All citations from "Faust" by line number in Goethe (1972)

In his Faust, Goethe presents in a few passages, in an extremely condensed and concise manner (die Ver-Dichtung, Strecker 1988: 217-219), a poetic analysis of the problems engendered by the logocentrism that has turned the word into a fetish, and then he takes us in a few more extremely condensed passages, down to the very foundations of our world system. In the opening scene (354-363), he lets Faust speak those famous words which probably every German speaking person has heard sometime in their life . Goethe portrays a man of scholarly learning, not in his youth any more, and apparently with a successful medical practice (981-1010) and ten years of academic teaching and consulting career behind him: "Und ziehe schon an die zehen Jahr' ... Meine Schüler an der Nase herum". In psychological diction, he is apparently experiencing his "mid life crisis" uttering the words in (354-363). This scholarly man of profound learning sees himself trapped in a logocentric bibliosphere of verbiage, that is highly academic, but essentially useless for the recognition of the basic forces and principles of the universe. In short, he is desperately looking for "Alternatives to written Words" (written in the alphabet): "Daß ich erkenne, was die Welt im Innersten zusammenhält, Schau' alle Wirkenskraft und Samen, Und tu' nicht mehr in Worten kramen" (382-385), With the aspect of purely conceptual learning Goethe also gives a characterization of the scholastic academic tradition of Europe before Bacon and Galileo [583].

->:FUNDAMENTAL_IDEAS, p. 112

In a later scene (1867-2050) Goethe turns again his subtle sarcasm against the logocentrism of academic tradition. Here he lets Mephistopheles pose as "academic study advisor" for a student who has come to request guidance as to which academic path he should follow. Words are perfectly suited to weave intricate and artful conceptual edifices (1922-1930) which make them ideal for the forming of academic schools, where many generations of students are made to obediently and unquestioningly follow the "words of the master" (1989) down to the Iota (2000). But they are all too often erring around in ornate edifices of verbiage.

Ein Schlag tausend Verbindungen schlägt: [584]

Der Philosoph, der tritt herein

Und beweist Euch, es müßt' so sein:

Das Erst' wär so, das Zweite so,

...

The step out of the bibliosphere of the logocentric academic tradition that Goethe lets Faust perform is described in scene:

->:BIBLIOSPHERE, p. 195

In this scene, Goethe takes us to the "foundations of the world", he lets Faust critically review the fundamental philosophical statement of the Christian tradition, John (1,1): "en archae en ho logos", which expresses the core of the logocentrism of this tradition. In this essential passage, Goethe lets Faust make his conversion ( metanoia[586] / kata strophae ) from a fundamentally static declaration-oriented[587] (logocentric, scholastic) framework to a pragmatic and process-oriented approach. In this, Goethe lets his protagonist perform "pars pro toto" the reorientation of the western mind from scholastic philosophy (ancilla theologiae) towards science and technology as it happened after the Renaissance[588]. Not without a sense for subtle humor, the name Faust (fist) of the protagonist emphasizes the elements of action and process , as opposed to the Kopf (head), the purely cognitive, word and mind oriented approach of the intellectual. It is the fist that forges and holds the tools with which the "faustian" Western civilization went on to conquer the world (Spengler). [589] As a pun, we might note that to become "a man of the fist", Faust needs to make a pact with me-fisto. This whole drama is described in its unfolding by Goethe in Faust II, the exploits of Faust and Mephisto in their work for the emperor (the powers of this world). Focusing again on the crucial passage around Faust's metanoia.

But the power behind the Faust stems also from a different source than mechanistic technology: Faust had become an adept of (alchymical) ritual: "Drum hab' ich mich der Magie ergeben" (375-520) [590] that is: he had studied an area which lies outside of logocentric scholastics as well as of the positivistic sciences and technologies. This focus on magical ritual sets the scene for the first climax of the drama that occurs in the immediately following passages (1255-1290) where Faust performs a series of conjurations, as he discovers that the poodle he has brought home from his walk in the fields, is no ordinary dog. The stages of this ritual process are unfortunately not described by Goethe in detail, only the first conjuration (1272-1291) where he evokes the elements. And when this doesn't work "Du sollst mich hören / stärker beschwören" (1296-1297) he makes another conjuration: "So sieh dieses Zeichen" (1300) and as last measure, he makes reference to an even "stronger medicine" that he has in store for his guest: "Erwarte nicht / das dreimal glühende Licht! Erwarte nicht / Die stärkste von meinen Künsten!" (1318-1321). Apparently this "magic of implication" works, and in an anticlimax, Goethe now describes the appearance of Mephistopheles, "the spirit of negation and destruction" (1328-1384).

With the appearance of Mephisto, Goethe now enters the metaphysical plane, and he goes even deeper, and under-mines all the foundations of our world views of the last 2500 years. He re-introduces the Presocratic philosophy, the concept of "generation and corruption" (1335-1344) which has first been described by Anaximander (also in the Aristotelian treatise under the same name). Thus he re-opens the philosophical field of contention for the ancient Heraklitean ideas of perpetual change "panta rhei", that had been closed shut with the static Parmenidean Being and the eternal unchanging world of the Platonic ideas that had been transfigurated (heilige Wandlung) into the Will of God in the Christian "philosophia ancilla theologiae". Genz (1994: 74-99), Goppold (1998: 2), Weischedel (1975: 21-28), Parmenides (1974), Heraklit (1976). In a later passage, (7850-8487) Goethe lets Thales, Anaxagoras, and Proteus appear as protagonists for the Presocratics.

->:LOGOCENTRISM, p. 197

The word Me-phis-to-pheles as used by Goethe is worth scrutinizing. There is no direct translation into any Greek words, but there seem to be several ways to decypher [591] it:

For the symbolic decyphering of the appearance of Mae-phis-to-pheles we need to consider the alchymical ritual setting of the whole scene that Faust has prepared, and we can make use of methods that are shown by Strecker (1988: 10-43, ch. 1 and 2), taking the evocation as important component of the ritual process (Turner 1987), in which Goethe lets us partake in this scene. The Faust is not an ordinary prosa text, but is an instance of extreme symbolic Verdichtung. Strecker (1988: 217-219): "The skilful placement speaks within the context of the totality or Gestalt of the ritual". This allows us to enter the ritual process ourselves and lets us strike the chords of evoked association and meaning that bear a connection to the themes that Goethe introduces in the passage between (1328) and (1867). The Latin words expressing the alchymical process are: solve et coagula[592], and transmutatio. (Chambers: Alchemy). In Greek (Rost 1862,I: 236), this is: { analysis / diaballein} ( dissolve, to cast apart) and { synthesis / symballein} ( coagula, to cast together), and { metamorphosis / metaballein} ( transmutatio). The symballein connects us to the word symbolon.[593] The casting apart of diaballein had at some time assumed a pejorative aspect in diabol /-us /-ic as term for the devil. The alchymical theme of these passages in Faust is that of the processes of creation, destruction, and transmutation: symballein, diaballein, and metaballein. The introduction of the Mae-phis-to-pheles serves as cypher for the necessity of any creation to be balanced by dissolution, of the balance of physis and lysis: "Und das mit Recht; denn alles, was entsteht, / Ist wert, daß es zugrunde geht;". This is expressed by the mae-, the Greek negation operator (Rost 1862,II: 79): "ich bin der Geist, der stets verneint". It is also the fundamental tenet of the Anaximandros fragment.

