Basic characteristics of space and time. Abstract: The formation of mythological ideas about space and time The formation of mythological ideas

We use the term “myth”, and in psychological practice it can mean, according to philological habit, “genre”, and, most often, this is a kind of mythical substance, the fabric of myth, a level of mythological existence that rises above the everyday.

In different civilizations, ideas about the mythological essence were associated with the existence of elements (images, symbols) of a higher, divine being. These are the “me” of the ancient Sumerians, principles and concepts that are fundamentally significant for human culture. “Eidos” of Plato, ideas or “seals”, hierarchically organized reality of the higher world. The runes of the ancient Germans and Scandinavians are magical signs that embody the basic principles of human existence.

It is most convenient for us to express the idea of ​​​​myth as a certain layer of symbolic existence using the following diagram:

Scheme No. 1. “Myth and reality”

There is an everyday reality, clearly confirmed by empirical experience and some objective evidence. As a result of its non-literal awareness, as a consequence of human cognitive development, its abstract representation arises in the world of ideas, concepts or symbols.

However, the attitude towards myth as a separate essence of perceived existence occurred only in the era of secularization of consciousness, with a decrease in the role of religion and an increase in the role of rational explanations in the life of society. As a result, in the era of Enlightenment (XVIII) and Rationalism (XIX century), the idea of ​​myth as a sacredly significant cultural phenomenon was leveled. It began to be perceived as “fiction, delusion or lie,” and this meaning is still relevant, although not the only one. This awareness of the myth, accepted as a postulate, was itself a derivative of the scientific mythological thinking of that time, from the belief in truth, cognizable empirically or otherwise through natural science.

Accordingly, philosophers, art critics and romantic poets argued with this “postulate of faith”: F. Schelling, I.-I. Winkelman, I.-W. Goethe, who adopted a different ideological system of worldview. They perceived myth as an independent discourse. Myth was for them a kind of poetry, different from prosaic truth presented in the figurative comparison of allegories. Myth should have been judged as a poetic product with independent value and integrity. Myth, according to F. Schelling, requires not anatomical decomposition, but a synthetic understanding. Moreover, he puts forward the idea of ​​the primacy of myth for the history of a people: it is not history that creates myth, but myth that creates history.

Scheme No. 2 “Philosophical debate”

Here, in schematic form, we see how differently the objective reality given by empirical experience (1 and 2) could be reflected by philosophers - materialists, rationalists and empiricists (1a) and poets - romantics (2a).

In every era, contemporary mythological ideas about man and his place in the world arise: modern mythology of this kind includes ideas about the loneliness or proximity of humanity in the Universe, about the influence of human civilization on the climate and the revenge of Mother Earth, the already exhausted myth about peoples – older and younger brothers, and others. Max Weber spoke about the historical rationalization of the picture of the world, which leads to the devaluation of the idea of ​​the sacred. However, the collapse of one mythological structure invariably leads to the creation of another (a clear example is the revolutionary myths of Russia in the first third of the 20th century).

By the beginning of the 20th century, in the wake of fascination with folk tradition and ancient philology, scientists came to the conclusion that myth is a historically and psychologically important metaphor. I. Bachofen made an attempt to link individual types and groups of myths with the historical stages of human development: matriarchy and patriarchy. This idea, directly or indirectly, influenced the views of S. Freud, K.-G. Jung and their followers, both in the light of the individual and collective development of humanity. One of the continuing trends is the idea of ​​myths as metaphors of maternal (female) or paternal (male) power in a cultural or ontogenetic context.

The emergence and development of anthropological science, getting rid of the veil of the theory of J.-J. Rousseau's idea of ​​the beautiful “natural man” led to the study of the mentality of primitive peoples who had survived to that time. Initially, it was believed that their natural state corresponded to the archaic period of “civilized” peoples; later, however, they abandoned this hypothesis for lack of evidence. L. Lévy-Bruhl's research helped to identify the features of primitive magical or “mythological” thinking characteristic of the archaic stage of the development of consciousness. As a rule, a person is possessed by collective ideas characteristic of a group. In addition, the entire surrounding world has an animated, mystical character, capable of manifesting it completely unpredictably (tools of labor can be like “living”, etc.), which is why it is necessary to constantly maintain a certain ritual balance, which is achieved by certain rites, rituals and taboos. In one of T. Pratchett's philosophical fantasies there is a definition of this key mythological worldview: if you do not create the necessary ritual, the Sun will not rise - instead we will see just a simple ball of burning gas. This transformation of the literal into the symbolic gives rise to the unity of myth and poetry.

In accordance with the theory of psychological ontogenesis, repeating civilizational phylogeny, or with the theory of K.-G. Jung about the most ancient layer of the collective unconscious, the archaic layer of the individual unconscious and the more developed layers of consciousness and awareness of modern man, the man of our time has not gotten rid of the layer of magical consciousness.

We divide the mythological thinking of modern man into conscious and unconscious. To the first we include poetry, artistic creativity, scientific movements, philosophy and religion. The second includes superstitions, “myths of ideas” (for example, “all women are bad drivers”), mass ideology and neuroses. Unconscious magical (mythological) thinking is distinguished by reductionism (from the Latin Reductio - reduction, bringing back), in this case, by turning to past experience as an explanation of the causes of the present without a consistent cause-and-effect relationship. As a rule, this is the disclosure of a certain “sign” that has a specific interpretation, usually positively or negatively charged. For example, the explanation of an unsuccessful marriage is that they forgot to tie a red ribbon on the wedding car. At the same time, mythological thinking of a conscious type is capable of revealing a particular phenomenon in a more ambiguous way, for example, “sitting at the corner of the table” can mean for builders “get your own corner (housing),” and for cheerful women – the presence of “a man with a good corner” , i.e. potentially a nice man.

Mythological thinking of a higher type and, as a rule, conscious, is characterized by a teleological component that determines the expediency of phenomena, which imply a rational meaning, a spiritual call or a personal challenge to a person. The tool of this process is often the disclosure of a symbol, which differs from a sign in its inexhaustible ambiguity and special power of meaning.

The English anthropologist B. Malinovsky, studying the primitive cultures of modern tribes, found that among these peoples myth plays the function of codifying rules, understanding and strengthening them, and setting behavioral guidelines. He concludes that myth for civilization is not a literary work, allegory or fiction, but the legal basis of faith and moral wisdom. Here we can say that the same applies to the myths of our civilization, which we take on faith and which have a certain meaning and power. The collective myths of Western culture currently include myths about democracy as the best form of government; about conventional allopathic medicine as a guarantee of maintaining health and beauty; about youth as the best period of a person’s life; about children as angelic beings; about the humiliation of women in patriarchal societies. In accordance with these objects of faith, demonic antagonists are recognized: despotism as a form of government; homeopathy with its own code of disease and healing; maturity and old age as the decline of human existence; naughty, capricious, aggressive children; men - in feminist myths.

Another famous anthropologist, M. Eliade, gave the concept of a mythological locus, time and space, different from the usual ones, where the action of the myth takes place. Here the same events can always and invariably unfold, a certain cyclical or random sequence of plot development. Therefore, Persephone is kidnapped by Hades every year, and then returns to her mother again in the spring. The mythological locus refers to that which “has happened forever” or “has been and will be always and now.” To one degree or another, all secondary, harmonious or consonant events from the real world correspond to the events of this locus.

First of all, rituals turn out to be conscious similarities to the events of the mythological locus. They confirm the special rhythm of the myth, which can not only happen once or occur from time to time in a random order, but also sound at a strictly defined time. This is especially true for seasonal holidays and initiation rituals.

Scheme No. 3 “Myth and Ritual”

This diagram shows that the same myth, as a postulate of the worldview, requires the systematic execution of a ritual confirming it. Also, and vice versa: observing the repetition of this or that collective ritual, we can wonder about its true, and not literal, symbolic and mythological saturation and meaning.

In “The Myth of the Eternal Return” Mircea Eliade points to the ability of archaic and pre-Christian (even “non-Christian”, regardless of time) man as a whole to recreate his Cosmos (ordered world) from Chaos (non-existence or complete confusion and confusion) . Archaic and pagan mythology in general is always cyclical: linear time became important only under Christianity, where there are unique acts, such as the birth, sacrifice and ascension of Jesus Christ. Therefore, for archaic, pagan man, it becomes possible to “repair the world,” which took place at the critical moment of the end of one annual cycle and the beginning of a new one. The collective unconscious, even in our time, still tries to repeat this ritual: it is not in the “adult” rituals of celebrating the New Year, but it remains in children's holidays. The New Year's performance in most cases tells us about the “evil forces” that are preventing us from celebrating the New Year (they stole the Snow Maiden, put Santa Claus to sleep, stole a bag of gifts, etc.) and about their curbing, essentially saving the world. Round dances around the Christmas tree, accompanied by a “big figure” - Santa Claus, reminds us of the symbolism of the World Tree and our existence in the Middle World of mortals.

Myth and ritual are always the creation of Cosmos from Chaos, therefore myth is closely related to ritual in primitive cultures. It was possible to restore order only through the affirmation of myth at a time and place when reality was again destroyed by a breakthrough of chaos (for example, in critical situations of disasters or at breakpoints in time at the end of one and the beginning of another cycle). Until now, ritual is capable of affirming a myth: this happens with state, social and military rituals that affirm the idea of ​​certain social rules and relationships as a given: the inauguration of the president, a military parade, the commemoration of fallen soldiers, the “first line” at school, etc.

The mythological locus allows one to concentrate a certain meaning and power in the “world of ideas”, sufficient to be extended to the world of everyday life. This is what a person’s individual and collective ideas about the world are built on.

Religious myths, fairy tales, epics, political ideology, social ideas, national identity, family traditions, and family legends are born and created from mythological matter. And we can present here the following characteristics of this symbolic primal substance:

The myth is literal; there is no metaphor in it itself. Metaphor is born in the transition from the world of symbols to the literal world.

Myth is characterized by the greatest concentration of meaning. Pre-logical thinking and the causal (causal) meaning of any combinations dominate here.

Myth is the root plot of all numerous repetitions, both told and lived.

Myth is ambivalent: due to its symbolic nature, it presupposes a polarity of views and assessments.

The myth is created, not given above. The mythological form is created by human culture.

A myth is an idea of ​​the world that does not require evidence, only the power of faith and meaning.

The myth is transmitted externally by the individual and society. He can describe the world around him and its components quite well according to certain characteristics; otherwise, phenomena not represented in the myth will be designated as external “chaos” in comparison with the “ordered cosmos” of the myth.

Common collective myths are ideas expressed in the formula “We are good, they are bad”: this is how nationalist ideas, religious intolerance, “war of the sexes”, ideas of the stage of “teenage rebellion” are manifested. The civilizational myth of Western culture (both Christian and Islamic) is the idea of ​​one’s religious knowledge as a “light of truth” for other, unenlightened peoples. In the last three centuries, this messianic myth has morphed into the idea of ​​scientific enlightenment and the promotion of democracy to backward peoples and states.

Common individual myths at the moment we can call the ideas of fatalism (everything in the family is written as destined) and its polar opposite - individualism (man makes his own destiny). It is noteworthy that these provisions entered into individual polarity when collective religious ideas lost special interest in this issue or disagreed. In addition, each individual carries within himself a unique compendium of various myths, certain aspects of collective beliefs or typical ideas that create his own unique mythological picture of the world.

In the narrow sense of the word, “our myths” we can call certain “important stories” and “significant images”, whose existence is fundamental for one person, his loved ones, society, people, civilization. Thus, the image of the Mother remains the eternal symbol, and the significant stories associated with it will coincide in some ways and differ in some ways in different cultures and in different individual stories. How different are the Christian Mother of God Mary, the Greek goddess of fertility Demeter and the Scandinavian goddess of the Wild Hunt Frigg, but they all experienced the death of their children and mourned them. And for many women, their families, and family histories, this experience is familiar and significant.

Consciously chosen myths (religion adopted in adulthood, political views, etc.) can be both the result of existential experience and the following of a certain collective trend. Existential experience can lead both to entering into a myth (which can itself be a reservoir of similar experiences of many people) and to a conscious and meaningful conviction in something.

A myth is always real for a person, either literally or metaphorically, such as stories about the creation of man by God or how some general gave his grandfather his hat. A myth is always told when there is faith in it, and any story colored or saturated with faith can become a myth when repeated. This is something that does not require proof, but lives in ideas, which is why they are different in every era. Humanity stops telling some myths of history, continues others, and still others begins again and again, as if from scratch. For humans and humanity, myth is a creative force that transforms the chaos of impressions and disparate events into an orderly picture of the world.

But myth is not just an ordered system of knowledge, but a structure of significant phenomena and explanations of this world. Ritual, iconic images of any culture, regardless of the image code (anthropomorphic images, fantastic characters, abstract patterns) always give us a fragment of a myth, quite open or encrypted with multi-layered symbols understandable to the people of the era. These could be divine statues or zoomorphic reliefs from archaic eras, allegories of the Enlightenment, iconic patterns of Persian carpets or a Soviet propaganda poster from the 1920s. Any visual “sign” system of a culture is a static statement of its myth.

Myth unites people in society, and therefore there are family, national, local, state, cultural, and human myths. At the family level, the myth will be a family legend, but it will have a sacred, special meaning (for example, the story of how a person saw a sign in the sky during the war, “the hammer and sickle,” on the eve of the Battle of Stalingrad). This may be an everyday story, about the rescue of a girl by strangers, but its significance will be so great that it will become a family myth. It is not the magic and supernatural experience that makes a story a myth, but the significance (emotional “power”) of the story for the storyteller and the audience.

Myths, in the general sense, will be historical songs, epics, spiritual poems, legends, stories about evil spirits, fairy tales, etc. Symbolic structures and rituals of a culture and subcultures will also be mythological. If, with the destruction or insufficient significance of a general cultural mythological layer, a myth, sign and ritual of a narrow community arises, then it becomes a subculture. Hence the myths, rituals and signs of youth subcultures, religious sects, criminal subcultures, and professional communities.

By myth in the broad sense of the word we will consider the image of the world (and the individual, in his likeness) and the history of the world. The first function of myth remains the protection of man, providing him with the boundaries of the knowable Cosmos (within the framework of myth) in the midst of unknown Chaos. We will call its second function development, challenge, testing, a certain requirement that myth provides to man so that he is able to recognize himself not as an animal or an elemental creature, but as a human being.

References:
1. Lévy-Bruhl L. Supernatural in primitive thinking. – M.: Pedagogy Press. – 1994.

