Paper for:

"Sign Processes in Complex Systems"

7th International Congress of the IASS-AIS

by:

Dr. Andreas Goppold, c/o FAW Ulm, Postf. 2060, D-89010 Ulm, Germany

Tel. ++49 +731 921 6931, Fax: (Goppold:) +731 501-999

URL: http://www.noologie.de/ (URL)

Keywords:

neuronal resonance fields, neuronal infrastructure, signe arbitraire, sign processes, language

Topics:

theoretical questions, problems of application to culture

The current progress in neurological research gives rise to the expectation that within the next generation, there will be an understanding of the neuronal loci and functions that form the infrastructure of sign processes and of language. Of the many works pointing into this direction, William Calvin's: "The Cerebral Code", and Spitzer's: "Geist im Netz" are quoted as examples. The present contribution aims at sketching a (so far hypothetical) working model based on Calvin's neuronal resonance fields for a heterodox interpretation of the ancient Greek Aoide language used in the Epics of Homer and other Aoidoi. While this is orthodoxically treated in the linguistic framework of the Saussurean "Signe Arbitraire" doctrine (e.g. Parry, Lord, and followers), it is proposed here that at least part of that material (perhaps of Pelasgian origin), was formed on another principle, to which Platon hints at in Kratylos: "That the sounds must be similar to the thing also". If this thing is interpreted not as the objective outer world (Popper-World 1) thing, but as neuronal subfunction of the "Weltbildapparat" (Riedl, Lorenz), then it is easy to see that the sign cannot be totally arbitrary, and that the sounds must correspond to an extremely fine-tuned neuronal and muscular resonance circuit that can produce and perceive them. As we can see in all spoken languages, only a very small subset of all the possible phonemic combinatorics is utilized in each language, and that combination is by no means arbitrary. The hypothesis presented will advance arguments that the ancient Aoide language can be interpreted, obviously not as prosa communication system (and no adaptation thereof), but as a (specially designed) fine-tuned neuronal-sound-imagination device designed for evoking neuronal resonance states of a kind that we presently associate with trance. Platon's description of Homer as "daemiourgon onomaton" (craftsman of words) is taken as hint in this direction. Selected examples will be presented of a morphemic combinatoric system underlying the Aoide language.

Cultural Memory CM: here equivalent with Cultural Transmission. In the generalized abstract (etic) sense: those processes and structures by which personal subjective memory material is exchanged between individuals and across generations and made available on an intersubjective basis. The diachronic aspect of cultural patterns. In subjective (emic) terminology, that faculty by which one individual can {reference to / learn from / participate in} the memory content of (an)other individual(s), even without direct personal contact, e.g. when they live in a distant place, or in the distant past.

Cultural Memory Bearer CMB: The carrier(s) of the Cultural Memory. Apart from the most generally true statement that every member of a human society is a Cultural Memory Bearer in at least some respect, in order to be a functioning human being, there are, and have been, specially trained classes and groups who functioned primarily as Cultural Memory Bearer, like the Aoidoi of ancient Greece, and the indian Rishis, the Griots of Africa, the norse Skalden, the welsh Bards, the Troubadours of the middle ages, and the Guslar of the Balkan. In non-writing cultures, these CMBs serve(d) a most prominent and most vital function to preserve the essence and higher spiritual values of their cultures across and against the degradations of time.

Cultural Memory System CMS: Systematic theoretical account of those processes and structures by which the CM arises and operates. In a different aspect this is also called the culture pattern replicator system (after Benedict 1934), as the ways and means by which cultural patterns are exchanged and transmitted in populations and across generations.

Cultural Memory Technology CMT: systematic use of static extrasomatic devices for CM. Writing is the prime cultural memory technology of civilizations.

Cultural Memory Art CMA: systematic use of dynamic somatic (and possibly extrasomatic) processes for CM. Dancing may be an example of CMA

Cultural pattern CP: (after Benedict 1934). The etic view by an anthropologist observer, of the life patterns, and life habits, the behaviors, creeds, and the forms of the artefacts of peoples of specific human cultures on the planet Earth which preserve a certain diachronic and synchronic degree of constancy even while the generations come and go.

Cultural Transmission CT: Transmission of Cultural Patterns, i.e. of ontogenic (learned) material in populations (synchronic) and across generations (diachronic).

G-1 The greek semantic cycle or gyros of chi-gamma-xi-kappa-rho-chi

G-2 Part of the semaiophonic network of "menin aide thea", Illias 1.1

G-5 Semaiophonic architectonics of the three main consonant cycles.