Another association connected with me- is mnae- / mnaemae- (Rost 1862,II: 91): pertaining to memory [594]. This, the cultural memory, is the core theme of the present study, and it is also the theme of the very last sentence in Faust's life (11581-11586): "Es kann die Spur von meinen Erdentagen / Nicht in Äonen untergehn". It is Faust's ulterior wish and aim to remain eternally in the cultural memory of the people for whom he has conquered the Lebensraum[595], to become an immortal cultural heros[596] (11575): "Nur der verdient sich Freiheit und das Leben, / der täglich sie erobern muß".

We have several possible ways to decypher the - phis-to-pheles: It was mentioned above that there is a phos- element that appears as the theme of the consecutive dialogue. This has the following connections: phos connects to phonae (the sound) by the Greek word phaino to bring to light / to sound (Rost 1862,II: 595, 596). ho phainon is an alias name for the planet (and alchymical force) Saturn. Graves mentions in (1988: 86-88): hae-phaistos[597], ? haemeraphaestos? (he who shines by day): Greek god of metal work and smiths who is ugly and ill-tempered and hobbles (like the devil). But hae-phaistos is well-liked on the Olympus because he makes the most exquisite mechanical devices, especially famous are his mechanical tripods. (Connection to Faustian technology, Spengler 1980). Then there is a Greek word pistis / pistos (Rost 1862,II: 293) that refers to a pact, a contract, an agreement, a guarantee, a pledge, a pawn, a collateral, an oath, a vow, which is of prime importance in the following text. The - pheles can either be taken as an allusion to philes, friend, or to phalaes / phallos -> male organ of generation (see Faust: Gretchen), or to - pheres, as in phos-pheres:= lucifer[598]. The self-characterization of Mae-phaisto between (1348 - 1379) makes recurrence to all the core subjects of presocratic philosophy, especially Thales, Anaximandros and Hesiodos. The alchymical elements can be found in the philosophy of Thales: the dry, the humid, the warm and the cold (1374-1376), (Pleger 1991: 56, 65), (Chambers: Alchemy). Anaximandros' work is about the reign of time over the waxing and waning of all things (1338-1344), (1699-1706), (Pleger 1991: 61-66).

The fundamental theme of the polarity of space and time is brought to bear to with "Das stolze Licht, das nun der Mutter Nacht / Den alten Rang, den Raum ihr streitig macht"[599] (1351-1352). This short passage makes allusion to the fundamental polarity that our main senses and modes of orientation have: vision as the sense of space, and hearing of sound as the sense of time. Night, darkness, is the realm of sound. It is also the Leitmotiv of the Apollonian / Dionysian dichotomy of Nietzsche, Benedict (1934), and Paglia (1991). From our own experience, we all know that in the darkness, we hear most acutely [600]. Illustrative for this is also the account of the intense experiences of Jacques Lusseyran when he became blind (Innis 1972: vii), (Mcluhan 1978: 198, 1989: 27-28, 35-36, 37, 74-75). Time is the essential motif in the later passage (1699-1706). The polarity of space and time and the influence of the media is one of the main themes in the works of Innis (1952-1991), and McLuhan (1972-1989). In Faust (1384), Mae-phaisto is described as the son of Chaos[601]. This brings up Hesiodos' Theogony of the origin ( archae) of the All (ta panta) in the Chaos. Hesiodos (1978: p. 34-35, p. 50-53,Theog.). Hesiodos says: ex archaes ... hoti proton genet auton (from the beginning... what of those arose first), and then he continues: aetoi men protista Chaos genet, autar epeita Gai' eurysternos, (in the very beginning, verily, arose the Chaos, but then the broad-breasted [602] Gaia... (Theog.,ln. 116-117). And in that first act of primordial creation (out of the Chaos) also arose Eros lysimelaes , "the most beautiful of the eternal gods, the member-dissolving" (Theog.,ln. 120). [603] And then, in the next act of creation, arose (out of the Chaos) the dark elements: Tartaros, Erebos, and Nyx (night), and only out of the coupling of Nyx and Erebos arose finally the Ether and the Haemer (light of day) (Theog.,ln. 119-124). This is definitely a view of creation that is as unchristian as can be, and mae-phaistos now appears as the emissary of all those primordial forces of creation that had been driven into the underworld (the Tartaros, or the hell as it is called in Christian terminology). "Ich bin ein Teil des Teils, der anfangs alles war" (ta panta). The identity of this "Part of the Part that was the All in the Beginning" is elaborated in a further scene (8027-8029): "(Meph.) Da steh' ich schon, / Des Chaos vielgeliebter Sohn! / (Phorkyaden) Des Chaos Töchter sind wir unbestritten / (Meph.) Man schilt mich nun, o Schmach, Hermaphroditen." This, the hermaphroditaes being the " dearest Son of Chaos " will add further light to the identity of mae-phaistos: Because in the Orphic hymns, he is known as the Protogonos, the Erikepaios, the Phanes (phaino , above ), and the Priapus[604], (Orpheus 1992: 29). According to Graves (1988: 30) he is also the Eros, who was hatched from a silver egg that Nyx had laid in the womb of Darkness, and he set the Universe in motion. Eros was double-sexed and golden-winged and, having four heads, sometimes roared like a bull or a lion, sometimes hissed like a serpent or bleated like a ram. By this, we have now recovered a few more of the "parts of the parts that were the All in the Beginning", and of the names and guises under which this master of permutation (metaballein) of form appeared. ->:MORPHOLOGY, p. 128

In the abovementioned passage of primacy of the night over the light: "Das stolze Licht, das nun der Mutter Nacht / Den alten Rang, den Raum ihr streitig macht", Goethe lets Mae-phaisto retrace the connection to John (1,5-9) which equates the logos (word) with the phos (light), and lets him confront that with the ancient creation mythologies of Anaximandros and Hesiodos (above). His old "birthright" over the light is evidenced in his alias name: the phos-pheres:= lucifer (1377: "Hätt' ich mir nicht die Flamme vorbehalten"). It was said above, that Night, darkness, is the realm of sound. This is the theme of the archaic sound creation mythologies of the Chaos, which are essentially polar opposites of the younger Judaeo-/Christian light creation mythology. These are in all depth and detail described in the works of Marius Schneider (Schneider 1951-1990). Ruth Benedict (1934: 78) retraces part of this development in her polarity of dionysian (orgiastic, sound [605]) and apollonian (rational, light [606]) cultural patterns after Nietzsche. (Encarta: Dionysos, Bacchus), (Graves 1988: 103-111).