2. Malinovsky B. Magic, science, religion. – M.: Refl-book. – 1998.

3. Pratchett T. Santa Hryakus. – M.: Eksmo; SPb.: Domino. – 2005.

4. Toporov V.N. Myth. Ritual. Symbol. Image: Research in the field of mythopoetic: Selected. – M.: Progress-Culture. – 1995.

5. Schelling F. Works in 2 volumes - volume 2. - M.: Mysl. – 1995.

6. Shinkarenko V.D. The semantic structure of sociocultural space: Myth and fairy tale. – M.: KomKniga. – 2005.

7. Eliade M. Space and history. – M.: Progress. – 1987.

8. Jung K.-G. Archetypes and symbol. – M.: Renaissance. – 1991.

The article presents a philosophical and cultural approach to the existence and nature of myth. The myth is presented as a postulate of the collective worldview of people of a certain community, which does not require proof, only the power of faith and meaning. Any “sign” system of a culture or subculture is a statement of its myth.

A huge amount of research has been devoted to the analysis of temporal representations in the structure of mythological consciousness. Numerous works raise the problems of the structure of temporal representations in various mythologies, propose concepts of sacred ideas about time, and analyze the degree of dominance of cyclical or linear ideas about time.

Before analyzing mythological ideas about time, it should be noted that numerous studies create a wide field for discussion due to the fact that mythological descriptions of time in most mythological systems, although they have common features, have enormous diversity. The structure of temporal representations, both in simple mythologies and in the developed mythologies of Ancient Greece and Ancient Rome, Egypt, and Northern Europe, presents significant difficulties. A number of questions were posed in one of the latest monographs devoted to a comprehensive analysis of temporal representations, “History and Time in Search of the Lost” by I.M. Savelyeva and A.V. Poletaeva. In particular, it is difficult to structure general mythological ideas about time, since different peoples had predominance of certain components of the mythological temporal system.

When analyzing mythological ideas about time, we will build on the characteristics of the category of time existing in modern scientific literature [FES, 1983: 94]:

Time is objective and independent of human consciousness, of a person’s ability to perceive previous and subsequent events;

Time is a form of existence of matter, does not exist independently of matter, in other words, time is the environment in which objects are located, and each object is located at a certain point in time;

Time is continuous, there are no breaks in it;

Time is irreversible and unilinear, it flows from the past to the future, only the present moment really exists - now. An absolute repetition of past states and cycles is impossible - past events no longer exist, and future ones do not yet exist; this characteristic implies openness to time;

Time is one-dimensional; it has one dimension.

It should be recognized that we live in a world where the time factor is of great importance. But for the consciousness of a modern person, who, as a rule, operates with an everyday, and not an objective scientific understanding of time, time can be experienced, can be subjective: it can expand and thicken, it can stop and rush, it seems finite, and, finally, time can be heterogeneous [Losev, 1994: 87]. Such a perception of time becomes possible in Einstein's four-dimensional world, where time becomes the fourth parameter of material space. In the relativistic picture of the world, depending on the speed of movement of a body, its time can slow down or accelerate, or even vanish [Kosarev, 2000: 236-237].

Archaic man lived in an era when time had not yet become a factor of consciousness, but it certainly played a significant role in regulating human life. This proves the existence of the cult of time, which in different mythological systems was expressed by different temporal images. Time acted as an independent element of the universe.

In Greek mythology, time was personified by Kronos, in Roman Saturn, who was perceived as a symbol of merciless time, and in Greek mythology, Two-Faced Janus, who knew both the past and the future, was associated with time. In Iranian mythology, where the cult of time was extremely developed, time was personified by the highest deity - Zervan. In the beginning, Zervan was thought of only as infinite time (Zervan Akarana), existing initially, when the world arrived in an embryonic state. In the later parts of the Avesta, this image is complemented by the idea of ​​the final time (Zervan Dargahvadata) of this world, which correlates with this world, created and doomed to destruction. The bearers of the cult of time were also lower deities - the Moirai of the Greeks, the parks of the Romans, the Norns of the Scandinavians, symbolizing the past, present and future, and the calendar gods - Osiris, Dionysus, etc.

Thus, archaic man experienced the pressure of time. The time factor mattered, but only ancient man, unlike modern man, identified himself differently in the flow of time, as evidenced by the structure of mythological temporal ideas.

In the structure of the temporal consciousness of a person of the archaic era, different levels of perception of time can be distinguished.

From our point of view, time for archaic man was not one-dimensional. He lived simultaneously, as if in two time dimensions. The man of the mythological era knew not only chronological profane time, which is irreversible, transitory and moves from the past to the future towards death, but also sacred time, which is not contained in the continuous flow of time, but unshakably rises above it [Hübner, 1996: 129- 130]. Sacred time is a paradigm that is repeated, reactualized countless times and remains forever in the present: all events of the present and future have their own sacred prototype in myth, which can explain them and fill them with primordial meaning. Due to this eternal repetition, sacred time can be cyclical and closed. Moreover, it is sacred time that is fundamental and decisive.

In myth, two time layers are distinguished: the time of explanation of phenomena and the time of origin of phenomena, thus, the myth combines two levels: diachronic and synchronic. A myth is a narrative about some primary sacred action that occurred in the beginning (Eliade, 1994: 63). The first ancestors, the first objects and the first causes refer to some initial time of first creation - the “mythological past” (which does not correspond to the historical past), when the creation of the cosmos from chaos and the ordering of the world took place. The current structure of the Universe, its order, is a consequence of the activities of the gods and ancestors in a long time ago. By creating the Universe, the gods also created Sacred Time. This time of beginning arose “immediately”; no other time existed before it, since no time could exist before the events told in the myth [Eliade, 1994: 49-50].

We have already written that the mythological act of creation is naming. The act of creating time was a verbal, onomathetic sacred act [Kurchanov, 1998: 35-36]. Only that which has a name can establish itself in existence. Here A.F.’s formula becomes clear. Losev “myth as an expanded magical name.”

The cultures of antiquity remain stubbornly faithful to the past; They are characterized by a high appreciation of the past, perceived as a timeless model, and not as a stage of formation. The story about the mythical time of creation and creation can primarily be found in the myths of creation - cosmogonic, anthropogonic, etiological. In higher mythology, ideas about the mythical primordial time can be transformed into a “golden age” or, conversely, an era of chaos, subject to order by the forces of the cosmos. Mythological initial times remain the background in the archaic epic (Edda, Kalevala).

Myth is characterized by the concept of the cyclical development of time. Cyclicity is a concept used in the theoretical analysis of mythology, characterizing the features of the mythological model of time and history. The concept of cyclic time is presented in its most complete form in the book by M. Eliade “The Myth of Eternal Return: Archetypes and Repetitions.” Man of archaic cultures did not actively try to influence history, but sought to organically fit into reality through the repetition of archetypal mythological models. The lack of distinction between the natural and human worlds, the lack of differentiation of the human personality led to the fact that in archaic society the passage of time was perceived as a regular alternation of such phenomena as day and night, winter and summer, dying and spring rebirth, birth and death. Natural and cosmic processes influenced the life of archaic man. The discovery of cyclicity in the movement of cosmic bodies and the periodicity of natural phenomena gave rise to a belief in their influence on the cyclical nature of earthly events, which was reflected in ritual practice.

Sacred time does not flow continuously, without breaks from past to future, but consists of time patterns independent of each other. The past, present and future are considered not in diachronic terms, but within the framework of a single cyclical model of mythological time. Because of this, the past can constantly be reborn in the present, at the same time being a predetermination of the future. Thus, in the present, the past and the future merge, existing simultaneously. This paradoxical interweaving of past and future is successfully expressed in English by the verb tense, which is called “future in the past”, and in French - “anterior future”.

Ancient man could stop, interrupt the flow of continuous worldly time, make the transition to mythological time through imitation of archetypal models [Eliade, 1998: 58-60]. Fear of history and progress forced a person to “refuse” history. It was possible to protect oneself from history only through cyclicality. Returning to the beginning, joining Eternity means achieving peace, constancy and harmony.

Thus, according to the views of M. Eliade, the cyclic model of time is characteristic of sacred temporal representations, and profane time is perceived linearly.

Here we should quote E.M.’s remark. Meletinsky that, at the basis of the very first temporal concepts, the cyclic concept of time is subordinated to the linear one [Meletinsky, 1995: 176]. EAT. Meletinsky believes that the archaic mythical model of time is expressed in the dichotomy “initial time - empirical time” (by empirical time we mean profane).

But the spatial understanding of time, extremely important for the category of mythological time, fundamentally contradicts the linear idea of ​​time, at least for Indo-European myth [Gurevich, 1984: 110; Steblin-Kamensky, 1984: 113-116]. The past, present and future find themselves on the same plane: they are side by side. Therefore, the Indo-European verb hardly needed to have a temporal function - the verb did not fix the action in time. Initially, in the Indo-European era, there was a species, and the verbal system noted not so much the sequence of actions relative to each other, but rather their completeness, instantaneity, and duration. Later, the time factor was developed, and the meaning of the species was reduced.

Following M. Eliade, these scientists write that in a sense, for archaic man, only the present existed, but it was a comprehensive concept that included both the past and the future, and there were no sharp differences between them. If time is cyclical and the past repeats itself, then future time is nothing more than the renewed present and past.

The future tense exists in the mind: it can be influenced with the help of magic, it can be prophesied, it is seen in prophetic dreams, the future tense is fate. Ideas about fate have analogies and parallels in different mythological traditions. In Greek mythology it is Moira. Lachesis(“the giver of lots”) assigns lots even before a person’s birth, Clotho(“the spinner”) spins the thread of his life, Atropos(“inevitable”) inevitably brings the future closer. In Roman mythology, the Moirai correspond to parks. In Scandinavian mythology, people's fate is determined at birth norns, and the fate of warriors in battles - Valkyries. One of the norns Urd (Urör), represents the personification of fate, the future, what must happen. In Dahomey mythology, the goddess of fortune telling and fate F She is also considered the keeper of the keys to the future. This indicates that the concept of the future was part of the structure of temporal ideas of ancient man.

The structure of mythological temporal ideas also indicates the presence of the concept of the future. In ideas about time, three time layers can be distinguished: past-present-future. They can be found when dividing the world tree vertically.

Evidence of the presence of a holistic time paradigm “past-present-future” in developed mythologies is the structure of myths, where three groups of myths related to the past, present and future can be clearly distinguished. Myths about the past include etiological, cosmogonic myths and eschatological myths that tell about past catastrophes. The present time is described in calendar myths. And myths associated with the future are myths about the afterlife and eschatological myths about the future destruction of the world [Savelyeva, Poletaev, 1997: 595-596].

Based on the above, we can conclude that the concept of the future, although it was not expressed implicitly in grammatical forms, was represented explicitly in the behavior of ancient people (fortune telling, prophecies, prophetic dreams, faith in fate, beliefs, legends) and implicitly by mythonyms personifying fate.

In the Eddic retellings of myths about the beginning times, forms of the past tense often alternate with forms of the present tense in the meaning of the present or future [Steblin-Kamensky, 1976: 54]. Thus, this once again confirms that the future and the past were thought to be as real as the present.

In developed mythologies, along with the image of the initial time, the image of the final time of the death of the world appears. The death of the world is also the end of time, since time is merged with its specific content and exists only because this content exists. But time is cyclical, and the world will be reborn again after its death. The most consistent idea of ​​the cosmic cycles of death and rebirth of the world is given by Hindu mythology: the universe dies when Brahma falls asleep and his night comes, and with the onset of day, God again creates the universe. A description of the world catastrophe can be found in the eschatologized German-Scandinavian mythology, which reflected the death of tribal foundations in the late period of its development. The eschatological “Divination of the Velva” tells of oaths trampled upon by the gods; and on earth in the last “age of storms and swords” brothers will begin to kill each other for selfish reasons, close relatives will die in strife, etc., until the day of the death of the gods comes - Ragnarok. In the original "Divination of the Völva" and "Younger Edda" in the story about the end of the world, the future only occasionally appears, while the form of the present tense predominates.

N.L. Kurchanov puts forward the assumption that the idea of ​​time of the ancient Germans is characterized as a one-time counter-narrative deployment of a continuum. Pictures of the future rebirth of the world arise from the memory of the gods about the past creation, thereby the memory of the gods turns back time and projects acts of past creation into the future. N.L. Kurchanov defines the act of re-creation as verbal and mnemonic [Kuchanov, 2000: 33-35].

In continuation of this topic, it should be noted that, of course, the question of the structure of temporal representations is debatable. In various mythological systems, either a linear or cyclical model of time was dominant. Thus, analyzing the ancient Greek myth, K. Hübner describes sacred time as cyclical, where an unshakable sacred primordial event is constantly updated within the framework of profane time, but remains identical to itself, since it belongs to the eternal world. “Although everything mortal goes on its own course, unchangeable primordial events operate in it” [Hübner, 1996: 130]. And, for example, the idea of ​​cyclicity is alien to Babylonian ideas about time; for them time was linear [Klochkov, 1981:96]. Christian mythology is dominated by a linear model of time perception: “a demon leads a person in a circle; “sacred history” arranged by God goes in a straight line” [Averintsev, 1975: 55].

It should, however, be noted that cyclism was more likely to be characteristic of profane consciousness, and not of sacred ideas. Human daily life is regulated by biocosmic rhythms (change of seasons, phases of the moon, day and night, cyclicality in the movement of planets), which determine the cyclical nature of earthly processes [Savelyeva, Poletaev, 1997: 286].

Time was not perceived abstractly, but concretely; it was filled with semantics and was inextricably linked with the flow of events, with what was happening. In the consciousness of ancient man there is no concept of time as abstract pure duration; time, first of all, is the flow of events and the chain of generations; it depends on what fills it. For mythological consciousness, an anthropocentric assessment of time is important: all events are perceived through the prism of human life.

This can be traced at the lexical level. The Germanic peoples have words tid, timi did not denote an empty abstraction - time. They had a more specific meaning, seasons, periods of indefinite, more or less significant duration, and only occasionally - shorter periods of time - hours. At the same time, the word ah had two main meanings: “year”, “harvest”, “abundance”. A year, in general, time is not an empty duration, but filled with some specific content, each time specific, defined [Gurevich, 1984: 104-105].

M.I. Steblin-Kamensky gives typical examples of the names of units of time in Eddic myths, determined not by their place among the same units, but by what happened in these units of time - “the age of swords and axes”, “the age of storms and wolves” [Steblin-Kamensky, 1976: 46].

