Man’s Self-Image and Timefrom Changing Images of Man Ed. by OW Markley & Willis W. Harman 1982
the Mesopotamian valley ~3500BC
“from their observations of repeated heavenly movements which were correlated with times of planting, reaping, etc., and professional priesthood discovered the arts of precise astronomical observation, mathematical reckoning, and writing. The priestly watchers of the skies had become aware of something most remarkable and exciting, completely unknown before, namely, the mathematical regularity, precisely measurable, of the passages of the moon, the sun, and the five visible planets. With that discovery came a completely new conception of the universe and of the human place within it. No longer were the determinants of the image of one’s self in the world to be the animals which one hunted or the plants of a lush environment self-renewed trough death, but an ever-increasing factual knowledge of the natural order of the universe. Moreover – and possibly because this new type of knowledge could not be extended to the entire community – there developed abruptly at this time a clear distinction between governing and governed classes.”
re: Zoroastrianism
“In this teaching, time was imagined not as an ever-cycling round (as in most of the conceptions before approximately 1200 BC), but as a linear trend to victory, which was to culminate in a season of prodigious wars and the appearance, finally, of a second Savior, Saoshyant, through whom the Lord of teh Lie and all his works were to be annihilated. The dead were then to be resurrected and all would dwell forever in light and truth.”