The connection between Saturn and time is given by H.v.Dechend (1993: 122, 203-4, 218, 242, 244-248) who equates Saturn with Chronos and Kronos, the god of time, and in (247-248) Saturn is again equated with Hephaistos.

The central issue of the Saturnian reign over time is shown in the bet by which Faust wagers his soul's immortality (ie. the endurance of his person's substantial essence over time), [607] against the ever-increasing entropy, the second law of thermodynamics. [608] This is set in (1699-1706), and this sets the starting signal for Faust's and Mae-phaisto's race into creation and destruction, and the waxing and waning of worldly phenomenal appearances against the eternal law of time :

And this pact is to be set in writing (to preserve the evidence against the law of time, destruction, for eternity [609]). There is a discussion which writing medium is best: "Erz, Marmor, Pergament, Papier? Soll ich mit Griffel, Meißel, Feder schreiben?" (1731-1732). One settles for parchment: "Allein ein Pergament, beschrieben und beprägt" (1726). Now the central aspect of cultural memory could be characterized as: CM is that of the personal memories which doesn't die with the person who is dying . Thus we could state that writing as CM technology is an "Alternative to the immortal soul", and so we get the poignant theme of Faust's pact with his Mae-phaisto for the subject of the present study. This factor of "virtual immortality" is evident in the preservation of the names of scientific and literate workers in the collective memory of society. (Also: Assmann 1993: 145-147). Thus, the writing of an academic bibliography, whatever its utilitarian (exoteric) purposes may be, is also a solemn rite (esoteric) by which (virtual) immortality is instantiated and celebrated. And the very same moment Faust imagines to have achieved this:

That moment is the fulfilment of the pact, and the victory of time over creation:

Innis (1972: 7): The concepts of time and space reflect the significance of media to civilization. Media that emphasize time are those that are durable in character, such as parchment, clay, and stone. The heavy materials are suited to the development of architecture and sculpture. Media that emphasize space are apt to be less durable and light in character, such as papyrus and paper. The latter are suited to wide areas in administration and trade. Materials that emphasize time favour decentralization and hierarchical types of institutions, while those that emphasize space favour centralization and systems of government less hierarchical in character...

->:TECHNO_FACTOR, p. 155

Thus we have brought about the main themes of the Ver-Dichtung in Goethe's Faust: time and space, sound and light, destruction and creation, forgetting and memory, death and immortality, and with the friendly help of Mnae-phaisto-philes, we have refreshed our memory (mnaemae) and traced them back to their very earliest and oldest beginnings (the archai) that exist in the cultural memory of Western civilization (the Homeric epics, the Presocratics, and the Orphic hymns), by this, we have re-membered ( Er-innern) them, (made them present), and with Harold Innis, we can connect them to the cultural transmission that is the core subject of this study.

->:CMM_TYPOLOGY, p. 140

Faust owes his posthumous fame to the anonymous author of the first Faustbuch (1587), a collection of tales about the ancient magi--who were wise men skilled in the occult sciences--that were retold in the Middle Ages about such other reputed wizards as Merlin, Albertus Magnus, and Roger Bacon. In the Faustbuch the tales were attributed to Faust; they were narrated crudely and were further debased with clodhopping humour at the expense of Faust's dupes. The intense conviction of the author's descriptions of Hell and of the fearful state of mind of his merciless hero, as well as his creation of the savage, embittered, remorseful fiend Mephistopheles were so realistic that they inspired unquestioning belief. Some of these passages were used verbatim by Thomas Mann in his novel Doktor Faustus (1947; Doctor Faustus, 1950).

The Faustbuch was speedily translated and read throughout Europe. An English prose translation of 1592 inspired The Tragicall History of D. Faustus (1604) by Christopher Marlowe, who, for the first time, invested the Faust legend with tragic dignity. It invoked more effectively than the original the summoning from the underworld of Helen of Troy to seal Faust's damnation. Marlowe retained much of the coarse humour and clownish episodes of the Faustbuch. German versions of Marlowe's play increased them. This association of tragedy and coarse buffoonery remained an inherent part of the Faust dramas and puppet plays that were popular for two centuries. Yet for all the antics of Casper the clown, the puppet plays retained some tense and moving scenes. Faust's end was often floodlit with poetry, and his eternal damnation was never in doubt.

The publication of magic manuals bearing Faust's name became a lucrative trade; the books included

careful instructions on how to avoid the bilateral pact with the devil or, if need be, how to break it. The

classic of these, Magia Naturalis et Innaturalis, was in the grand-ducal library in Weimar, Ger., and was known to Goethe.

The German writer Gotthold Lessing undertook the salvation of Faust in an unfinished play (1784).

Lessing, an enlightened rationalist, saw Faust's pursuit of knowledge as noble, and arranged the hero's reconciliation with God. This was the approach adopted by the outstanding chronicler of the Faust legend, J. W. von Goethe. His Faust (Part I, 1808; Part II, 1832, after the poet's death) makes of the Faust myth a profoundly serious but highly ironic commentary on the diverse potentialities of Western man's cultural heritage.

The poem contains an array of epic, lyric, dramatic, operatic, and balletic elements, ranging through metres and styles to present an immensely varied commentary in terms of theology, mythology, philosophy, political economy, science, aesthetics, music, and literature. In the end Goethe saves Faust by bringing about his purification and redemption.

Hector Berlioz was moved to create a dramatic cantata, The Damnation of Faust, upon the French version of Goethe's dramatic poem by Gerard de Nerval. This work, first performed in 1846, is also staged as an opera. Charles Gounod based his opera Faust on Part I of the Goethe work, to a libretto by Jules Barbier and Michel Carré. It was first performed in Paris in 1859.

In the 19th and 20th centuries other writers sought to emulate Goethe in assaying Faust's salvation, but with none of his stunning success. And others retold the story without Goethe's happy ending. Among them were Adelbert von Chamisso, Faust, Ein Versuch (1804); Christian Grabbe, Don Juan und Faust (1829); Nikolaus Lenau, Faust: Ein Gedicht (1836); Woldemar Nürnberger, Josephus Faust (1847); Heinrich Heine, Doktor Faust: Ein Tanzpoem (1851); and Paul Valéry, Mon Faust (1946). Lenau and Valéry, in particular, stressed the dangers of seeking absolute knowledge, with its correlative of absolute power. For them the incorruptibility proclaimed by Goethe confronts an annihilating instinct common to mankind and to the original Faustbuch. They fear that the Faustian spirit of insatiable scientific inquiry has been given modern expression.