If nothing happens to mythological characters - heroes, gods, etc., then time ceases to exist. A similar characteristic of time can be found in the Eddic myths, in the “sagas of the Icelanders” [Steblin-Kamensky, 1971: 110-111; Gurevich, 1972: 26].

The mythologized calendar is characterized by a qualitative fullness of time, forming an inextricable unity with events, and the dedication of days and seasons to various spirits and gods. In English, the etymology of the names of the days of the week from Tuesday to Friday goes back to the names of gods from German-Scandinavian mythology: Tuesday is the day of the god Tiu, the supreme god of war, Wednesday is the day of the god of war Wodan or Odin, Thursday is the day of the thunder god Thor, Friday is the day goddess of fertility Freya.

Time in myth also takes on an axiological connotation: it can be good or evil, favorable or hostile. Such qualitatively heterogeneous time is not so much realized as lived and experienced [Gurevich, 1984: 111].

Despite the abundance of literature on the problem of mythological time-space, many questions still remain. The problem of unstructuredness and disorder of sacred ideas about the past, present and future was raised in the already mentioned work of I.M. Savelyeva and A.B. Poletaeva “History and time in search of the lost.” They cite the points of view of M. Bargh and A. Gurevich. M. Bargh believes that mythological time is momentary, is not connected with either the past or the future, and in this sense lies outside the flow of history. For A. Gurevich, mythological consciousness was ahistorical, and the present time of the life of an archaic person contained both the past and the future [Savelyeva, Poletaev, 1997: 94-95].

In developing this issue, one can cite the point of view of M. Eliade, who also considered the mythological Sacred Time as an “eternal present”, different from the historical present [Eliade, 1994: 49-50].

K. Hübner views mythological time as consisting of two dimensions: profane and sacred. At the same time, in sacred time it is impossible to distinguish “now” as the present moment, and it does not seem to flow from the past to the future. Since sacred time is embedded in profane time, in which sacred primordial events are present, then “from a profane point of view, the past can constantly repeat itself and arise in the present. As something eternal, it also appears from a profane point of view to the future. Thus, the past and the future coincide in the present” [Hübner, 1996: 142-143].

CM. Telegin distinguishes two time layers in the time of myth: “ancient, without a structural organization, chaotic and frozen in its uncreateability, and a new one, created, structured, cyclical” [Telegin, 1994: 28-29]. Mythical time is opposed to historical linear time and, thanks to cyclism, is associated with Eternity.

An interesting interpretation of time is given in the article “An American Indian Model of Universe” by B. Whorf. The initial hypothesis is that it is possible to adequately describe the comprehensive picture of the Universe without resorting to such traditional generalizations as time, space, speed, matter.

In the Hopi language there are no words, grammatical forms and constructions that explicitly or implicitly express such concepts that exist in our linguistic culture as time, past, present or future, despite the fact that the Hopi language is capable of describing and explaining all observable processes in the Universe. In Hopi culture there are abstractions for which our language cannot develop adequate terms. These abstractions are part of the animalistic beliefs of mystical, occult thinking. As B. Whorf writes, these abstractions may be expressed explicitly in the psychological or metaphysical terms of the Hopi language, may be implicit in the very structure and grammar of this language, or embedded in Hopi culture and behavior.

Instead of the two attributes of the universe being time and space, in Hopi culture the universe can be described in terms of manifested and manifesting or unmanifest, or subjective and objective. Objective is everything that is accessible to our senses, the entire Universe, without division into past and present, but not including the future. The subjective includes both what we call the future and what is mental and exists in our consciousness. Subjective reality (subjective only from our point of view) covers not only the future, but also the entire mental, intellectual and emotional spheres, the essence of which is the purposeful desire for realization and manifestation. This dynamic area covers expectations, desires and goals, thoughts, and the realm of mental causation. B. Whorf calls the realm of the subjective a broader concept, close to our concept of hope. Thus, mythological time belongs to the realm of the subjective, mental, and accordingly the Hopi are aware of this and through grammatical means show that the events narrated in the myth and the events of the present time have different degrees of reality or reality.

Consequently, following B. Whorf, we will believe that mythological time cannot be called ahistorical, located outside the flow of history, but it is entirely located in the human mind.

Thus, in mythological representations there are two different images of time: eternal, timeless time and earthly, passing time, with mythological time being the leading one. The idea of ​​sacred time, in which the past, present and future exist next to each other, due to which it is static, in later worldviews was called eternity. We will address this below.

To summarize what has been said, let us once again highlight the main characteristics of mythological temporal representations that are relevant for this study: multidimensionality, cyclicity, simultaneity of the past, present and future, reference to the past, contradictoryness, anthropomorphism. These characteristics form the conceptual basis of mythological space-time.

Further development of the concept of time is associated with the rationalization of consciousness.

We find the difference between sacred and profane time in the philosophical views of Plato and Aristoles. To distinguish between two images of time, Plato introduced the concepts of “zones” (in Greek meaning “age”, “eternity”) and “chronos”.

Christian philosophy inherited the problem of the dichotomy of Sacred-Profane time of Greek culture, but transferred it to the plane of God’s relationship to the world he created, highlighting the opposition between eternity (or divine time) and time itself (or earthly time), where eternity is an attribute of God. Time belongs only to God, but man can only experience time [Le Goff, 1992: 155].

The founder of the tradition of contrasting time and eternity, which underlies Christian philosophy, is St. Augustine.

St. Augustine viewed time as the criterion of movement, change and existence of all “created” things. Time appeared as a result of the Divine creative act and simultaneously with it. Having created transitory things, God also created the measure of their measurement. In this world, everything exists as a frozen constant “now” (nuns stans). Static eternity is inseparable from the Divine being [Sokolov, 1979: 59-60].

At the same time, it is fundamental for us that St. Augustine approached the assessment of time from the position of subjectivity, which will play an important role in the philosophical views of the 20th century, and which we will dwell on in more detail below.

About medieval ideas about time A.Ya. Gurevich writes that in the Christian worldview the concept of time was not dissolved in the concept of eternity, as in other ancient mythological systems, where sacred time absorbed and dominated the profane. Earthly time coexists with eternity, and at certain, decisive moments, eternity invades history. A Christian strives to move from the time of earthly mortal existence to the abode of eternal bliss of God's chosen ones [Gurevich, 1984: 120].

Of course, Christian times largely inherited the features of mythological ideas. THEM. Savelyev and A.V. Poletaev write that the Christian religion has preserved all the components of the mythological temporal structure [Savelyeva, Poletaev, 1997: 599]. In Christian mythology one can also find myths about the past, heroic deeds of saints, calendar and eschatological motifs. By repeating mythological ritual actions, later Christian ones, a person is transported to the divine world of eternity.

Christianity introduced the concept of linear historical time, placing God in historical time and establishing the historicity of Jesus Christ. The concept of linear and continuous time was borrowed from Judaism, where the central core is not the mythology of the sacred cosmos, but the mythology of the people. History was divided into two periods: “before the birth of Christ” and “after the birth of Christ” and his passion.

Unlike archaic mythology with its commitment to the past, for Christian mythology it is valuable not only the past, as an act of accomplished tragedy, but the messianic future, which began from the moment of the appearance of Jesus Christ and brings retribution. This opened up a new perspective, where the present time was devalued in anticipation of the Last Judgment, but was intensely and intensely experienced with the hope of redemption and the fear of retribution for sins [Gurevich, 1984: 158]. As J. Le Goff writes, to exist for a Christian meant to be aware of participation in eternity, therefore the time of salvation - the future - was the main thing for a person (Le Goff, 1992: 173).

Although each event in “Sacred History” is unique, as S.S. notes. Averintsev: “Christ died once,” exclaimed Augustine; but every year, in a constant sequence, Easter replaced Good Friday” [Averintsev, 1975: 274]. Thus, although Christian mythology placed the past, present and future in a linear sequence, it is based on the idea of ​​cyclicality.

Historical time was comprehended from the position of anthropomorphism. World historical eras correspond to six periods of human life: infancy, childhood, adolescence, youth, maturity, old age [Gurevich, 1984: 132].

The transition from the Middle Ages to the New Age was marked by the replacement of the religious picture of the world with natural scientific ideas. Therefore, already in the 17th century. the concept of two times takes on a new form: the ideas about the essential difference between “divine” and “earthly” time are replaced by the thesis about the existence of objective (absolute) time and its subjective perception (relative time).

The picture of the world that emerged in modern times represents the Universe as a flat three-dimensional world. According to Newton's formulas, time here is reversible, homogeneous and uniform; it can flow both forward (to the future) and backward (to the past), without in any way affecting the general patterns and general appearance of the Universe, and space is homogeneous, empty and flat.

XX century brought a new understanding and perception of time. The flat three-dimensional world of classical mechanics was replaced by the four-dimensional world of Einstein. This world has curvature and volume, which allows us to derive from the theory of relativity all kinds of concepts and models of space and time - open (to infinity) and closed, homogeneous (uniform) and inhomogeneous (with compactions and rarefaction), linear (unidirectional) and nonlinear (multidirectional) ), static (stationary) and dynamic (developing), substantial and relative, single-layer and multi-layer, etc. Such unique models of space-time, in turn, are presented in ancient mythologies [Kosarev, 2000: 209236]. Einstein's picture of the world, according to A.F. Losev, makes a miracle conceivable [Losev, 1990: 408].

It can be stated that the time of consciousness has similar characteristics to mythological time; both mythological and subjective time can be considered as varieties of "conceptual" time. Let us repeat once again that a person, thanks to the intellectual work of consciousness and memory, is able to unite various time layers, make time multidimensional, multidirectional, qualitatively heterogeneous, and fill it with specific content.

Notes

Ritual actions, according to M. Eliade, return a person to the mythical primary time, when the first ancestors created the world, and which regulates the daily life of the collective and the individual. Collective and individual rituals re-actualize primordial time through the reproduction of archetypal actions: the development of a new land reproduces the act of transition from chaos to space, each battle is the first duel of ancestors or gods, and marriage is the first marriage ceremony. Sacred time appears as reversible, discontinuous and restored time, as “a kind of mythical eternal present” [Eliade, 1994: 49].

The main features and images of the universe are depicted in allegorical form by myths, customs, calendar systems, symbols, and are also contained in esoteric teachings. The spatio-temporal structure of the world of the ancients finds expression in various types of division of certain processes, events and in methods of orientation to the cardinal points - everything that is associated with the continuous rhythmic movements of the celestial bodies. Many thousands of years ago, not only the idea of ​​the integrity of the surrounding nature, but also of its two- and three-unity, four- and five-fold nature, etc. naturally formed.

Antonina Valerievna DOBRYAKOVA, who gave a scientific report at Moscow University at the famous interdisciplinary seminar of Professor V.P. Levich on the problems of TIME, talks about all this.

(Journey from "one" to "thirteen")

Living on earth under the ever-changing dome of the sky, ancient man cultivated in himself a sense of the “fluidity” of what we now call time. Archaic cultures borrowed time guidelines from natural rhythms of various types, representing them in images and cults.

The original timeline was undoubtedly linear(or single), when the events of human life and community were correlated with natural phenomena that were equivalent in nature and comparable to life spans. So the count was kept only by sunrises, or by days (more precisely, half days), by moons - from one full moon to another, or from new moon to new moon, by summers or springs and winters. This type of division does not involve spatial reference and therefore was developed among freely nomadic tribes. It corresponds to a single, indivisible tribal deity (usually male), combining all significant social functions and activities. Hence the incomprehensible “female” occupations of male solar and lunar deities or “male” ones of female ones (the solar god the weaver or cook and Diana the huntress), and this version does not also contradict the androgynous past of these gods.

Fig.1. Triskele

Humanity's nomadic past is reflected in the myths of the celestial hunter, the golden-antlered deer carrying the Sun (hence the golden color of the antlers) or being the Sun. Every day the hunter catches up and kills the deer, and every morning it is born again. Ideas about the death and eternal resurrection of the solar deity led to the fact that the direction to the west became not only a symbol of death, but also eternal life, the immortality of the solar god. For example, in the Armenian epic there is a phrase: “Endowed with immortality, like the setting sun.” In the archaic era, the horse and bison (bull or buffalo) were game animals and were equated with deer. From these hunting myths arose the deification of horses and bulls in the form of celestial bodies and the combination of the Sun and Horse, Moon and Bull, common in ancient times. Celestial horses associated with the Sun were even ritually called deer, for example, among the ancient Altai, when golden masks with deer antlers were put on horses sacrificed in burial mounds.

There are two possible origins binary times in mythology: gradation, or division, polarization (sunrise-sunset, winter-summer, new moon-full moon) of the same rhythm that was uniform in the past; segregation, the combination of two rhythms into one cycle with the division of functions between them (Sun-Moon polarities, day-night). Direct observation of photoperiodicity in the archaic period led to a paradoxical position, at first glance, for modern thought, that temporal and spatial reference points are strictly tied to each other. (Nevertheless, this is quite consistent with the idea of ​​\u200b\u200b“relativity” proclaimed by modern science. - Ed.). So east-west, undoubtedly, is the most ancient space-time axis of humanity, universally associated with the direction of sunrise and sunset. Mythologems of hunting tribes, which preserved the most ancient layers of the nomadic period of mankind, almost always associate the east with the “birth” of the Sun and mythical characters of solar origin (from a Christian psalm one can mention the words: “Give praise to the Lord who rises above the sky in the east,” and that’s just one of the many references to Christ as a solar Deity), and the west is considered a place of “dying”, but also the kingdom of ancestors and spirits revered by tribes. Among the ancient Jews, the western direction was considered the sacred direction, the doors of the temples were oriented to the west, while in the Christian tradition the eastern direction is the predominant direction.

In what other ways is the dual division of the world manifested in the perception of the ancients? A common origin from a single image leads to the emergence of “twin” or “brotherly” myths, or, as an option, “sister” myths. One can trace the emergence of the multiplicity of the image purely figuratively. First, the deity becomes two-faced: for the Romans - two-faced Janus; Africans, Indo-Chinese, Polynesians have masks painted on both sides (half the face is white, half is black); the time of the living and the time of the dead; day and night. Then the character becomes two-headed (and, further, multi-headed), where the body means the original unity, and the different heads are already separate functions or periods. Then the division continues, and two (then more) separate characters appear, initially brothers or sisters. Thus, among the Zuni Indians, the “beloved twins” divided the tribe into two phratries - the people of winter and the people of summer. The solar origin of twin myths has been noted repeatedly; however, some researchers dispute it, linking this symbol with two bright stars in the constellation Gemini (Pollux and Castor). Perhaps there are two independent branches of the origin of the myth, since twin legends exist among peoples (the Mayans, for example), for whom the location of a given section of the sky is indicated by completely different symbolism (the constellation Turtle).

