’ εἶπεν: ‘οὕτω δὲ ἡμᾶς βασανίσας δίκην ὑφέξεις: βράδιον γὰρ ἀπολήψῃ τὸ εὐαγγέλιον.’

This is a word which can tell a story of a man taking up a heroic mantle, and in spite of uncertainty around his aims and movements, he achieves victory and reaches home in the end. Again, euangelion can simply mean 'good news,' but this is not 'good news' in a simple sense. It is good news in relation to a greater destiny achieved, even if we do not know how or why, followed by a moment when the clouds part and the sun shines through.