Copyright (c) 1996 Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Main literature: For introduction to Bastian's work: Fiedermutz (1990), Bastian (1881), Bastian (1866-71), Bastian (1903), Jahoda (1992: 104-110), Schwarz (1909).

For the present study, the relevance of Adolf Bastian stems from his expertise in the fields of biologiy and ethnology, [610] and his approach as of assuming a point of perspective under which to treat cultural productions in an abstract manner and with a systematic singular paradigm with focus on their aspects of form, rather than their content. This paradigm was called by Adolf Bastian's the Elementar- und Völkergedanken (here abbreviated as E&V). Since Bastian never brought this work to a definite conclusion (Fiedermutz 1990: 121), a certain measure of interpretation is admissible concerning the open areas of his work. The basic reasoning is this: The idea substrate that is constant behind all the varied individual and ethnic productions must be some basic elementary structure, which Bastian called the Elementargedanken. By applying an (unspecified) kind of logical combinatorics ( logisches Rechnen , which he had derived from Quetelet), Bastian hoped to arrive at a structure which would explain the formation of local ethnic productions (the Völkergedanken). Bastian attempted to sum this up in one of the last publications in his life (1903), but since he could never arrive at a systematic exposition, his life work remains a torso. The basic mechanism of reproduction and transmission of cultural material is called the CMS [611] in the context of the present study. The simple observation of the fact that cultural material gets reproduced at all, and that it gets reproduced over a certain appreciable duration (the synchronic and diachronic extension of cultural patterns), [612] proves that there exist stable cultural configurations beyond any individual, idiosyncratic, ad hoc, productions, experiences, inventions, and intentions. After Bastian, there were many designs by diverse workers in different directions to establish systematic views of culture: Steward's Cultural Core (Raum 1990: 262), Leslie White's Concept of Cultural Systems (1975), and Mühlmann (1996), as well as the memetics view which will be mentioned in the next section.

Mühlmann (1996: 111): Wenn es einer kulturähnlichen Organisation nicht gelingt, ihre Merkmale an die nächste Generation zu übertragen, kann aus ihr keine wirkliche Kultur entstehen.

Wir haben die Grundgedanken aufzusuchen, wie sie in allen Gedankenkreisen, unter allen Zonen und Ländern, in allen Zeiten mit zwingender Notwendigkeit aus der mikrokosmischen Anlage der Menschennatur hervorgewachsen sind, durch Besonderheiten der Umgebungsverhältnisse zwar an ihrer Oberfläche verschiedentlich gefärbt, aber dem zentralen Achsenkreuz nach unverändert dieselben.

Bastian's ideas stand in the tradition of Leibniz [613], Herder, A. and W. v. Humboldt [614], Wundt, and Schopenhauer (via Wundt). The main principle of Schopenhauer's Vorstellung is used by Bastian:

Bastian (1881: 12): Die Welt, soweit wir sie kennen, besteht nur aus unseren Vorstellungen, sagt Wundt, und wenn Schopenhauer mit dem Gehirn, worin die höchste Objectivation des Willens sich zeigt, die Welt als Vorstellung geschaffen sein lässt, mit Raum, Zeit, Formen, Vielheit, Causalität, so hätten auch die (objectiven) Einkörperungen (subjectiver) Abstraction hinzuzutreten.

(p. 14): Indem der Mensch in dem aus eigenem Mikrokosmos reflectirten Horizont seiner Vorstellungen lebt, ergeben sich die an demselben umherbewegten Gestaltungen als die in der Umgebungswelt projicirten Schöpfungen innerer Denkthätigkeiten...

(p. 15): "Das Vorstellen stellen wir gar nicht wieder vor, sondern indem wir vorstellen, ist ohne Weiteres dadurch dem Vorstellen gewiss, dass es vorstellt"...

Bastian emphasizes the collective psyche of humanity or any ethnic group. The individual psyche is secondary to the collective.

The E&V are by no means limited to mental thoughts and ideas alone, but they encompass the whole of cultural productions (Schwarz 1909: 34). Bastian's natural scientific approach is outlined in (1881: XVI). Here he mentions Quetelet as forerunner, and sketches a mathematical-combinatoric method . (Also Fiedermutz 1990: 131-132).

Memetics is a recent discourse aimed at providing a Darwinistic evolutionary view of cultural phenomena. Its aim is similar to the CMS cultural pattern view presented here. Both views deal with the same observable phenomena, ie. the creation, maintentance, propagation, and degradation of cultural appearances, which are called memes in the memetics discourse, and cultural patterns in the CMS view.

There exists a large amount of memetics literature in the order of many megabytes on the following WWW sites :

The Journal of Memetics

http://www.cpm.mmu.ac.uk/jom-emit/ (URL)

The Journal of Memetics also keeps a link list with "Other Memetics sites":

http://www.cpm.mmu.ac.uk/jom-emit/online.html (URL)

An extensive memetics bibliography is found under:

http://www.cpm.mmu.ac.uk/jom-emit/biblio (URL)

The Lycaeum: http://www.lycaeum.org/: (URL)

http://www.lycaeum.org/~sputnik/Memetics/index.html (URL)

Memetics index: http://143.236.107.53/authors/kkitow/memetics/ (URL)

Principia Cybernetica: http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/ (URL)

The Ars Electronica festival 1996: http://www.aec.at/ (URL)

Richard Brodie's (1996) introduction to his popular book on memetics perhaps expresses the more farfetched expectations of this discourse. The aim is, as he states, to find a new paradigm by which to unify the hitherto separated academic camps of humanities and natural sciences (C.P. Snow's two cultures: Encarta: Snow). If this program would be carried through, this would lead to a conversion of the academic humanities into branches of memetic engineering. This is reminiscent of the claims of the media engineering approach to cultural studies, and E.O. Wilson's sociobiologist proposal to convert the humanities into research protocols of human ethology and sociobiology.

->:LIT_CULTMEDIA, p. 140, ->:EXTRA_OBSERVER, p. 113.

The science of memetics is based on evolution. Darwin’s theory of the evolution of species by natural selection utterly transformed the field of biology. Scientists are now applying modern evolutionary theory to the way the mind works, the way people learn and grow, the way culture progresses. In so doing, the field of psychology will ultimately be as transformed by the scientists researching memetics as biology was by Darwin.