The polarization of the functions of the twins leads to the perception of the initially single aspect as an antagonistic duality, when one of them is associated with good and light, the world of the living (Abel), and he is opposed by his antipodean brother, the patron of the forces of darkness and evil, death (Cain). Hence the appearance of a pair of brothers - an immortal and a mortal.

It is necessary to emphasize the peculiarity of the constructions of archaic cultures associated with the category of time, namely, the use of the same method of grading periods for cyclical processes of different scales. This is a very important point in understanding the category of mythological time. Thus, similar linear series are given for days, years, lunar periods. Sunrise is associated with spring, noon with summer, sunset with autumn, winter with midnight (there is another system in which spring is midnight, summer is dawn, autumn is noon, winter is sunset). Summer is associated with the full moon, and winter with the new moon. And this lunar binary, also perceived as the death and birth of the corresponding deity, may turn out to be closely intertwined with the solar one.

The consequence of this principle is the existence of the “time of the gods,” that is, a scale of life incomparable with human ones. For the Hindus, these are extremely small or huge periods of time, which are obtained by dividing or multiplying solar, human years by hundreds and tens. (One year was originally equivalent to one “day of Brahma”).

Lunar binary (full moon - new moon) is important for orientation - before the full moon and after the full moon (waxing and waning months). In almost all mythologies, the time of the first period is considered as favorable for all living things, and the time of the second - as dangerous and difficult. Sometimes this is reflected in myths as the life period of a deity (infant - a month, a young man, a mature man, an elderly person and an old man, then three days of “death” - the new moon)

Fig.2a. The cardinal directions in Christian mysticism. Quaternary of Ezekiel

Further complexity of spatio-temporal ideas traced in mythological stories, ancient calendars and cults is provided by various ternary gradations. The solar cycle is associated with the idea of ​​trinity: a three-part division - morning, noon, evening. Thus, in the fairy tale about Vasilisa the Beautiful, three horsemen are mentioned: red (rising sun), white (midday) and black (evening). The ancient Egyptian sun god says: “I am Khepri in the morning, I am Ra at noon, I am Atum in the evening.” It is important to note that a single deity already unites three independent mythological images, replacing each other and differing in their characteristics. This is extremely typical of all regions and mythological systems. Certain segments of the daily cycle become different qualities of a certain deity, his own time.

Rice. 2b. The cardinal directions in Christian mysticism. Quaternary Ap. Joanna

The most ancient peoples of Europe had a symbolic sign called triskele(Fig. 1): from the combination of three and skelos - bone, or leg (among the Cretan-Mycenaeans, Etruscans, Celts). It is known among the ancient Japanese and the peoples of the Himalayas (Sikkim, Bhutan). Three spirals, and sometimes three legs, running one after another in a circle. Initially, the running of the Sun was depicted, and then it became a symbol time running, the course of history and the rotation of the stars.

The Hindus know the “three steps of Vishnu” and the year, divided into three seasons of four months. There is also a legend about three brothers - Ekakta, Dvita and Trita, that is, the first, second and third. The god of fire in Hindu mythology, Agni, also belongs to the trinity gods. It is often emphasized that he was born in three places - in the sky, among people and in the waters, he has three dwellings and three lights, three heads, three powers, three languages. He is both a child and an old man at the same time; he permeates the entire Universe with his power; from it appear the material primary elements from which the world is composed. Agni then becomes the guardian of one of the cardinal directions in the fourfold or eightfold system of the Hindus. Akhni personifies the Sun as “heavenly fire” and the annual trinity of the solar cycle.

How did the transition to four-part perception of the world - in time and space?

The original division of the year into two seasons had different meanings at different latitudes. In the tropics, the rainy season and the dry season were clearly visible, each of which was attributed to the influence and dominance of a specific deity. Among the Mayans, the change of season was described as a dramatic duel between the gods, the outcome of which determined the weather for the entire duration of the “reign.” In colder regions, summer and winter were distinguished, the definition of which set the second of the most ancient mythological axes: north-south (in comparison with the east-west axis).

The identification of this axis also has incredibly ancient origins. In essence, modern anthropologists attribute it to pre-human (pre-sapien) time. It is believed that the awareness of such concepts as the change of day and night and the movements of the celestial bodies occurred during the era of Acheulean and early Mousterian tools. Characteristic is the precise orientation of the burial grounds and cult caves along the cardinal directions, including the north-south axis, as well as the crosses depicted on bear and deer bones found in the ritual parts of the caves.

Rice. 3. Drawing a pentagram point by point

The direction to the north pole of the world (Ursa Major and Ursa Minor) was presumably noted already during the periods of glacial and post-glacial nomads in the subpolar region, where the long polar night could affect the identification of additional landmarks in the starry sky in relation to the solar and lunar ones.

The non-setting stars of the circumpolar regions could evoke associations with the concept of “eternity”, which is not associated with constant birth and death. The North Pole began to be listed in many esoteric and exoteric traditions as the “top of the world”, the top of the “sacred mountain Meru” and the abode of the immortal gods. Particularly interesting is the data on the influence of the seven large circumpolar stars on the ubiquitous mythological archetype of the seven eternal characters, starting from the seven sages (Rishis) and ending with the seven-headed serpent, sometimes a bird .

So, both axes, east-west and north-south, gave rise to a four-part cross. It is oriented to the cardinal points and, undoubtedly, along with the circle, the oldest world symbol, has been distributed across all continents for at least 45-50 thousand years. At the same time, the characteristics of the cardinal directions in this cross have local features. As an example, let us mention two mystical crosses borrowed by Christian esotericists from more archaic European traditions (Fig. 2). Here the directions to the north and west differ in elements and symbolism, and, apparently, connection between the north and earth more ancient than water .

Since in ancient times the four-part division of space was associated with a four-part division of time, four seasons appear in the annual cycle (spring, summer, autumn, winter), the beginning of which is marked by the so-called cardinal points of the solar year: the spring and autumn equinoxes and the summer and winter solstices . The identification and veneration of these days is found even among the most primitive peoples and, undoubtedly, goes back far into the past. In addition to this “large” solar cross, there is also a “small”, or lunar, cross - the distinguished four phases of the Moon, which in total give the lunar month and the seven-day week to which we are all accustomed. A four-day week is also known (in tropical Africa).

Fig.4. Five-pointed stars in the astrological text of the Egyptians

The four-part division is used in the construction of global cycles—world centuries (epochs)—in mythologies and esoteric teachings. The period from the spring equinox to the summer solstice is associated with in the morning, and with the golden divine age. The period from the point of the summer solstice to the point of the autumn equinox correlates with the Silver Age and midday, and from the autumn equinox to the winter solstice - with the Bronze Age and evening. Considered the heaviest iron age, located in the world solstice cycles (corresponding sunset and night) until the point of the vernal equinox - the beginning of a new cycle.

A similar principle is used when identifying four “yugas” among the Hindus, and the four “pillars of the law”, gradually decreasing in number, apparently come from four world trees, one of the universal symbols indicating the cardinal directions.

The next gradation when considering space-time among ancient peoples is five-part division. Its initial appearance is associated with the release center as a special point of the cross, which has independent meaning. Then, this point from the center of the circle with an inscribed cross (initially denoting the horizon with the directions of space) moves to the circle itself, forming the so-called pentagram, the youngest of magical stars.

Magic stars are geometric figures drawn by a continuous line, based on points of the circle located through the same number of intermediate points. If constructed correctly, such a figure should close at the starting point. For a five-pointed star, there is only one way to draw it - bypassing one point (Fig. 3).

In the literature, there is an opinion about the primacy of five-fingered counting (and ten-fingered counting) as the basis of five-part symbols. An indirect confirmation of this can be the association in Ancient India of a five-day week with the fingers of the hand of a god rotating the firmament. Five-digit calendars were created by the Hindus and Chinese, and the five-year cycle has been known in Europe since the Neolithic; celebrations in the name of the goddess Hera were also held every five years. The five-pointed star in Egypt denoted a deity in general; the goddess of the Sky - Nut had five children - all this is standard calendar symbolism, indicating a five-part gradation (Fig. 4). In the system of primary elements, the five-part star became widespread, although the elements themselves varied (Fig. 5a, b). Five-digit systems are often associated with female deities. Friday among the Slavs and almost all Europeans was dedicated to the deity of love under different names: Venus, Freya, etc.

Fig.5a. China

Esoterically, "five" symbolizes person(head and four limbs), health and love, as well as the quintessence acting on matter (sacred marriage in alchemy was designated by the number five). The Pythagoreans considered the pentagram one of their symbols, rightly drawing attention to the fact that a general characteristic of organic nature is pentagonal symmetry, implying the presence golden ratio. The connection of the pentagram with the four elements and their elemental inhabitants in the European tradition made the pentagram a tool for magicians to “bind” or “grasp” spirits when drawing up pentacle diagrams.

It is worth mentioning the European alchemical tradition that associates the planets with the pentagram in an order slightly different from the Chinese (according to the original spatial cross, different from the Han): Mars, Venus, Mercury, Saturn and Jupiter (see Fig. 5b).

Let's move on to six-part presentation. The six-pointed star in the archaic was not only not an exclusive symbol of the Jewish people, but in an era much earlier than all mentions of this people, it was widespread as a wheel with six spokes. It symbolized the Sun among the Indo-Europeans and, according to the French researcher Marcel Homais, also among the Hyperboreans, the inhabitants of the “northern continent.” He calls it the sign of the “traveling sun” and provides data on its widespread distribution as early as 12-14 thousand years BC. e. on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean (Fig. 6a). In his fundamental study of myths and symbols, D. Golan suggests (quite justified by the structure of temples with fixed observation points) that the “six cardinal directions” known in India are obtained as a result of dividing the horizon at the points of sunrise and sunset at the equinoxes and solstices. Thus, in addition to the north-south axis, two more solar axes of cardinal points are formed. It is curious that the ancient Tamils ​​have a six-faced deity of the Sun and fire Muruga n is a clear personification of the six-season year. A six-pointed star, strictly speaking, is not a real magic star and cannot be built by continuous sliding, like a five-pointed one. It is a combination of two mutually inverted independent triangles, which was considered in alchemy to mean union of water and fire- a symbol of the human soul. The ancient Greeks considered such a figure to be a symbol of a hermaphrodite (Fig. 6b, c).

Fig.5b. Europe

The six and five seasons of the year had important calendar significance not only for India, but also for China. The pentagram of “five rotations” (wood, fire, earth, metal, water) divided the year into 73.05 days, and the “six energies” (dryness, humidity, wind, cold, heat, fire) - into six steps of 60.875 days . The combination of “rotations” and “energies” gives a complete Chinese 60 year cycle taking into account the annual rhythm as well.

The planets are also included in the system of correspondences. In China, the five primary elements were influenced by Jupiter (spring, east), Mars (summer, south), Venus (autumn, west), Mercury (winter, north), Saturn (late autumn, center). Moreover, interestingly, the Chinese god of time Tai-Sui was the personification of the planet Jupiter (Sui-sin), whose 12-year cycle underlies the calendar. This deity was in charge of the seasons, months, days, and it was believed that opposing him was as harmful and dangerous as striving to gain his favor. He was depicted with a spear (or ax) and a bell that caught souls (the connection of the bell and bell with the spirits of the dead, in particular, ancestors, is a tradition among various peoples: the ringing of a bell is considered the “voice of the dead,” blessing or cursing the living).

Planetary influences are also considered through another magical star - seven-part, derived from the Middle Eastern tradition (Fig. 7). Like all magical stars, the seven-rayed one has two types of movement from point to point - in the order of “rays” and in the order of “circle”. If for the Chinese pentagram one is called suppression, and the second is called the generation of elements from each other, then for the star of magicians this forms sacred series, according to which, for example, the daily clock of planetary influences was calculated, necessary for constructing pentacles when invoking spirits and geniuses through magical rituals (around the circle, if you move counterclockwise: Venus, Mercury, Moon, Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, Sun and Venus again).

As for the Christian week, it appeared in European calendars later than the five-day and five-year cycles. This is evidenced, in particular, by the system of five preserved in astrology. term- divisions of 30-degree astrological signs, mentioned by Ptolemy in his four books (in the Egyptian and Chaldean versions), where each term was dedicated to one of the planets (and the luminaries, like the Chinese, were excluded from the pentagram system). Now terms are most often used in horary, horological astrology, which is closest to priestly fortune-telling practices.

In Europe, in addition to the seven-day week, where each day is dedicated to planets or luminaries in the order indicated by the star of the magicians, there are also years of the seven-year esoteric cycle. In India one can also find a seven-season year: the hymns of the Rig Veda speak of the seven sons of Aditi or that the Sun has seven rays, seven horses.

"Seven" appears as the six directions of space and the center or as the reconciliation of four and three. The Rig Veda mentions a ritual where four priests represent the cardinal directions, and three priestesses represent the three levels of the universe: top, middle and bottom. This is a very common version of the sacred interpretation of “seven”. Among the Bombara people of Nigeria, seven is also the sacred sum of four and three.

For the natives of the southern seas, the “seven stars” often mean not the Big Dipper, but the Pleiades. In Polynesian languages, their name is translated as seven stars. The ancient Sumerians called it “stars” and were considered the seven great heavenly gods. In Indochina there is a myth about two brothers - northern and southern, the first is associated with the constellation Ursa Major, and the second with the Pleiades. However, it is fair to note that the seven great celestial Sages - Rishis, mentioned in the Rig Veda (Lords of Wisdom - Ed.), are undoubtedly personifications of individual stars of the Big Dipper.

Octalstructures differ in many respects from seven-part ones in their symbolism and the nature of esoteric actions. Even numbers most often appear as a “stabilizer”, performing protective functions. At the same time, as one of the elements of the mandala, or world circle, the eight-rayed star is related to the solar cycle. The proto-Indian signs of the eight-part Zodiac are known: edu(ram), yal(harp), nand(crab), amma(mother), knock here(scales), Kani(dart), Where(jug), min(fish). The supreme god from Mohenjo-Daro was also equated with the Sun in his journey through the constellations, and hence his epithet: “god of eight forms.” A comparison of the signs gives very clear analogies with the later 12-part Zodiac, and it is clear that to the cardinal cross of the four cardinal directions, another, oblique cross was added, which was also considered a guide to additional sides of the horizon (the Hindus had eight lockapa l - divine guardians of the cardinal directions). The fact that the eight-fold system was of great importance for yogic practices is recalled by eight siddhi— hidden powers that give the adept supernatural abilities (for example: mahim a - hugeness, the ability to arbitrarily increase one’s mass, prakamyya, or density - absolute insight of the mind and feelings).

