A Drop of History 53

The phoenix
The fabled bird that is reborn out of its own ashes

Quite often history makes references to symbols and myths that hide as much truth as the priestesses’ abstruse oracles. Usually the terminology that the ancient gods used in their messages to humans was so simplistic that only a fool would believe them, but their interpretations were anything but naïve.

A long time ago, in distant and mystery-riddled Egypt, people created the phoenix. A legendary bird, which, according to the myth, lived for five hundred years. The Egyptians believed that the soul of Osiris – the first god that rose from the dead – had assumed the bird’s form. Its first name was Bennu, and later the Greeks renamed it Phoenix.

Voltaire, in his book La Princesse de Babylone, describes this wondrous bird: “It was large like an eagle, and its gaze was as sweet and tender as an eagle’s is haughty and threatening. Its beak was rose-coloured. Its neck had all the colours of the rainbow, but even more bright and vivid. A thousand shades of gold sparkled on its wings. Its feet seemed to be a combination of purple and silver, and the tails of the beautiful birds that draw Hera’s chariot were much inferior to its own.”

According to the legend, this exquisite creature appeared miraculously in the sky, always towards the east. Its appearance was linked to cosmic changes. When the phoenix felt its end approaching, it would build a nest of aromatic woods, clove and cinnamon. The nest would ignite under the sun’s rays and the phoenix would remain in it until it was consumed. Mysteriously, a large egg would remain among the ashes, and the new phoenix would, just as miraculously, hatch out of it. Its first duty was to carry the ashes to the temple of the Sun, in Heliopolis.

For analysts, this resurrection signifies the soul’s immortality. But the phoenix’s uniqueness is in the fact that resurrection “stole” nothing of its previous existence. The phoenix is reborn with full knowledge of what it is, contrary to the eastern religions’ tenets, which believe in reincarnation, but the memories of previous lives are not supposed to be carried into the next. This particular element we will find much later in Christianity, referring to the resurrection of Jesus.

Voltaire goes on contemplating the subject: “Is it not equally easy for the great god to continue acting upon a little spark of himself? He had already given me emotion, memory, and thought, and he continues to give those to me. Whether he granted this gift to a fiery particle of matter hidden within, or to the entirety of my organs, it makes no difference deep down: men and phoenixes will continue to ignore how this is done….”

Still, it was an act of dreadful irreverence towards history and mythology that this incredibly conceived mythological symbol was chosen as the emblem of the Greek colonels’ dictatorship, arguably the most uneducated and uncultured people ever to take the reins of this country.

© Dimitris Kambourakis 2002, All Rights Reserved
Translation from the Greek © M.A.K. 2007, All Rights Reserved

A Drop of History 40

Yin and yang
Confucius’ exhortations to the Chinese

Shall we take a trip to China today? Not for any other reason, but because we Europeans are convinced that world history has been created only in our part of the world. For us, whatever has happened over the rest of the world is just footnotes and stub chapters in our history books… or so we think.

Vast China has seen flourishing civilisations and empires whose power and magnificence were inconceivable by European minds. The three religions that spread and took root in China were Taoism, Buddhism and Confucianism. Despite risking being simplistic, let us rank Taoism and Buddhism among the religions of the people and consider Confucianism to be the religion of the upper social classes. And let us get a taste of Confucianism and its beliefs, in order to realise the complexity of those societies, in contrast to simpler and more accessible religions like Christianity or Islam.

The motion of the universe, nature and people is determined by the alternation of yin and yang. Yin and yang are the two opposite sides of one item, phenomenon or emotion. Shadow is yin, sunshine is yang; cold is yin, heat is yang; female is yin, male is yang; calm is yin, activity is yang; joy is yin, hatred is yang, and so on. The list is endless. The motion from yin to yang and back is the motion of the universe.

The alternating rhythm of yin and yang is the Tao. According to Confucianism, nature’s Tao is determined and constant. But humankind, being an anarchic, troublemaking element, has the freedom not to follow its Tao, and thus disturb the predetermined harmony of alternating yin and yang.

And therein lies the supreme meaning of virtue. The virtuous man does not tamper with the Tao, that is, tradition and established order. The one who wants to change what has been valid forever is impious and dangerous. Confucius says: “The definition of good government is the ruler being a ruler, the subject a subject, the father a father and the son a son.” Despite the charming, to the Westerner, elements, despite its apparent relativity, this religion is nothing but a system seeking to perpetuate the structure of a society divided into rich and poor, patricians and plebeians.

Confucius also says: “The ruler’s virtue is like the wind, the humble people’s virtue is like the grass. The grass always bends before the blowing wind.”

Truce with that obsession of world history with reminding us, all over the world and all over time, that, despite different names and rites, we are the grass and the others are the wind, before which we have to bend…

© Dimitris Kambourakis 2002, All Rights Reserved
Translation from the Greek © M.A.K. 2007, All Rights Reserved

A Drop of History 39

The intellectual brilliance of Islam
When knowledge and science were in Muslim hands

When the modern West – that’s us – talks about Islam and Muslims, the first thing that comes to (our) mind is a series of undeveloped societies, backward, unable to adapt to the new times. We consider such societies to be stuck in ignorance and barbarous customs that have nothing to do with the 21st century. Basically, that is the case. Islam’s vital space remained underdeveloped and immobilised during the crucial centuries when Western societies lived their intellectual rebirth, political reformation, industrial revolution, and now electronic globalisation. Some exceptional regions, like the Turkish coast, Lebanon, northern Egypt and Tunisia, confirm the rule rather than refute it.

And yet, we should know that there was a long period of time when Islam, and not the West, led world civilisation. Between the 8th and the 12th century, while Europe was rotting in the gloom of the Dark Ages and Byzantium was sinking into decay, the Muslim world was a garden cultivating philosophy, astrology, medicine, poetry, mathematics, theology and architecture. In every city, from Baghdad to Cordoba, there were vast libraries, universities and centres of medical study, that the West could not even conceive of. The Arabs developed algebra (a pure Arabic word as well) and trigonometry, defining the sine and the tangent. The Arabs solved biquadratic equations as early as the 16th century. Over 50% of the drugs used in modern medicine are based on the discoveries of Arabs of that period. Their geographers were unsurpassed; they corrected Ptolemy’s errors in calculating latitude and longitude, and they invented the astrolabe long before the West utilised it to make voyages overseas.

In medicine they were also very advanced. The Egyptian Ibn al-Nafis discovered pulmonary circulation three centuries before Michael Servetus, who is glorified by modern medicine. In philosophy, Islam in its heyday could count on enlightened minds, whose theories were hugely influential in both East and West. The Muslim world of the time was won over by Aristotle. There were countless scholars of falsafa, that is, Greek philosophy. The most illustrious philosophers were Al-Kindi, Al-Farabi, Avicenna, Al-Ghazali, and the famous Averroes. It seems incredible, but the West discovered Aristotle and built its Renaissance on him, not through copies of his works in the Greek language but through the translations that Averroes had elaborated.

Of course, a lot has changed for Islam since then. The educated have become illiterate, the strong have become weak, fanatics have got the upper hand, enlightened minds have been persecuted, but that is the fate of societies and civilisations, regardless of how unwilling to believe it one is at the time of thriving and optimism.

© Dimitris Kambourakis 2002, All Rights Reserved
Translation from the Greek © M.A.K. 2007, All Rights Reserved