(Brodie 1996: 15): paradigm shift

Every so often, the world of science experiences something called a paradigm shift. That happens when one of the basic, underlying assumptions we’ve been living with changes, such as when we shifted from looking at the universe as revolving around the earth to the earth revolving around the sun. Another shift occurred when Einstein discovered the relationships between space and time and between energy and matter. Each of these paradigm shifts took some time to penetrate the scientific community, and even longer to become accepted by the general public.

Viruses of the mind, and the whole science of memetics, represent a major paradigm shift in the science of the mind.

In a more scholarly article, "Culture as a Second Form of Evolution", Liane Gabora states that "thus far memetics has not lived up to this potential":

These works point toward the possibility that memetics constitutes a second form of evolution, distinct from yet intertwined with biological evolution, with the potential to provide the kind of overarching framework for the social and cognitive sciences that the first form provides for the biological sciences. However thus far memetics has not lived up to this potential, a situation that seems unfortunate given the success of the biological precedent. Although much was known about living things before Darwin, his theory of how life evolves through natural selection united previously disparate phenomena and paved the way for further biological inquiry.

The following is an excerpt from: Journal of Memetics - Evolutionary Models of Information Transmission. [619]

At least since the early seventies several authors have tried to adopt the principle of evolution by selection to understand the continuous change in cultural behaviors (Boyd [1], Calvin [2], Campbell [6], Cloak [7]). Richard Dawkins popularized the memetic approach. He coined the term 'meme' as an analog to the biological unit of inheritance, the gene or the genetic replicator (Dawkins [11], [12]). The rather simple distinction between genetic replicators as 'genes' on the one hand, opposed to all non-genetic replicators as 'memes' has been firmly imprinted in the evolutionary thinking about cultural information (Dennett [14, 15, 16], Hays & Plotkin [18], Hofstader [21], Hull [23, 24, 25], Lynch [28, 29], Westoby [35]). Since its initial conception, the term 'meme' has been used under very different meanings and in very different contexts, infecting a wide variety of disciplines. Among the most known are Dennett [14, 15, 16], who sees the human mind as being built up with memes comparable to the programming of a computer. Hull [23, 24, 25] defines the meme as replicator, and adds interaction to account for evolution by natural or artificial selection. He thus describes selection processes in science and biology using exactly similar definitions. Perhaps the most popular informal use of the term describes memes as 'viruses of the mind.' Parallels to both biological and computer virus varieties have been drawn (Dawkins [11, 13]).

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Memetics and Related Evolutionary Approaches

We see the memetic approach as an evolutionary one. The principle of evolution by selection is best known from the natural selection theory developed by Darwin to explain evolution of biological organisms [10]. Dennett [15] calls this natural selection principle a universal acid: it is such a powerful concept that it bites through everything. Indeed, in this sense Darwin described only a special case of selection when he was dealing with biological evolution.

Evolutionary theories are applied in a wide variety of disciplines. As mentioned above, evolutionary theories are applied to culture, like in the work of Boyd and Richerson [1], Cavalli-Sforza [6] and Csanyi [9]. The evolution of language can be seen in analogy to biological evolution, as described by Hoenigswald and Wiener [20]. In computer sciences, genetic programming and genetic algorithms are descendants of the evolutionary view as well, for example in the work of several people at the Santa-Fe Institute (Holland [22], Kauffman [26]). Learning theories of humans, applied to individuals, groups and society can be tied to evolutionary theory, as shown in the work of Campbell [4, 5]. The work of several philosophers of science shows evolutionary views, as in Popper's [34] and Kuhn's [27] work. In addition, these views have impact on evolutionary epistemology, and are analogical to biological evolution. Evolutionary theories have been described to account for brain development by Gerald Edelman [17], and extended to the msec-to-minutes time scale of thought and action by William Calvin [2, 3].Evolutionary theory is present in the field of economy, often tied to the development of technology, as in the work of Nelson and Winter [30, 31] or to the evolution of institutions as in the work of Hodgson [19] and North [32].

We feel that this plethora of approaches proves the potential of evolutionary thought in all fields of human sciences. At the same time this means that there is ample opportunity to compare models of evolution, and their applications, which is one of the aims of our journal.

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Key References (for more see the Bibliography of Memetics)

1. Boyd R. and Richerson PJ. 1985. Culture and the evolutionary process. University of Chicago Press.

2. Calvin W. 1996. The Cerebral code: thinking a thought in the mosaics of the mind, MIT Press.

3. Calvin W. 1996. How brains think: evolving intelligence, then and now. Basic Books.

4. Campbell DT. 1965. Variation and selective retention in socio-cultural evolution. In: Barringer HR, Blanksten GI and Mack RW (eds). Social change in developing areas, a reinterpretation of evolutionary theory. Schenkman Publishing Co.

5. Campbell DT. 1974. Evolutionary epistemology. In: Schlipp PA (ed). The Library of Living Philosophers, Vol. XIV: The philosophy of Karl Popper. LaSalle: Open Court.

6. Cavalli-Sforza L. and Feldman M. 1973. Cultural versus biological inheritance: phenotypic transmission from parents to children. Human Genetics 25: 618-637.

7. Cloak FT. 1975. Is a cultural ethology possible? Human Ecology 3: 161-182.

8. Costall A. 1991. The meme meme. Cultural Dynamics 4: 321-335.

9. Csanyi V. 1989. Evolutionary systems and society. A general theory of life, mind and culture. Duke University Press.

10. Darwin C. R. 1859. The origin of species. By means of natural selection. John Murray.

11. Dawkins R. 1976, 1982. The selfish gene. Oxford University Press.

12. Dawkins R. 1982. Organisms, groups and memes: replicators or vehicles? P. 97-117, in: The extended phenotype. Oxford University Press.

13. Dawkins R. 1993. Viruses of the Mind. P. 13-27, in: Dennett and his Critics, Blackwell Publishers.

14. Dennett D. 1990. Memes and the exploitation of imagination. J Aesthetics Art Criticism 48: 127-135.

15. Dennett D. 1996. Darwins dangerous idea. The Sciences 35: 34-40.

16. Dennett D. 1991. Consciousness explained. Penguin Books

17. Edelman G. 1992. Bright air, brilliant fire. On the matter of the mind. Basic Books.

18. Heyes CM and Plotkin HC. 1989. Replicators and interactors in cultural evolution. In: Ruse M (ed). What the philosophy of biology is; essays dedicated to David Hull. Kluwer Academic Publishers.