The Chinese, Mesoamerican Indians, and Scandinavians also had the concept of eight cardinal directions.

The associative connection of the solar gods with horses gave birth to Odin's eight-legged horse Sleipnir, the eight magical horses of Chinese mythology. The Chinese have a traditional epic about eight immortals, personifying the magical qualities of the eight cardinal directions. And the Chinese attached great importance eight trigrams, carrying out the materialization of all the “darkness of things” and changes in the world.

Fig.6a. The sign of the “traveling sun” according to Marcel Homais

The number eight is also associated with the concept of immortality (infinite time). Since on the celestial sphere immortality is expressed by the stars (as opposed to the born and dying luminaries and wandering planets), then in medieval sacred cosmogony eight corresponds to the fixed stars of the firmament, symbolizing the overcoming of planetary influence. Already the cardinal cross has its “star” embodiment in the form of four “guardians of the sky”: Regulus - the guardian of the north, Fomalhaut - the south, Antares - the west, Aldebaran - the east. Astrologers believe that these meanings were assigned to these stars at times when the equinoxes and solstices were located near them.

Another calendar meaning of eight is that once every eight years the full moon coincides with the solstice and therefore the readings of the Moon and the Sun are combined with each other. In the countries of the Middle East and Ancient Greece, an eight-year calendar was adopted; in Sparta, the king ruled for eight years.

In Christian mysticism, the number eight was a symbol of regeneration and baptism by water. At the same time, in Russian icon painting and Orthodox symbolism of pre-Nikonian times, a double square of mutually intersecting crosses accompanied images of the god-father Hosts, most often in the upper right corner, either instead of a halo, or as a background behind the head. The figure eight designated eight “centuries” (by “century” the Old Slavonic tradition meant a thousand years). Subsequently, these images were recognized as heretical and prohibited by the official church.

The next magic star is nine-rayed. It also originally represented the aspect of eight plus the center, but then transformed into an odd structure - three times three. The Trinity system was most closely associated with the symbolism of the vertical, or “three worlds”, “three suns”. The nine-part structure thus represents the idea of ​​tripling on each level. The nine-rayed star, of all the magical stars, is most associated with the idea of ​​hierarchy and, at the same time, with the idea of ​​the other world, the world of spirits, gods and their abodes. For Dante, both heaven and hell have nine circles, in Judaism and Christianity there are nine orders of angels and demons, among the Mesoamerican Indians, both heaven and the underworld can be divided into nine tiers (and they are ruled, respectively, by nine gods).

In calendar terms, dividing 360 by nine gives the forty-day months celebrated as sacred by the Druids. Astrologers consider forty-degree aspects to be karmic (that is, responsible for the manifestation of past life experiences). We mark nine and forty days after death as special periods. There is an opinion that a cat (one of the personifications of the Moon goddess) has nine lives.

Fig.6b. Asia Minor 6 thousand years BC. e.

Tenmarks the beginning of a new countdown cycle. Lokamanya Bal Gangadhar Tilak in his book “The Arctic Homeland in the Vedas” indicates that among the Hindus, the chariot of the Sun can be pulled by either seven or ten horses. The Rig Veda mentions two categories of priests - Angiras, called navagwa And dashagwa: the first serve for nine, and the second for ten months ( Nava- nine, Dasha- ten). Tilak consistently attributes the increase in light months to migration to more southern latitudes, where the polar night gradually disappears, “eating up” the remaining months of the year.

It should be noted that a ten-month year and a ten-day week were incredibly widespread in ancient times in the tropical zone. M.S. Polinskaya in her book “The Language of Niue” mentions such a calendar as widespread among the Polynesians. The Chinese preserved this gradation in the 60-year cycle as “ten trunks of heaven.” Among the Miao-Yao peoples, the sky was originally illuminated by ten suns and nine moons, which in seven years dried up the earth so much that people began to shoot at them with bows until they killed all the extra ones, leaving one Moon and one Sun. The gradation into seven and ten heavens is very common in Indochina. It seems impossible to us to assume that all these peoples are migrants from the North Pole. Periodization in the tropics, as mentioned, was associated with seasonal rains and coincided with the flowering and ripening of plants, the agricultural year. The analogue of winter was often the two least favorable months, which at first made up one and only then were divided into two.

By the way, the Romans also had a ten-month year, even the name of December ( soundboard- ten) reminds of this; January and February were added later. The number ten was primary to designate "cosmic man"; according to ancient Jewish tradition, ten sephira form Adam Kadmon - the first man.

Finally, elevencracy. The number eleven is often considered unfavorable, bringing danger and conflict. This may be partly due to the fact that it is one of the natural "solar numbers" associated with the 11-year cycle of solar activity, which affects the Earth in two ways. In European symbolic esotericism, the Sun was viewed as not so much a benevolent as an “evil” planet, because even the number 666 was a designation of the Sun (the incident is that Christ, being a solar deity, also related to this figure, which was sometimes considered as the “number Christ").

Rice. 6th century Troy

In the East, eleven also has a dual meaning. One of the revered bodhisagvas is Kannon, a very benevolent and merciful character of Japanese Buddhism, a human intercessor, has an eleven-faced appearance or the head of a horse, reminiscent of her solar origin. At the same time, the Hindus may initially have eight Rudras (children of the god of rage), but then, in more developed Hinduism, it became eleven. It is curious that, despite the violent nature of the Rudras, they are associated with fertility and vitality.

Fig.7a. "Star of the Magi"

Number twelve everywhere played a huge role in the formation of space-time archetypes, although different researchers interpret its origin differently. In European symbolism, 12 means cosmic order and law. In the Gospel description of the Heavenly Jerusalem there are four walls with three gates on each side of the world. Since above each of the gates there is one name of the ancient Israelite tribes, then, apparently, the tribal division of the proto-Semites historically occurred according to the principle: first - into four, and then into three more. Astrologers also divide each of the four seasons of the year into beginning, culmination and end, thus distinguishing three groups of zodiac signs, three crosses: cardinal, fixed and mutable.

At the same time, the most common point of view is that twelve months are the coordination of the lunar and solar calendars into one cycle. Since the lunar months do not fit neatly into the solar year, the coincidence of both calendars can be reconciled in the mentioned eight-year cycle of the ancient Romans and Greeks, combining five years of 12 and three years of 13 months. For the Japanese of the Heian era (classical Middle Ages), the year could consist of 12 and 13 lunar months of 27- 33 days each.

Concerning thirteen, then this is an important calendar number among the Mayan peoples, whose Zodiac united thirteen constellations. They had an extremely complex calendar of a 13-day week and an 18-month year, with each month consisting of 20 days.

The sacred 260-day cycle (13 x 20) arose before our era; after such a cycle, the number of the 13-day week and the name of the day coincided. There was a four-year cycle, when the name and serial number of the day of the 20-day month coincided, as well as a large 52-year cycle, when all four components coincided. The inhabitants of Mesoamerica were convinced that the end of the world would come every time after 52 years. For them, this was seen as a normal calendar event, celebrated with special rituals: all old lights were extinguished in order to then light new ones - a typical custom in all parts of the world.

The 12- and 13-year cycles are best known to us as the basis for cult holidays associated with the life and activities of divine personalities. These are, to a certain extent, cycles of solar activity, and the 12-year period is the time of Jupiter’s revolution around the Sun, which is the period during which it restores its position in the sky relative to the Sun and stars. Let us remember the 13 sacred holidays a year among Christians (or the 12 apostles and Christ himself, which makes up the sacred number 13), the 12 labors of Hercules, episodes from the lives of Buddha and Gilgamesh among the Babylonians, associated with the signs of the Zodiac. 13 was considered the number of death and resurrection and was therefore also sometimes associated with Christ.

Fig.7b

In conclusion, it should be noted some more features of the category of time, characteristic of mythologies in all parts of the world. The time of the gods is different from the time of people in that in the divine and demonic worlds it either slows down (one day in heaven is equal to a year, or even a century, a millennium on Earth), or incredibly accelerates, which gives those incredibly small fractions of a second when comparing time scales , which we can find in the Indian tradition. It is curious that in psychological practice there is a known effect in which time seems to stretch, allowing you to do a lot in a relatively short period of time...

Note

On the role of the North Pole of the World, see the article by A.M. Shustova in “Delphis” No. 21 (2/1999) and in the same issue fragments of the translation of the book by B.G. Tilak. — Approx. ed. The number 11 is a sign of the rhythmic features of structures organized exactly according to the principle of the golden ratio; 10- and 12-fold accompanies systems that are very similar to “golden” ones (“Delphis” No. 21 (1/2000), p. 80).— Note ed.

Bibliography

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Kuzmishchev V.A. The secret of the Mayan priests. M.: Young Guard, 1968. P.368.

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Mythological dictionary. Ed. E.M. Meletinsky. M., 1990. P.672.

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Polinskaya M.S. Niue language. M.: Eastern literature, 1995. P.127.

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Encyclopedia of Occultism. T.1. M.: AVERS, 1992. P.208.

The methodological and ideological significance of the category “matter” is revealed immediately as soon as we ask the question: how the material objects and phenomena around us exist.

Evolution of ideas about space and time

Mythology

A person always lives in a certain space, realizing his dependence on such characteristics as dimensions, boundaries, volumes = he coexists with space.

For ancient people, mythological consciousness is characterized by an understanding of space as opposed to chaos or emptiness, in which there is no order. The space is filled with things and objects, spiritualized and heterogeneous. It is a certain cause from which other properties of being subsequently arise. The process of gradual transformation of chaos into space as something formed: space displaces chaos by filling it with various creatures, animals, spirits and gods. Worldviews related to space rather construct space than reflect it. The world arises from chaos, space is formed by constructs, but does not contain them.

Archaic ideas about space are characterized by deployment property, spreading, expansion of space in relation to a special world center as a certain point “from which this unfolding takes place or once took place” (the navel of the Earth).

Space consists of parts ordered in a certain way. Right-left, top-bottom, center - periphery (set by the human body). The shell of the human body + physicality as such (the body of the world is the body of the ancient god, whose death gave life to the world), Indra is the son of Heaven and Earth.

In mythological consciousness, space is characterized by a certain cultural preset meaning of the place in which a person may find himself. Center of space– this is a place of special sacred value. Within the geographical space it is ritually designated (pillar, tree, later – temple, cross). The periphery of space is a danger zone that in fairy tales and myths the hero must overcome. Sometimes it is even a place outside of space (in chaos), which is captured by an expression like “go there, I don’t know where.” Victory over this place and evil forces signifies the fact of human exploration of space, that is, “its inclusion in a cosmic and organized “cultural” space” (the labors of Hercules).

The most important property in early ideas about space is that it not separated from time, forming a special unity - chronotope. Let's not go anywhere, because it's so good here now, although if it's good here and now, then we don't care where to go.

In ancient times, people felt an even greater dependence on time; the understanding of death as a stop of individual time was associated with it. Man lived in time and was afraid of it. (In ancient Greek mythology, Cronus, one of the titan sons of Uranus, at the instigation of his mother, who was avenging the Cyclops sons thrown into Tartarus, rebels against his father and castrates him with a sickle. “Cronus is like Chronos - “Father Time” with his inexorable sickle.” The image of the inexorability of the sickle of time as an all-consuming force, before which nothing can resist. Cronus gains power over the Earth, knowing from prophecies that one of his sons must overthrow him. Then he devours all the sons, but Zeus manages to hide. He defeats Cronus, and The time of the reign of the Olympians is coming, “human-sized” time.)

So: “the beginning of time”, prime time, primordial events (linear time). Non-human-sized time. Either chaos, or a golden age (Bible: The Spirit flew over the water, 7 days of creation; the time of the Titans and Cyclops; the time of Svyatogor).

Gradually the linear model - into a cyclical, human-sized time.

Thus, space and time were the most important components of constructing a picture of the world. Understanding the unity of space and time determined their place in the understanding of the structure of the Cosmos, which consisted of a special kind of spatial and temporal sacred points as certain spiritualized points of the world.

Antiquity

In Ancient Greece, in line with atomism (Leucippus, Democritus), the idea of ​​​​infinite empty space appeared, in which only movement is possible. The space of atomists is centerless, eternal, and has no boundaries. Epicurus, however, deprived it of isotropy, retaining the selected directions “up” and “down” to explain the fall of bodies. In the ideas of other philosophical movements, space has a border and a center, a top and a bottom. (Isotropy is one of the key properties of space in classical mechanics. A space is called isotropic if rotating the reference system by an arbitrary angle does not change the measurement results.)

The space of Aristotle's world is, of course, filled with air and filled with places for objects, heterogeneous and anisotropic,(Anisotropic- i.e. birefringent.) is an arena and a participant in events. Okoem. We lived in this world until the Renaissance. Aristotle "forever" presented space, time and motion as continuous, infinitely divisible.

Euclidean space is quite adequate to the “throwing” kinematics of rigid bodies. Euclid provided practitioners with a means of measuring and comparing the lengths, areas, and volumes of objects of various shapes. Euclid's abstract space is homogeneous and isotropic, infinitely divisible and limitless. Euclid's geometry still feeds our spatial intuition and philosophy.

Cyclicality. Ideas about the past, present and future, about the flow and duration of time.

Everything is in one place - Olympus is nearby.

Open churches (trust in the world, there is no division into internal and external space, all space is sacred).

In the Middle Age:

Augustine (354 – 430), linearity of time and direction: “What is time? As long as no one asks me about it, I understand, I don’t have any difficulty; but as soon as I want to give an answer about this, I become completely at a dead end... There was no time before the creation of the world. Creation caused some movement; the moments of this movement in the world are time... Where is this elusive time?... Time exists only in our soul. The past is in memory, the future is in anticipation.” (Confession).

In the Middle Ages, the space of the Universe received additional equipment: hell and heaven with nine circles each; structures containing angels and God and the trajectories of celestial bodies.

Divine order, order, human-sized: measures of length - human parts + days of walking. At the same time, there is a big frog in the forest. Heroes who guard the splits of the world with a sword in their hands.

Eden was marked on maps.

Revival:

The concept of infinity appears

The Renaissance restored the idea of ​​a homogeneous, empty, infinite abstract space and placed frames of reference in it. “The Universe is a sphere, the center of which is everywhere, and the circumference is nowhere” (Nikolai Kuzansky).

Infinity. Age of Discovery: America (1492) and others. 15th – first half of the 17th century.