19. Hodgson G. 1993. Economics and evolution. Bringing life back into economics. Polity Press.

20. Hoenigswald HM and Wiener LS. 1987. Biological metaphor and cladistics classification. Francis Pinter Publishers.

21. Hofstadter DR. 1985. Metamagical themes: Questions for the essence of mind and pattern. Basic Books.

22. Holland JH. 1975. Adaptation in natural and artificial systems. Univ. Michigan Press. Reprinted in 1992 by Bradford Books/MIT press.

23. Hull DL. 1982. The naked meme. In: Plotkin HC (ed). Learning development and culture, essays in evolutionary epistemology. John Wiley and Sons.

24. Hull DL. 1988. Interactors versus vehicles. In: Plotkin HC (ed). The role of behavior in evolution. MIT Press.

25. Hull DL. 1988. Science as a process: An evolutionary account of the social and conceptual development of science. University of Chicago Press.

26. Kauffman SA. 1993. The origins of order, self-organization and selection in evolution. Oxford University Press.

27. Kuhn TS. 1970. The structure of scientific revolutions. University of Chicago Press.

28. Lynch A. 1991. Thought contagion as abstract evolution. Journal of Ideas 2: 3-10.

29. Lynch A. 1996. Thought contagion. How Belief Spreads Through Society. The New Science of Memes. Basic Books.

30. Nelson RR. 1987. Understanding technical change as an evolutionary process. North-Holland.

31. Nelson RR and Winter SG Jr. 1982. An evolutionary theory of economic change. Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.

32. North DC. 1990. Institutions, institutional change and economic performance. Cambridge University Press.

33. Plotkin HC. 1982. Learning, development, and culture. Essays in evolutionary epistemology. John Wiley and Sons.

34. Popper KR. 1979. Objective knowledge: An evolutionary approach. Clarendon press.

35. Westoby A. 1994. The Ecology of intentions: How to make memes and influence people: Culturology.

The following is an excerpt from Daniel Dennett's article on memes (1990):

There are few ideas more hackneyed than the idea of the evolution of ideas. It is often said that schools of thought evolve into their successors; in the struggle for attention, the best ideas win, according to the principle of the survival of the fittest, which ruthlessly winnows out the banale, the unimaginative, the false. Few ideas are more hackneyed--or more abused; almost no one writing about the evolution of ideas or cultural evolution treats the underlying Darwinian ideas with the care they deserve. I propose to begin to remedy that.

The outlines of the theory of evolution by natural selection are now clear: evolution occurs whenever the following conditions exist:

1. variation: a continuing abundance of different elements

2. heredity or replication: the elements have the capacity to create copies or replicas of themselves

3. differential "fitness": the number of copies of an element that are created in a given time varies, depending on interactions between the features of that element (whatever it is that makes it different from other elements) and features of the environment in which it persists. [Endnote 1]

Notice that this definition, drawn from biology, says nothing specific about organic molecules, nutrition, or even life. It is a more general and abstract characterization of evolution by natural selection. As the zoologist Richard Dawkins has pointed out, the fundamental principle is "that all life evolves by the differential survival of replicating entities" [Endnote 2].

The gene, the DNA molecule, happens to be the replicating entity which prevails on our own planet. There may be others. If there are, provided certain other conditions are met, they will almost inevitably tend to become the basis for an evolutionary process.

But do we have to go to distant worlds to find other kinds of replication and other, consequent, kinds of evolution? I think that a new kind of replicator has recently emerged on this very planet. It is staring us in the face. It is still in its infancy, still drifting clumsily about in its primeval soup, but already it is achieving evolutionary change at a rate which leaves the old gene panting far behind. [Endnote 3]

These newfangled replicators are, roughly, ideas. Not the "simple ideas" of Locke and Hume (the idea of red, or the idea of round or hot or cold), but the sort of complex ideas that form themselves into distinct memorable units--such as the ideas of

arch / wheel / wearing clothes / vendetta / right triangle / alphabet / calendar / the Odyssey / calculus ...

Intuitively these are more or less identifiable cultural units, but we can say something more precise about how we draw the boundaries--about why D-F#-A isn't a unit, and the theme from the slow movement of Beethoven's Seventh Symphony is: the units are the smallest elements that replicate themselves with reliability and fecundity. Dawkins coins a term for such units: memes--

a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation. 'Mimeme' comes from a suitable Greek root, but I want a monosyllable that sounds a bit like 'gene' . . . it could alternatively be thought of as being related to 'memory' or to the French word même. . . .

Examples of memes are tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes fashions, ways of making pots or of building arches. Just as genes propagate themselves in the gene pool by leaping from body to body via sperm or eggs, so memes propagage themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain via a process which, in the broad sense, can be called imitation. If a scientist hears, or reads about, a good idea, he passes it on to his colleagues and students. He mentions it in his articles and his lectures. If the idea catches on, it can be said to propagate itself, spreading from brain to brain. [Endnote 4]

So far, no doubt, this seems to be just a crisp reworking of the standard fare about the evolution and spread of ideas, but in The Selfish Gene, Dawkins urges us to take the idea of meme evolution literally. Meme evolution is not just analogous to biological or genic evolution, not just a process that can be metaphorically described in these evolutionary idioms, but a phenomenon that obeys the laws of natural selection exactly. The theory of evolution by natural selection is neutral regarding the differences between memes and genes; these are just different kinds of replicators evolving in different media at different rates. And just as the genes for animals could not come into existence on this planet until the evolution of plants had paved the way (creating the oxygen-rich atmosphere and ready supply of convertible nutrients), so the evolution of memes could not get started until the evolution of animals had paved the way by creating a species--homo sapiens--with brains that could provide shelter, and habits of communication that could provide transmission media, for memes...

The first rules of memes, as it is for genes, is that replication is not necessarily for the good of anything; replicators flourish that are good at . . replicating! --for whatever reason. As Dawkins has put it,

A meme that made its bodies run over cliffs would have a fate like that of a gene for making bodies run over cliffs. It would tend to be eliminated from the meme-pool. . . . But this does not mean that the ultimate criterion for success in meme selection is gene survival. . . . Obviously a meme that causes individuals bearing it to kill themselves has a grave disadvantage, but not necessarily a fatal one. . . . a suicidal meme can spread, as when a dramatic and well-publicized martyrdom inspires others to die for a deeply loved cause, and this in turn inspires others to die, and so on. [Endnote 6]

The important point is that there is no necessary connection between a meme's replicative power, its "fitness" from its point of view, and its contribution to our fitness (by whatever standard we judge that). The situation is not totally desperate. While some memes definitely manipulate us into collaborating on their replication in spite of our judging them useless or ugly or even dangerous to our health and welfare, many--most, if we are lucky--of the memes that replicate themselves do so not just with our blessings, but because of our esteem for them.

...

...