In Galilean three-dimensional space, free motion occurs in a circle, and not in an infinite straight line. Galilean space is homogeneous: the laws of mechanics are the same at all its points. Galileo ingeniously introduced emptiness as an infinite number of voids devoid of size.

Clocks appear in city squares in the 14th and 15th centuries; they do not show minutes.

New time : Newton empty space

In modern times, scientists continue to discuss finitude and infinity, discreteness and continuity of space, the connection between space and time, movement and matter (does matter determine space or vice versa?).

Philosophers distinguish between spaces real("In fact"), conceptual(in science and art), perceptual("given to us in sensory perception"). In myth they are all united, in philosophy the real and the conceptual are identified, in science the conceptual and perceptual are identified.

In modern times, Europeans arithmetized the plane by introducing coordinates. The distance (x,y) between points x = (x1,x2) and y = (y1,y2) is not measured, but calculated.

Pairs of coordinates - vectors - can be added and multiplied by a number: arithmetic operations on points (vectors) are defined on the plane.

The next step: the number of coordinates (the dimension of space!) has crossed the threshold of clarity, but remains finite. The terminology has been preserved, the formulas have been “lengthened”. Space has become an extended manifold (Grassmann).

Modernity

Problems of conceptual space came to the fore.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, another step was taken: the number of coordinates became “infinite”.

In the history of philosophy, space has been understood as:

Absolute extension, emptiness in which all bodies were included and which did not depend on them (Democritus, Epicurus, Newton);

Extent of matter and ether (Aristotle, Descartes, Spinoza) or forms of existence of matter (Holbach, Engels);

The order of coexistence and mutual arrangement of objects (Leibniz, Lobachevsky);

Complex of sensations and experimental data (Berkeley, Mach) / a priori form of sensory intuition (Kant).

Time was interpreted as:

Substance or self-sufficient essence, with which the beginning of the study of its metric properties was connected (Thales, Anaximander); Heraclitus raises the question of the fluidity, continuity and universality of time, laying the tradition of it dynamic interpretations. At the same time, Parmenides, on the contrary, speaks of the immutability of time, that visible variability is only our illusions, and only the present has true existence (the emergence statistical concept of time).

Duration of existence and measure of changes in matter (Aristotle, Descartes, Holbach) or as a form of existence of matter, expressing the duration and sequence of changes (Engels, Lenin);

The form of manifestation of absolute eternity, transitory duration (Plato, Augustine, Hegel);

Absolute duration, uniform throughout the universe (Newton);

The relative properties of things, the order and sequence of events (Leibniz);

A form of ordering of complexes of sensations (Berkeley, Hume, Mach) or an a priori form of sensory intuition (Kant).

Objective idealism (Augustine, Hegel) denies Space and Time as universal properties of the world, considers these forms of being as the product of a non-human spiritual principle, which itself resides outside of time (eternal) and outside of space (infinite).

Thus, according to Hegel, the absolute idea only at a certain stage of its development first generates space, and then time and matter.

Representatives of subjective idealistic philosophy tend to deny the objective nature of P and V (Kant, Mach).

In Kant's time, no one doubted that contact with things (experience) is the impact of things on us, causing us certain impressions, observations (from which the mind draws conclusions); It is impossible to deduce universal provisions from observations, since the number of facts that obey such a law is infinite and it is impossible to observe all of them. Consequently, the experience of cognition does not provide knowledge about space and time.

Kant reasoned that we learn about what is characteristic of things only from contact with them, from experience. Ours judgments about space and time are not obtained from experience, which means that their source not in external things, but in ourselves, in our mind. And Kant concludes: ideas about space and time are characteristic of our mind as “forms of contemplation” inherent in it before any experience. No experience is possible without these forms; in every experience we use them. Space and time are like glasses without which we cannot look at things. Through green glasses, everything appears green. Through the glasses P and V, everything appears to exist in space and time. But these glasses are inherent in our consciousness, outside of which there is no space and time.

Kant expresses the idea that our experience of knowledge is not reduced to the impressions caused by things in us and to their subsequent logical processing. The most important role in experience is played by a person’s influence on things., it is this that allows one to substantiate the universality of the provisions.

The 19th century Austrian physicist and philosopher Mach called P and B ordered rows of our sensations.

However, P and V are just as objective characteristics of being as its materiality and movement.

Basic theories of space and time. Relation of Space and Time to Substance

In the history of philosophy, there were 2 points of view about the relationship of P and B to matter.

Substance concept

Characteristic of the scientific model of the world, starting with Newton and Galileo. Time and space are here considered as a special kind of incorporeal substances that exist on their own and independently of other material objects, but have a significant influence on them. They represent, as it were, a container for those material objects, processes and events that occur in the world. In this case, time is considered as absolute duration, and space as absolute extension.

It led to the conclusion that P and V are independent of the nature of the material processes occurring in them.

Relational concept (after the discovery of the theory of relativity by A. Einstein it began to dominate)

One of the major physicists of the early twentieth century, Arthur Eddington, said that throughout Europe, people who understand the theory of relativity can be counted on one hand. Even now there are not much more of them.

Among physicists there was even this quatrain:

This world was shrouded in deep darkness.

Let there be light! And then Newton appeared.

But Satan did not wait long for revenge,

Einstein came and everything became the same as before.

In SRT (1905), such space-time characteristics as length, time interval, and the concept of simultaneity lost their absolute character. All these characteristics turn out to depend on the mutual movement of material objects.

In general relativity - the establishment of a close dependence of the metric properties of space - time on the gravitational relationships between material objects. Near heavy objects, the geometric properties of Space begin to deviate from Euclidean ones, and the pace of time slows down.

Philosophical meaning of the theory of relativity:

1. TO excluded from science the concepts of absolute P and absolute B, revealing the inconsistency of the substantial interpretation of space and time as independent forms of existence independent of matter.

2. Showed the dependence of space-time properties on the nature of movement and interaction of material systems, confirmed the correctness of the interpretation of P and V as the main forms of existence of matter, the content of which is moving matter.

Einstein: Previously it was believed that if by some miracle all material things suddenly disappeared, then P and V would remain. According to the theory of relativity, P and V would disappear along with things.

3. TO dealt a blow to subjectivist, apriorist interpretations of the essence of P and V, which contradicted its conclusions.

Within its framework, P. and V. were understood not as independent entities, but as systems of relations formed by interacting material objects. All of this system of interactions between P and V were considered non-existent. P. and V. acted as general forms of material objects and their states. Consequently, the dependence of the properties of P and V on the nature of the interaction of material systems was also allowed. Thus, P and V are forms that express certain ways of coordinating material objects and their states. The features and nature of material processes determine the properties of P and V. Also, the concept pointed not only to the dependence of space and time on a specific form of matter, but also to the fact that there is a universal relationship between matter in general and P and V as a whole.

Modern definitions of space and time:

Space and Time are relative and depend on different frames of reference. Space and Time have a physical meaning only for determining the order of events associated with material interactions. P and V began to be interpreted as interrelated. Everything in the world happens in the space-time continuum. Moreover, P and B are derived from a physical event, i.e. P and V are not physical realities in themselves; only an event that can be described in space-time characteristics is real.

In philosophical terms, P and V are the most important attributes of existence, representing at a specific level systems of physical relations between objects.

Timeacts as a measure that records changes in the states of developing objects, and as such it can be applied to a wide variety of natural systems. But the specifics of the course of temporary processes and their speed are determined by the structural features of the system under study.

Space,expressing the properties of the extension of various systems must be interpreted depending on the organization of space of a particular system. Therefore, the physical description of the world according to its spatiotemporal characteristics is an idealized model, the properties of which do not reflect the diversity of states of the world.

Consequently, there is no uniform world, but there is a unity of different structural levels of the world, which are described by local pictures of the world.

One-dimensionality– one value is enough to fix.

Uniformitylies in the equality of all its moments.

Irreversibilitymanifests itself in the impossibility of returning to the past (time asymmetry). Time flows from the past through the present to the future, and its reverse flow is impossible. The irreversibility of time is associated with the irreversibility of fundamental material processes.

The manifestation of time and space in the microcosm, living nature, and social reality is specific: biological time, psychological time, social space-time.

THEORIES, CONCEPTS, PARADIGMs

Birth of Aphrodite. Marble. Around 470 BC e.

Baturin V.K.

Myth as space and time of a newly born Man

Baturin Vladimir Kirillovich, Doctor of Philosophy, Professor, Head of the Department of Philosophy and Sociology of the All-Russian Correspondence Institute of Finance and Economics (Moscow), Academician of the Russian Academy of Natural Sciences

Email: [email protected]

The article is a study of the space and time of myth as a form of primary objectification of human existence. The main integral characteristics of mythological thinking are highlighted, and the invariants of philosophical reflection and, in general, human cognition that go back to the mythological are shown.

Key words: space, time, myth, mythology, mythological thinking, ritual, taboo, tradition, nature, activity, space, chaos, cognition, science.

Space and time are forms that express certain ways of coordinating material objects and their states. Space characterizes the coexistence of phenomena, and time characterizes their turnover. The most general characteristic of space is the property of an object to be extended, to occupy a place among others, to border on other objects. The most common characteristic of time is

comparison of different durations, development of processes, their rhythms and tempos.

There is, however, a more ancient understanding: in the “Explanatory Dictionary of the Living Great Russian Language” by V.I. Dahl, “time”, in addition to the usual meanings for us, also has such meanings as “weather, state of air”, as well as “happiness, earthly prosperity , welfare." And not only in Russian, but also in some other languages, the same word had the meaning of both “time” and “weather”; Apparently, regular changes in the weather served for them as an obvious and visual manifestation of the fact that in their lives something was constantly changing, “turning” (the immediate predecessor of the Russian “time” was the Old Russian “vertmya”). And only much later did people begin to understand that time is something more than just the weather.

As for the concept of “space”, everything is much more complicated with it. Suffice it to say that Aristotle, for example, had a spatial model of the Cosmos that included 56 spheres! The Space of Cosmos was different from the Space of the earth's surface, the Space of the supralunar world was fundamentally different from the Space of our earthly (sublunar) world. Earthly Time differed sharply from cosmic Time.

But the main content of these concepts, according to M. Heidegger, is different and mysterious: “Space - doesn’t it belong to those primary phenomena, the perception of which, according to Goethe, embraces a kind of fear, almost horror? After all, beyond space, it would seem, there is nothing more to which it could be raised. You cannot deviate from it to something else." People have exactly the same fear and horror in relation to time - after all, it “devours” their life, ultimately taking it away from them. This is a modern perception of space and time, what can we say about the ancient mythological one?

The purpose of this article is to show what determined the space and time of a newly born Man. We will try to show that man, throughout his entire existence, was a real Man precisely in mythological times, but then... Then something happened that in the 19th century our great compatriot F.M. Dostoevsky defined as follows: “Man did not work out. Man is a pathetic mockery of man.” Based on this verdict of the great Russian philosopher and writer

about man in general, it can be noted: only one type of historical man was fully developed - the mythological man. This conclusion, in turn, is an algorithm for our actions today: a person of the coming future, if he wants to “work out” too, will necessarily have to become a mythological person, since the meaning and role of mythology for humanity is not so much in the past as in the future ( D. Vico, F. Nietzsche). So talk about the space and time of myth

This is, in fact, a forecast project of the Space and Time of the Future.

So, about mythology - great, mysterious, still extremely necessary and fundamentally in demand.

Mythology is the first historical form of the human worldview - an extremely general understanding of the world and man, a person’s system of views on the world around him and man’s place in it.

The most complete definition of myth was given by our domestic philosopher A.F. Losev:

"1. A myth is not an invention or fiction, it is not a fantastic invention, but - logically, i.e. first of all, dialectically, a necessary category of consciousness and being in general.

2. Myth is not an ideal being, but a vitally felt and created material reality.

3. Myth is not a scientific, and in particular a primitive scientific, construction, but a living subject-object interaction that contains its own, extra-scientific, purely mythical truth, reliability, fundamental regularity and structure.

4. Myth is not a metaphysical construction, but a real, materially and sensually created reality, which is at the same time detached from the usual course of phenomena, and, therefore, contains varying degrees of hierarchy, varying degrees of detachment.

5. Myth is neither a diagram nor an allegory, but a symbol; and, already being a symbol, it can contain schematic, allegorical and life-symbolic layers.

6. Myth is not a poetic work, but its detachment is the elevation of isolated and abstract things into an intuitive-instinctive and primitive-biological sphere related to the human subject, where they are united into one inseparable, organically fused unity”3.

In mythological thinking, man is not yet separated from external nature. Both man and everything else are fused, inseparable, one. Individual consciousness is not isolated from group consciousness, image and object, subjective and objective are not distinguished, the principles of activity are not separated from activity itself. The structure of primitive society is transferred to nature itself, natural properties and connections are constructed by analogy with the characters, roles and relationships in the tribal

1 Heidegger M. Works and reflections of different years. M.: Gnosis, 1993. P. 243.

2 Romanov I.N., Kostyaev A.I. Philosophy. Research - texts - diagrams - tables - exercises - tests. Tutorial. M.: Pedagogical Society of Russia, 2003. P. 14.

3 Losev A.F. Russian philosophy. // Losev A. F. Philosophy. Mythology. Culture. M.: Politizdat 1991. pp. 71-72.

community through personification, anthropomorphism, animalism. And vice versa - a person whose ancestral connections are described in images of nature (zoomorphism, phytomorphism, etc.). The ability of thinking to fix the properties of things and firmly assign them to them is still poorly developed, because The logical structures of mediation, justification, and evidence have not yet been formed. The explanation of the essence of things comes down to a narration of its origin. These features of mythological thinking are reflected in the language, which is characterized by the absence of names that fix generic concepts and the presence of many words denoting a given object from its different properties, at different stages, at different points in space, from different perspectives of perception. The same thing has different names, and different objects and creatures (living and nonliving, animals and plants, natural objects and people) are assigned the same name. This is associated with polysemanticism, and subsequently the metaphorical nature and symbolism of mythological thinking.

A significant place in mythological thinking is occupied by binary oppositions as tools for the cognitive and practical activity of a mythological person: Earth - non-Earth, light

Darkness, right - left, male - female, life - death, etc. Dual oppositions are removed during mediation - replacing the original opposition with some derivative formations involving random factors and those constructed arbitrarily, using various associations and relationships. The content expressed in a word acquires the character of immediate reality. The suggestive factor of speech determines the unconsciousness and inevitability of the transmission and assimilation of the myth1.

Mythological consciousness is distinguished by syncretism, the perception of pictures born of human creative imagination as “irrefutable factors of existence” (Losev). For mythological content there is no boundary between natural and supernatural, objective and subjective; Cause-and-effect relationships are replaced by connections by analogy and bizarre associations. The world is harmonious, strictly ordered and not subject to the logic of practical experience. The natural-historical incompleteness of reliable knowledge about the world, the lack of development of the conceptual apparatus and principles of knowledge of the world predetermined the emergence of myth as a kind of hypothesis, an improvised judgment about reality, which then appears as the unity of the possible and self-evident content of the appearance of the world2.

Another important aspect of the myth is that it represents the objectification of various collective phobias, framed in vivid and accessible images of mass expectations, fears, and hopes based on emotional consonances and subjective conviction3.

The role of language in the generation and development of myth is enormous: language itself gives birth to myths, myth is a “disease of language.” “Language undoubtedly played a significant role in the formation of myth,” Tylor emphasized. - The very fact of naming such concepts as winter and summer, cold and heat, war and peace, virtue and vice, gave the compiler of myths the opportunity to imagine these ideas in the form of personal beings. Language not only acts in complete harmony with the imagination, the products of which it expresses, but it also creates on its own, so that next to the mythical ideas in which speech followed the imagination, there are also those in which speech went ahead and imagination followed. along the path she laid out. Both these actions coincide too much in their results to be completely separated. The tyranny of the word over the human mind is one of the engines of myth-making.”4

Myth introduces a person into the situation of Sacred Time, the time of Beginnings and Origins. Worldly time is discontinuous, discrete, transitory. Sacred time is continuous - holistic, equal to itself and independent of man. The life of the Cosmos seems to be an eternal return to the origins of Time and the Beginning of the World (cosmic cycle); the return there, to the initial time, is carried out through holidays and is fixed in the archetype of the holiday. Only by returning to the Origins, there - only in this way can anything be changed, updated, strengthened, strengthened; being in secular time, this cannot be done; to do this, you need to return precisely to Sacred time5.

In the creation of the World, a mythological distinction is made between Urgia and Gonia (this is especially characteristic of our Slavic mythology). Analyzing these mythological principles in modern language, it should be noted that urgia is a kind of metamorphosis, revolution, bifurcation point, it is something sharp, masculine, violent, unnatural, cultural. Urgia is a provoked change in something in the World, more like the purposeful achievement of a predetermined goal, like some

control. Gonia has a completely different meaning - it is natural, smooth, feminine, soft, evolutionary,

non-violent, traditional self-development.

These two components of any development process - urgic and gonionic - are somehow synergistic

1 Dictionary of philosophical terms / Scientific. ed. prof. V.G. Kuznetsova. M.: INFRA-M, 2004. P. 333.

2 The latest philosophical dictionary / Redcall. ... I'M WITH. Yaskevich. Mn.: RIVSH, 2005. P. 634.

4 Taylor E.B. Primitive cultures / Transl. from English YES. Koropchevsky. M. SATI IAET SORAN, 2003. P. 76.

5 Domnikov S.D. Mother Earth and Tsar City. Russia as a traditional society. M.: Aletheya, 2002. P. 26.

6 Ibid. P. 29.

the beginning of the mythological.

It should be emphasized once again that all events and actions of people on Earth found their ideal prototypes in the Heavenly and (or) Underground Worlds, and were commensurate with the organization, openness of the Heavenly World, or the chaotic, formless, irregularity of the Underworld (Underworld). But the main thing is precisely that man’s earthly existence was a continuous reflection of the Heavenly or Underground plans.

The myth is self-closed, complete, and the only movement possible in it is only repetition, only the reproduction of what has already happened, without any changes or interpretations2.

The main integral characteristics of mythology are:

1) global scale: mythology models the whole world as a whole;

2) syncretism of scale - coincidence, unity and indivisibility of its semantic, axeological and praxeological principles;

3) structural-semantic heterogeneity - myth, when it coincides with reality at some points, fills semantic gaps with fantastic explanatory and interpretive models;

4) the universality of mythological rigorism - the absence of a discrepancy between what is and what should be: despite its drama and even tragedy, the world process in its mythological form is depicted and ultimately proceeds in full accordance with the established sacred program;

5) the paradigmatic nature of mythology in relation to all forms of human behavior and activity in the corresponding archaic societies;

6) the fundamental infinitiveness (recitability) of myth, which presupposes the actual unfolding in culture of the entire spectrum of derivatives: the explanatory potential of mythology can be realized only under the condition of its permanent interpretation, interpretation of its content, without allowing criticism and preserving the original core of meaning;

7) the internal orientation of the mythological towards immanent understanding and interpretation - this is where the hermeneutic tradition of interpretation is laid down as a tradition of immanent interpretation of the text;

8) normative fideism: to adapt any myth into the mass consciousness, confidentiality is required - a myth lives as long as people believe in it, and any critical analysis, especially skepticism, is simply impossible within mythology;

9) self-sacralization of the mythological, based on the presence within it of specific protective mechanisms operating in the ambivalent mode of “carrot and stick” - programs of love and fear;

10) the mandatory mechanism of sacralization of the name - the bearer of mythological consciousness, which serves as the basis for the nominal type of transmission of information from generation to generation; later, with the collective addressing of the myth, - sacralization of the name of the ethnic group (Jews, Hellenes, Slavs, and all others);

11) sufficient explanatory potential of the mythological, working both externally (interpretative assimilation of new phenomena that fall within the scope of consideration of myth) and internally (immediate “tightening” of semantic gaps due to the reinterpretation of existing myths or the creation of a new quasi-world);

12) immanent pragmatism: the mythological acts as a basic means of achieving real pragmatic goals, acting as an information and technological resource for providing economic, household, communication, etc. activities;

13) obligatory connection with ritual: ritual as a form of magical action is aimed at achieving real goals by illusory means, and thus the mythological is inextricably linked with ritual;

14) non-reflexivity: in mythological content, reflective, non-immanent, non-sacralized action or approach is not allowed;

15) conservatism: the mythological is not inclined to innovation, because each myth must be adapted into the content of mythology through some kind of interpretative mechanism, which is destructive for the foundations of the mythological and therefore is initially rejected.

These are the main integral characteristics of the mythological; In addition to them, it is necessary to note a number of important properties (characteristics) of the mythological:

Anthropomorphism;

Etiology understood as geneticism (recall that eSha is the cause); hylozoism - total revitalization of being;

Animism is the animation of fragments of the Cosmos;

Construction of all architectonics through the introduction of binary oppositions;

1 Ibid. P. 38.

2 Ibid. P. 634.

The heterogeneity of the time of myth as a structured relationship between profane and sacred time periods - this is precisely where cyclical ideas about the passage of time come from, suggesting a regular return of temporal movement to the point of the sacred date of the “beginning of time” (the act of “cosmogenesis”);

Allegorism of generalizations, where the mechanism for its implementation is the personification of generalized phenomena.

Without going into further detail of the content of mythology, we will note and analyze only what is important for our research.

Mythology is a certain unity of human activity, “sealed” primarily in rituals, aimed at a special interaction with reality. The result of this interaction is some stable and strong traditions, which, on the one hand, are a kind of reflection of reality,

and, on the other hand, performing a regulatory and meaning-forming role for the implementation of human activity (primarily in the form of ritual, as noted above). The design of human activity is finally limited by various kinds of taboos.

The subjects of taboo were things, animals, people, words, actions, etc. Some of them fell under taboo because they were considered sacred, while others, on the contrary, were “unclean” in a mythological or religious sense. According to the ancient ideas of people, for any touching of the sacred (as well as the “unclean”) they were expected to be punished, coming from mysterious higher powers, from spirits and gods.

The practice of tabooing is the main mechanism for regulating social relations. Gender and age taboos divided tribes into marriage classes and thereby excluded sexual relations between close relatives. Food taboos determined the nature of the food that was intended for various representatives of ancient society - the leader, warriors, women, children, and the elderly. Other taboos were supposed to guarantee the inviolability of the home or hearth, compliance with the rules of burial, and the distribution of responsibilities and rights between members of the community. The tribesmen were literally crushed by the oppression of countless taboos, the violation of which was severely punished (as Lévy-Bruhl put it, people in an archaic society were controlled by the formula “We do not believe, we are afraid”)

Only a select few, for example, priests, leaders and outstanding warriors, were allowed not to comply with some taboos2.

In mythological times, another important event took place - the authoritarian fragmentation of human activity - “... the separation of the “head” from the “hands”, the commanding from the obeying. This is how the authoritarian form of life arose; it is still the main and main division of society... Its meaning is that clearly or vaguely, the experience of one person is recognized as fundamentally unequal to the experience of another person.”3

The authoritarian fragmentation of human activity noted by A.A. Bogdanov is indeed a very important circumstance generated by the mythological - after all, it turns out that for the majority of members of an archaic society, only programmed activity is allowed, only activity within the framework of a certain rigid “track” (this is for the majority and this - in the form of activity precisely as a ritual); for the chosen ones (the “elite” of that society - priests, leaders, prominent military men) - another activity, much freer, outside the “rut”, activity already in the form of primordial activity.

This most important property of the authoritarian fragmentation of human activity is important not only by the content of those aspects that are highlighted by A.A. Bogdanov himself, but also by the content from the perspective of the problems of our research, namely: human activity in mythological times is represented by two components - tradition (ritual) and activity (with the predominant predominance of ritual for the majority).

Other times will come - no longer mythological, but so to speak “scientific”, where activity in the form of activity will predominate. We will return to this issue more than once, but here it was necessary to show the origins and beginnings of these important processes, and we tried to do this using various mythological circumstances and arguments.

It is also very important to emphasize that human activity, both in the form of ritual and in the form of activity, makes sense precisely because it is capable of influencing the behavior of the Cosmos, and here the fundamental principle is the principle of all-similarity, according to which “man recognizes himself as a part of the Universe... A round dance circle, a circle as a symbol of orderliness... as the idea of ​​universal connection and universal unity”4.

This connection, a cosmic connection (no less!) did not stop even after the death of a specific person in an archaic society! It has been studied that “...connection with the world of ancestors is carried out through labor (agriculture), which retains a ritual character throughout the history of agriculture.

1 The latest philosophical dictionary. pp. 635-637.

2 Dictionary of philosophical terms. P. 572.

3 Bogdanov A.A. New World: Gathering of Man // Bogdanov A.A. Questions of socialism: works of different years. M.: Politizdat, 1990. P. 26.

4 Domnikov S.D. Decree. op. P.109.

ical civilization... The dead allegedly continued to live underground and had greater power over it than the farmer who walked along it with a plow. Caring for crops is combined with caring for the dead... ancestors are present at the common table... their first piece of any dishes."1.

The rituals of homelands and funerals are almost the same: “...the funeral rite is the same homeland rite, performed in the reverse order: at birth it begins with the removal of the body from the womb of the mother (earth), at death the ritual ends with the immersion of the body in the womb of the earth (mother). » .

Finally, we note that in cultivating the duality of earthly and unearthly, living and dead, the amazing wisdom of mythological archaism is revealed: “it is impossible to live only in heaven, corporeality necessitates taking care of the material. But it is impossible to live only on the earthly: passion for the carnal destroys the flesh, ... concern for form destroys the content. "3.

From this approach, in particular, there is another curious and important property (characteristic) of the mythological: “A master who put his talent into the service of society could rise to the level of a saint, be considered as a mediator between the world and heaven, but any self-will or selfishness on his part immediately turned such a person, in the eyes of the majority, into a carrier of dark forces, the embodiment of evil. Such people were often rejected by society.”4.

“When an archaic blacksmith, casting spells before starting work, experiences his work as serving the gods and spirits of the forge, he reproduces the eternal and unchanging world of Tradition. When the forge owner works to produce the maximum quantity of goods of such quality that can be sold at a favorable price for him, he reproduces a world of limitless dynamics; this corresponds to the transition from a value-rational to a goal-rational activity dominant”5.

Mythological thinking, based on rigid, mandatory instructions, following which is like moving in a rut, gave rise to a number of powerful and long-lived traditions that continue to operate to this day, being “built-in” into the scientific thinking of modern man. As K. Jaspers noted, tradition cannot be eliminated from our history, since the very historical existence of man is possible only through constant reference to the enduring spiritual achievements of the past. The historical “is tradition through authority and constitutes continuity through recollection of the past. Historical is the perishing, but eternal in time, imperfection of man and his historicity is one and the same. Therefore, the more we comprehend it, the more we are amazed and we continue to search again.”6

The meaning of tradition is clearly seen from the following statement of M. Heidegger: “Whatever and how we try to think, we think in the space of tradition”7. “All perception and understanding involve prejudices, described in terms of some particular interpretative paradigm; therefore, even methodologically sound judgments that we consider objective are prejudices.”8

What traditions from mythological times remain effective to this day? What traditions can be fully called invariant for human cognition?

The main such invariant is, in our opinion, the cognitive tradition, which communicates a kind of Unified Plan, according to which everything happens in the Universe. The myths of many peoples of the world are devoted to the description of such plans for the emergence and functioning of the Universe. Despite all the diversity and diversity of mythological ideas, they invariably contain a desire to embrace and describe the World Whole in accordance with any single, most often hierarchical, scheme.

The main question that worried the ancient Greek philosophers was, according to researchers, the following: “is there a single plan underlying everything that happens in the Universe”9? The unified plan as a tradition of knowledge, as one of its main paradigms, developing, subsequently acquires other forms, while maintaining its main content. Thus, from the time of the Pythagoreans, this Plan begins to be understood mathematically: “The Pythagoreans were amazed that phenomena that were very different in qualitative terms had the same mathematical properties; This means that mathematical properties express the essence of phenomena”10. According to legend, Pythagoras, amazed by the order and harmony reigning in the world, called the world Cosmos, a harmoniously ordered unity.

It is interesting to note that the very ideas of the Pythagoreans about world harmony were based on their

1 Ibid. P. 152.

3 Ibid. P. 205.

4 Ibid. P. 195.

5 Yakovenko I.G. A fresh look at history // Society. science and modernity. 1999. No. 1. P. 109.

6 Jaspers K. Vom Ursprung and ziel dez Geschichte, 1949. S. 149.

7 Heidegger M. Decree. op. P. 40.

8 Gadamer H.-G. Hermeneutics, tradition and reason. Cambridge, 1987, p. 80.

9 Klein M. Mathematics. Loss of certainty. M.: Mir, 1984. P. 19.

10 Ibid. P. 21.

mathematical and acoustic discoveries, thanks to which numerical relationships were established for musical intervals - tones, fourths, fifths, octaves. However, then these relations were extrapolated to the entire Cosmos as a kind of “huge musical instrument.”