I need not dwell on the importance of the founding memes for language, and much later, for writing, in creating the infosphere. These are the underlying technologies of transmission and replication analogous to the technologies of DNA and RNA in the biosphere. Nor shall I bother reviewing the familiar facts about the explosive proliferation of these media via the memes for movable type, radio and television, xerography, computers, fax machines, and electronic mail. Suffice it to say that we are all well aware that we live, today, awash in a sea of paper-borne memes, breathing in an atmosphere of electronically-borne memes.

Memes now spread around the world at the speed of light, and replicate at rates that make even fruit flies and yeast cells look glacial in comparison. They leap promiscuously from vehicle to vehicle, and from medium to medium, and are proving to be virtually unquarantinable. Memes, like genes, are potentially immortal, but, like genes, they depend on the existence of a continuous chain of physical vehicles, persisting in the face of the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Books are relatively permanent, and inscriptions on monuments even more permanent, but unless these are under the protection of human conservators, they tend to dissolve in time. As with genes, immortality is more a matter of replication than of the longevity of individual vehicles. The preservation of the Platonic memes, via a series of copies of copies, is a particularly striking case of this. Although some papyrus fragments of Plato's texts roughly contemporaneous with him have been recently discovered, the survival of the memes owes almost nothing to such long-range persistence. Today's libraries contain thousands if not millions of physical copies (and translations) of the Meno, and the key ancestors in the transmission of this text turned to dust centuries ago.

Brute physical replication of vehicles is not enough to ensure meme longevity. A few thousand hard-bound copies of a new book can disappear with scarcely a trace in a few years, and who knows how many brilliant letters to the editor, reproduced in hundreds of thousands of copies, disappear into landfills and incinerators every day? The day may come when non-human meme-evaluators suffice to select and arrange for the preservation of particular memes, but for the time being, memes still depend at least indirectly on one or more of their vehicles spending at least a brief, pupal stage in a remarkable sort of meme-nest: a human mind.

Minds are in limited supply, and each mind has a limited capacity for memes, and hence there is a considerable competition among memes for entry into as many minds as possible. This competition is the major selective force in the infosphere, and, just as in the biosphere, the challenge has been met with great ingenuity.

...

A related phenomenon in the competition of memes for our attention is positive feedback. In biology, this is manifested in such phenomena as the "runaway sexual selection" that explains the long and cumbersome tail of the bird of paradise or the peacock. Dawkins provides an example from the world of publishing: "Best-seller lists of books are published weekly, and it is undoubtedly true that as soon as a book sells enough copies to appear in one of these lists, its sales increase even more, simply by virtue of that fact. Publishers speak of a book "taking off', and those publishers with some knowledge of science even speak of a 'critical mass for take-off'. [Endnote 11]

The haven all memes depend on reaching is the human mind, but a human mind is itself an artifact created when memes restructure a human brain in order to make it a better habitat for memes. The avenues for entry and departure are modified to suit local conditions, and strengthened by various artificial devices that enhance fidelity and prolixity of replication...

But if it is true that human minds are themselves to a very great degree the creations of memes, then we cannot sustain the polarity of vision with which we started; it cannot be "memes versus us" because earlier infestations of memes have already played a major role in determining who or what we are. The "independent" mind struggling to protect itself from alien and dangerous memes is a myth; there is, in the basement, a persisting tension between the biological imperative of the genes and the imperatives of the memes, but we would be foolish to "side with" our genes--that is to commit the most egregious error of pop sociobiology. What foundation, then, can we stand on as we struggle to keep our feet in the memestorm in which we are engulfed? If replicative might does not make right, what is to be the eternal ideal relative to which "we" will judge the value of memes? We should note that the memes for normative concepts--for ought and good and truth and beauty are among the most entrenched denizens of our minds, and that among the memes that constitute us, they play a central role. Our existence as us, as what we as thinkers are--not as what we as organisms are--is not independent of these memes.

Dawkins ends The Selfish Gene with a passage that many of his critics must not have read:

We have the power to defy the selfish genes of our birth and, if necessary, the selfish memes of our indoctrination. . . . We are built as gene machines and cultured as meme machines, but we have the power to turn against our creators. We, alone on earth, can rebel against the tyranny of the selfish replicators. (p.215.)

...

Homo sapiens has been around for half a million years. The first serious invasion of memes began with spoken language only tens of thousands of years ago, and the second great wave, riding on the meme for writing, is considerably less than ten thousand years in progress--a brief moment in biological time. Since memetic evolution occurs on a time scale thousands of times faster than genetic evolution, however, in the period since there have been memes--only tens of thousands of years--the contributing effects of meme-structures on our constitution--on human phenotypes--vastly outweigh the effects of genetic evolution during that period. So we can answer the defining question of the Mandel Lecture with a rousing affirmative. Does art (in the broad sense) contribute to human evolution? It certainly does, in the most literal sense. In fact, since art appeared on the scene, it has virtually supplanted all other contributions to human evolution. [Endnote 13]

I would like to close with some observations on the history of the meme meme itself, and how its spread was temporarily curtailed. When Dawkins introduced memes in 1976, he described his innovation as a literal extension of the classical Darwinian theory and so I have treated it here. Dawkins himself, however, has since drawn in his horns slightly. In The Blind Watchmaker (1988), he speaks of an analogy "which I find inspiring but which can be taken too far if we are not careful." (p.196). Later in the same chapter, he says "Cultural 'evolution' is not really evolution at all if we are being fussy and purist about our use of words, but there may be enough in common between them to justify some comparison of principles." (p.216) Why did he retreat like this? Why, indeed, is the meme meme so little discussed thirteen years after The Selfish Gene appeared?

In The Extended Phenotype, Dawkins replies forcefully to the storm of criticism from sociobiologists, while conceding some interesting but inessential disanalogies between genes and memes--

memes are not strung out along linear chromosomes, and it is not clear that they occupy and compete for discrete 'loci', or that they have identifiable 'alleles'. . . The copying process is probably much less precise than in the case of genes . . . memes may partially blend with each other in a way that genes do not. (p.112)

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Endnotes

1. See, for instance, Richard Lewontin, "Adaptation," The Encyclopedia Einaudi, 1980, Milan; Robert Brandon, "Adaptation and Evolutionary Theory," Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science, 1978, 9, pp. 181-206, both reprinted in E. Sober, ed., Conceptual Issues in Evolutionary Biology, 1984, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

2. Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976, p.206.

3. ibid

4. ibid

6. Richard Dawkins, The Extended Phenotype, Oxford: W.H. Freeman, 1982, p.110-11.

11.The Blind Watchmaker, London: Longman Scientific, 1986, p.219. Dawkins' discussion of these complex phenomena, in the chapter "Explosions and Spirals" (pp. 195-220), is a tour de force of explanatory clarity and vividness.