It should be noted that it is from the ancient Greek thinkers that the tradition of the union of mathematics and natural science, the mathematization of sciences in general, originates. This tradition is based on the idea

about the unity of the surrounding world, its content-structural homogeneity and, as a consequence, the fundamental possibility of transferring patterns from one subject area of ​​cognition to another. The mathematization of knowledge combined with the tradition of searching for a Unified Plan, which led to the emergence of ideas about the Mathematical Plan, in accordance with which the world was created and exists. Among the founders and followers of this tradition are Pythagoras, Plato, Aristotle, Euclid, Kepler, Descartes, Galileo, Newton and other scientists.

Another ancient tradition, one of the main invariants of our attitude to the world, is the biblical tradition (in the Bible, by the way, the Unified Plan for the Creation of the World is also presented), which asserts that man is the crown of creation, and that the rest of the world is given to him for his possession and use. Starting from the era of modern times, it is this idea of ​​man as a master, the master of the surrounding reality, that makes its truly triumphant march - after all, this was precisely the intention of the founders of European science.

Let us refer, for example, to the statement of R. Descartes: “Instead of the speculative philosophy taught in schools, we can create a practical one, with the help of which, knowing the power and action of fire, water, air, stars, heavens and all other bodies surrounding us, we could use and these forces in all their characteristic applications and thus become, as it were, masters and rulers of nature”1.

As a continuation and consequence of this tradition, another arises - the tradition of an adversarial attitude towards nature: nature must be purposefully used, conquered, curbed, put into service to achieve the goals and objectives of man - to satisfy all possible needs of its sovereign owner, created in the image and likeness of God. Currently, humanity has fully realized the “charms” of this tradition, but we repeat, this tradition is ancient, essentially mythological.

Another ancient cognitive tradition, dating back to the times of the ancient Greek natural philosophers, is the search for arche, the origin of all things: “in nature, as in the polis, one of the elements should belong to dominance, power”2. In this regard, we would like to especially emphasize two points here.

Firstly, the search for arche “in nature, as well as in the polis” reveals, in our opinion, one of the most important heuristic techniques of cognitive activity - extrapolation of knowledge obtained in one subject area (in the “polis”) to another subject area (in "nature")

Secondly, let us pay attention to the fact that arche (the fundamental principle of the world) is understood by Greek philosophers as the dominant, ruling element. It is also important that the ancient tradition of searching for the arche - the owner, the master of the world in the form of a certain entity (element) - with the goal of cognizing this world and mastering it, echoes the biblical tradition of understanding the role of man in the world. Knowledge, therefore, can be understood as mastery of the dominant principle in order to dominate oneself.

According to F. Bacon, “the goal of scientific knowledge is not knowledge for the sake of knowledge, but the domination of man over nature”3.

Cognition for the purpose of management, for solving pressing human problems - this is the most general meaning of such an important and still active cognitive tradition - the tradition of searching for arche.

Another tradition that is unchanged in its content and is still active today is the search for final knowledge, truth, alethia, which in Ancient Greece (in particular, in the philosophy of Plato) was understood as the obvious, unconcealed existence of things, their order open and accessible to human understanding. It was believed that what appears in alethia is always present in the world and is only “waiting” for its time (like the ripening of a fruit) to become human knowledge. On the contrary, “what we call scientific knowledge is not, as a rule, knowledge in the Platonic-Aristotelian sense, but rather represents information concerning various competing hypotheses and the ways in which they stand up to various tests.”4 We are still subject to this cognitive tradition (due to the essentialist orientation of our knowledge) and are at least partly focused on comprehending the essence of what is happening in the world, exploring the “first principles and causes”, exploring, first of all, traditions invariant for all times.

However, at certain stages of development of archaic society (especially in ancient Eastern ones), tradition acquires its transformed form, being reflected and rationalized within the framework of pro-

2 History of ancient dialectics. M.: Mysl, 1972. P. 32.

3 The latest philosophical dictionary. P. 152.

4 Gorelov A.A. Philosophy: Textbook. M.: Yurayt, 2003.

professionally created culture, imprinted in certain texts and other written and symbolic expressions. All this ultimately leads to the splitting of traditions into “primary” and “secondary” and, what is especially important, “secondary” ones become capable of development, change, and suggest the possibility of restructuring the past through its constant reinterpretation in active and symbolic forms, carry out a selection of elements of human experience (mythological experience) through a change in the matrices themselves, rooted in general human activity. A changeable (secondary) tradition is already different, different from the primary one - different, first of all, in that it can change and develop. This is the initial prototype of a new concept - the concept of “knowledge”. Such a system of traditions is now fully capable of, firstly, “connecting” a person with the past, closing (to a certain extent) the possibility of retrospective arbitrariness; on the other hand, it is precisely such a system of traditions that opens a person to the prospect of freedom in the present and future on the basis of the past, which is taken into account only selectively1. The transition “tradition - secondary tradition - knowledge” is extremely important for understanding the entire problematic of the philosophy of science (more on this later).

It is clear that such human activity differs from strictly ritual activity, when a person was nothing more than a “social automaton” and could only “walk” in “formation” and strictly “on a track.” Now human activity is a kind of negation of ritual and it is precisely this that can be called the original form of activity

Activity is not strictly regulated, activity with a certain degree of freedom and the choice of its various “editions”. Only now the “liberated” activity (activity) is connected with the liberated secondary tradition (the original form of knowledge), capable of interpretation and change.

Tradition is directly related to rite and ritual, the immutability of which is “guaranteed” by mythological paradigms of the periodic return of primordial time, as a result of which the restoration of the original order occurs.

Tradition ensures the reproduction in systems of present (“living”, “immediate”) activity of tested and time-tested samples of past (“dead”, “materialized”) activity, i.e. it determines the present and future by the past, which has already come true and acts as the sum of the conditions of any human activity. Moreover, the legitimacy of traditional forms of action is justified and legitimized by the very fact of their existence in the past, and their effectiveness is assessed through the accuracy of following the accepted pattern. All elements of tradition are imbued with symbolic content and refer to the meanings and archetypes enshrined in a particular culture.

In order to “appropriate” the world for yourself, to make it your own, respectively safe and understandable, you need to split, dismember, divide the world, like a ritual sacrifice, and then put everything back together again2. Doesn't this remind us of today's scientific tools of analysis - synthesis? Don’t we find in the mythological, in essence, that unchangeable attitude towards the world and in the scientific, when knowledge is like a ritual of sacrifice, when it is a kind of tradition of sacrifice?

Another important feature of the mythological beginning is the idea of ​​the unity of the World, which is actualized by festive rituals, emphasizing the mantic possibilities of the festive period - a period of cosmic uncertainty, a period of mixing of elements and the world’s presence at the origins of all potential possibilities; During this period, people tried to use the smallest, barely defined signs to discover the beginnings of the future awaiting them.

So, we have examined the main content of the concept of “tradition,” which is one of the main elements of mythology as a whole.

Let us now dwell on another important concept, noted as an element of mythology above - the concept of “human activity in the form of ritual.” Here, first of all, you should focus on the following.

Ritual (lat. psha^ - ritual, gksh - solemn ceremony, cult rite) is one of the basic concepts of cultural and philosophical anthropology, which allows us to adequately reflect the uniqueness of human behavior (activity) in “distant” cultures - archaic, traditional, mythological. The ritual was initially presented as a sacred act based on endowing things with special (symbolic) properties. The ritual principle turns out to be the basis of a person’s daily work activity, a means of maintaining the integrity of human groups (Malinovsky, Durkheim), an opportunity to relieve psychological stress and harmonize the human psyche (Jung). But the main thing about ritual is that it is a kind of sacred action aimed at establishing or maintaining universal and social order. The form of obligatory human participation in the festive renewal of the world is an archaic, mythological ritual. It begins with actions that are pointedly contrary to generally accepted norms.

1 The latest philosophical dictionary. P. 1048.

2 Domnikov S.D. Decree. op. P. 38.

3 Ibid. P. 110.

mom. thereby plunging the “aged” cosmos into “fruitful” chaos. Then the ritual begins to consistently “restore” the original order of things. Ritual by its very nature is a syncretic action, to which later and specialized forms of activity go back in their origins - production-economic, military-political, religious-cult, scientific, artistic, educational, etc.), but still the main thing in the ritual is precisely festive destruction - restoration in order to maintain a firmly established order. Human activity, following traditions and taboos - absolute patterns of permissible (allowed) behavior, is ritualized and fits into the model of the ideal balance of the Cosmos and Nature. It is ritual that acts as the supporting frame of a mythological (traditional in general) society, ensuring the reproduction of the sacred order of things.

In conclusion, we will only emphasize the enormous distance between the ritual aimed at maintaining the sacred harmony of the entire Cosmos then and the current, modern activity of man, today “concerned” with this. by the person himself to the fore and main plan of the goals and values ​​of the utilitarian-egoistic action of an autonomous individual. The distance is really huge1!

In Homer, the epistemology of the word “myth” includes one and a half dozen meanings: “thought”, “prescription”, “order”, “advice”, “purpose”, “intention”, “goal”, “promise”, “request”, “ intent”, “threat”, “reproach”, “defence”, “boast”; in Hesiod - “words that carry something important - both true and false.” Already from this it is quite clear the colossal significance of the myth - after all, for many centuries, the most difficult and dangerous for humans, myth performed the following functions:

a) establishing a balance between the tribal collective of primitive people and nature;

b) a special holistic explanation of the surrounding world;

c) systems of rites, rituals, holidays, etc., with the help of which people seemed to “dance” ideas about life and death, about relationships among themselves, between man and nature, became accomplices in common affairs and the “creation” of the Cosmos, and became involved to the requirements of responsible behavior and co-creation throughout the entire space of their life and activities, they knew the “red” boundaries of what is permitted, etc.

With the help of myth, the unity of goals, means, results, motives, needs, and individual cycles of human activity was ensured.

By dividing myth into profane and sacred areas, mythology ensured dominance, true reality for primitive man, not the profane (as, unfortunately, in the present era), but the sacred.

It is especially necessary to note the authoritarian nature of the myth - after all, the myth does not provide the individual with the opportunity to freely choose any alternatives of behavior and does not allow a critical attitude towards its own content. In other words, the mythological exists as one powerful tradition, “imprinted in rituals,” obligatory for all members of a given primitive collective, for everyone without exception, and forced adherence to this tradition is ensured by such features of mythological consciousness as collectivity, suggestiveness, and symbolism. Naturally, such an authoritarian tradition could maintain stable, unchanging ideas about the world among its followers for a long time. As I.T. Yakovenko emphasizes, “the dynamics in the consciousness of our distant ancestor are born when the perception of the universe of human activity as a Ritual performed in the boundless temple of God’s World dies”2.

The loss of the dominant influence of mythology on a person in all elements of his life and activity without exception begins with a new type of mythology - the so-called. heroic mythology; her hero has qualities that allow him to deal first with demonic monsters, then with natural phenomena, and then with the gods themselves! The “heroic” that gradually emerged from mythology is embodied in the rational, which immediately opposed itself to the myth; moreover, the myth itself, first of all, the norms of the species, including morality, and various prohibitions, ultimately come under the fire of the rational as a subject of criticism. and taboo. Then there followed a break between the rational and the value side of consciousness, the stage of conceptual comprehension of the world began, accompanied by an even greater destruction of integrity, rigid fixation of the acquired contents (knowledge) with concepts, the development of cause-and-effect and logical connections, etc. - all this is an emerging science - a cognitive fragment of mythology, which ultimately destroyed the mythological ontology and worldview of man, nature, society, and man himself. Science, the dominance of which is increasingly expressed in our losses than in our achievements, in crises and disasters than in ups and victories. Without any exaggeration, we can say that scientific chauvinism is largely to blame for mankind’s numerous global problems. Let's explain what was said.

Mythological is the unity of ontological, epistemological, praxeological, essentialistic and axiological principles. The united mythological is torn, dismembered, separated by science (as if in a sacrifice) into separate components, destroying that unique

1 The latest philosophical dictionary. P. 839.

2 Yakovenko I.T. Decree. op. P. 110.

integrity and unity, which is so characteristic of mythology. Science (emerging science) also participates in this, which ultimately receives the cognitive fragment of an integral mythology. The latter should be especially emphasized: science is a cognitive fragment of an integral mythology, a part that imagines itself to be a whole. Science has achieved tremendous success in understanding the world around us - this is undoubtedly its enormous historical merit. But its huge disadvantage is its decisive role in violating the holistic mythological perception of the surrounding world, covering the entire space of human life and activity, moving away from value, axiological components, and, as a consequence, from morality, from co-creation, from the community of human interests.

Science, especially the new science emerging during the Enlightenment, became the resource of the free individual relying on himself. In isolation from general goals, in isolation from moral and other values ​​(moral values ​​at the time of the birth of the new science remained under the jurisdiction of religion), such a science for such a free, “untethered” individual could not but lead to negative ones, to numerous negative ones for a person and peace consequences - environmental, economic, moral, cultural, spiritual, etc. This science-centrism of science has led to a serious systemic crisis of human civilization, which, in particular, is reflected in the knowledge of our era - “the era of waiting for death.” The emergence of an objective science, divorced from man, oriented first to truth, and then to benefit, but not to value, already in classical science leads to ideas about nature, completely divorced from man, destroys the unified Cosmos, discards the modesty of man, his morality and turns science into an instrument of domination and dictatorship; in the words of A. Poincaré: “Bend nature this way and that until it adapts to the requirements of human reason”...

As shown above, that activity has already appeared, “untied” from tradition, from ritual, from taboo, which can allow itself to pursue other, including purely research, and not just traditionally set goals and objectives; a secondary tradition has appeared, which is ready to change its content exactly like scientific knowledge; that community has appeared, that community that can afford not only ritually-conditioned activity - namely the elite, leaders and priests - and it is they who are the future prototype of the scientific community; For them, even in mythological times, knowledge is one of the main resources of their power, power, a means for effectively managing the majority of people in an archaic society, for whom it is their destiny to walk in formation and strictly only according to the rut of rituals and traditions.

Let us note that logic and a certain initial “conceptual apparatus” are also manifested, which “from there” seems to start in its changes and movements, but now into different temporary circumstances, into different, scientific meanings and contents.

This is mythology - great, mysterious, still extremely necessary. We still use her achievements - speech, society, activity, morality, science, education, religion, technology, power, etc., but at the same time we don’t even think about the fact that all this was given to us by the only successful person so far. Mythological man.

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