12. In several recent essays I have expanded on the claim that the very structure of our minds is more a product of culture than of the neuroanatomy we are born with: "Julian Jaynes' Software Archeology," in Canadian Psychology, 27, 1986, pp.149-54; "The Self as the Center of Narrative Gravity," (originally published as "Why we are all novelists," Times Literary Supplement, Sept. 16-22, 1988, p.1029), forthcoming in F. Kessel, P. Cole, D. Johnson, eds., Self and Consciousness: Multiple Perspectives, Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum; "The Evolution of Consciousness," forthcoming in The Reality Club, volume 3; and "The Origins of Selves," forthcoming in Cogito. See also Nicholas Humphrey and Daniel Dennett, "Speaking For Our Selves: An Assessment of Multiple Personality Disorder," Raritan, 9, 1989, pp.68-98.

13.Those who are familiar with the Baldwin Effect will recognize that art contributes not merely to the fixing of phenotypic plasticity, but can thereby change the selective environment and hence hasten the pace of genetic evolution. See my discussion in "The Evolution of Consciousness," oc.cit., and Jonathan Schull, "Are Species Intelligent?" forthcoming in Behavioral and Brain Sciences.

[583] To do justice to the scholastic tradition, the thousands of selflessly serving monks in the monasteries and countless small technical innovations and inventions during many centuries of hard, straining labor in the scriptoria, paved the ground to the cursory handling of words in books that Faust and the Renaissance were the heirs to. Illich describes this century-long process in (1988: 29-51).

[584] To which we might add that hypertext allows us to achieve yet one more level of interconnection over normal, linear text. See Landow (1992). See also: ->:WEAVING, p. 165

[585] Perhaps also to be applied to the school of Harold Innis.

[586] ->:BUDDHA_METANOIA, p. 120, ->:GESTALT_SWITCH, p. 123,

Matth (4,17), Matth (18,3),

[587] "Fiat lux", "let there be light", is the paradimatic declaration of this tradition. (Genz 1994: 61). No questions may be asked as to where the switch is, or where the power for the light comes from.

[588] An extensive discussion of this break with the scholastic tradition is given by Campbell (1996,IV: 683-716), and the Faust theme is discussed on (1996,IV: 711-714). Historically, a person Dr. Johann Faust lived around 1480-1540. Campbell notes that one aspect of the immense popularity of the Faust theme had been the printing press. The first Faust book was brought out in 1587 by Johann Spieß, and immediately sold out, and was reprinted in four pirated editions (713).

[589] ->:KULTURMORPHOLOGIE, p. 131

[590] ->:RITUAL_PATTERN, p. 224

[591] "Was ist mit diesem Rätselwort gemeint?" (1337)

[592] Illich (1988: 5-6): Writing is not the only technique we know for making the flow of speech coagulate and for carrying clots of language along intact for tens of even hundreds of years.

[593] ->:SYMBOL, p. 119

About Mnemosyne as the mother of the muses, see also Hesiodos (1978: 47).

Hertha v. Dechend (1993: 257) asserts that Hermes is the Greek name for Thoth as he is called in Egyptian mythology

[595] I.e. this is the emphasis on the aspect of space, which Faust wants to conquer, only to be eventually defeated by time. (See Innis 1991).

[596] Campbell (1996,III: 88-110, 165-214).

[597] v. Dechend (below) equates Saturn again with Hephaistos.

[598] See also: Bloom (1995). His book: "The Lucifer Principle. A scientific expedition into the forces of history" describes vividly the the luciferic principle of destruction in history.

[599] See also: Kaiser (1980: 87 ff.).

[600] Not to forget that we also tend to dim the lights when we go to bed with our lover, in order that our experience of feeling and touching is enhanced.

[601] Rost (1862,II: 632): chaos, the emptiness, the void, the immense unfathomable open space, the deep cave, the gaping, the yawning, the unstructured formless "substrate" out of which the cosmos is fashioned. The present meaning of disorder is only a subordinate theme in the ancient meaning. The meaning of " immense unfathomable open space " is identical to the core concept of Anaximandros: the apeiron. Rost (1862,I: 123).

[602] To which Goethe makes allusion in (7902-7920) where he lets Anaxagoras call the goddess of night: "Du! droben ewig Unveraltete, / Dreinamig-Dreigestaltete, / Dich ruf' ich an bei meines Volkes Weh, / Diana, Luna, Hekate! / Du Brusterweiternde, im Tiefsten Sinnige", and 7990: "Die Parzen selbst, des Chaos, eure Schwestern". moirae: ->:MOIRAE, p. 166

[603] The element of lysis (dissolution) balances the creation of Nature ( physis).

The phallus as "trademark" connects us back to the -pheles in Mae-phis-to-pheles. And we see why he was called Herm-Aphroditaes. The Dionysus is treated further down.

[605] The sound is chaotic, non-melodic: Orpheus (1992: 64): "Dionysos, dem Lauttosenden, den Herrn der Gestirne rufe ich an", p. 84: "Verzückter, lautlärmender Bakchos, ... komm zu uns, Seliger, Reigenfreund, Bring allen die Fülle der Freude!"

[606] Apoll was called the phoibos (Rost 1862: 615) the clear, radiant.

Related words are: phos, photo-, phoos and phaos. More words of visual phenomena: photisma, phoibos: splendor, shining, sparkling, brilliant, luminous. phoibasma, phoibetes: prophet, oracle, mantics. phoinos: purple, phoenician, dark red (glowing). phosphoros: luck, fortune, rescue.

[608] ->:IMMORTALITY_COMPLEX, p. 137, ->:CULTURAL_MNEMO, p. 230

[609] This may be the logical error that Mae-phaisto committed: He as the lord of time and destruction wants to preserve something against time and against destruction. That doesn't compute.

[610] He was a medical doctor, thoroughly founded in the classics, and he is considered the founding father of German ethnology.

[611] ->:CMS_DEF, p. 139

[612] ->:CULTURE_PATTERN, p. 132

[613] Bastian (1881: XVII):

[614] Graebner (1927: X):

[615] From Richard Brodie's "Virus of the mind" homepage:
http://www.brodietech.com/rbrodie/votm.htm (URL)

[616] In the present context also called the synchronous and diachronous extension of cultural patterns.

->:CULTURE_PATTERN, p. 132

[617] This is the epistemological line that Riedl bases his morphological method on.

->:MORPHOLOGY, p. 128

[618] The mathematical statistical approach to cultural phenomena was pioneered by Quetelet and Bastian. ->:ADOLF_BASTIAN, p. 246

[619] http://www.cpm.mmu.ac.uk/jom-emit/overview.html (URL)

[620] See also ->:BEDNARIK, p. 195