G-6 Chi-Aleph connections

GIM-1-4 Marija Gimbutas: cultural patterns of Old Europe

H1, H2, H3 Patterns from Catal Hüyük, Mellaart: "Goddess from Anatolia" Vol. 1-3

The data material for this section is derived mainly from Homer, Hesiod, Anaximandros, Heraklit, Parmenides, Platon, Parry, Lord, Havelock, McLuhan, deKerckhove, Latacz, Visser, A. & J. Assmann, B. Powell, S. Hummel, T. Strehlow, M. Schneider, H. v. Dechend, and Mary LeCron Foster. I have used their materials in a (hopefully) unprecedented novel way, giving new interpretations from the different viewpoint of a non-written Cultural Memory System. The following is a sketch for a larger project work.

Mary LeCron Foster's hypothesis is used as base of the present work. This assumes a decisive influence on cultivation and formation of language in a kind of phememe-design. Those who designed the language, were called Aoidoi in ancient Greece. [48] Daher heißt die folgende Hypothese auch die Aoide-Hypothese.

I will present here a sketched / outlined technical information model called the AOIDE. [49] This is the working name for a hypothetical information model of neuronal structures and mental functioning of the professional Cultural Memory Bearers of the ancient oral epic traditions world wide whose thinking modes were, according to the hypothesis, different from modern civilized western prosa thinking. The base of the hypothesis are data we have available on the greek Aoidoi, (like Homer), the african Griots, the norse Skalden, the welsh Bards, the Australian Aboriginal Songline tradition, and the indian Rishis and {what is known of / can be inferred from / can be hypothesized into} these data. In the following I will use the word aoide for the generic class of all Cultural Memory Bearers of all epic traditions world wide.

AOIDE [50] is called the model of {cultural memory / information / language / epic / sonic / mythic / lucid trance / divination / prophesy} mental technology (mentation) derived from data on various oral traditions around this planet.

The following text will try to elaborate this model. Apart from my own original ideas, [51] I am basing this work on the oral memory technology researches of Hertha v. Dechend's "Hamlet's Mill" (1993), with her concept of the oral epic computation and data transmission technology, [52] of the comparative trans-global epic studies of Theodor Strehlow (1971), the detailed work on Aoide and the alphabet of Barry Powell, the global musical cosmogony of Marius Schneider, and the phememe hypothesis of Mary LeCron Foster (1996). I am picking up suggestions, hints, ideas, concepts and aims from their works. Many of the sources and connections came to me in some fortuitous, unpredicted, seemingly random way, which seems to be an essential part of the process. For example, the material about the Australian Aborigines (Strehlow 1971) came to me through a personal connection. [53] As will be made more explicit in the ensuing discussion, aoide mentation [54] has some connection with {entering / entertaining} {different / alternate} modes of mental functioning. One popular name for such states is the blanket term "trance". It must remain for a later and larger project work to define that more closely, and using the results from applying the tools. The process must follow a circular (self-referential) bootstrapping pattern. The theory assumes that it is almost impossible for the prosa framed mind of our current civilizations to unaidedly step out of its normal operation patterns and enter the AOIDE mode.

Let us design a construction principle for a structural edifice of sounds and meaning.

1) onoma-semaiophonic

The key term onoma-semaio-phonic [55] is the working principle of the method applied. It assumes a hypothetical [56] interrelation and connectivity of semantic/phonetic elements of an archaic language like the aoide language is assumed to have been . The German term for onoma-semaiophonic is Sinn-Klang [57], in English Sing-Lang, and Aboriginal Australian: Song-Line. It has to be stated that this is not an etymological concept.

2) nexus sounds as attractors

Let us now call the sound meaning of the stoichea as used by Platon in his linguistic discussions in Phaidros, Kratylos, and Timaios the nexus sounds [58] of the aoide language. [59] The greek version is given only as paradigmatic example, and the principle holds equally for any language in which the aoide sings [60]. The nexus is not a linguistic or etymological concept. The nexus was used in a slightly different {meaning / intention} by Whitehead in "Process and Reality" (1969: 22-25) [61] and the general principle is transferred to this context. If we want to use a physical metaphor, we can use the attractor principle of chaos theory, or maybe an electrostatic / electromagnetic / gravitational attraction force field. Behind this lies a neurological attractor model, but at present this cannot be worked out. (See the note on William Calvin, further down).

3) the onoma-semaiophonic nexus and the morphogram

This is conventionally called a word. [62] An onoma-semaiophonic nexus (or short: nexus) is the form (morphae) of several con-nexted nexus sounds. We have to differentiate between the sound form as it can be put into grammata (written signs), the morphogram, and its sounding form, the phonae-morphae, or stoichaea, or in German, Klang-Form.

4) the onoma-semaiophonic link

Let us assume a sound connection between different but similar nexus, i.e. that nexus bearing a similar sound will have a connecting similar (and also antagonistic) meaning field, forming an onoma-semaiophonic link.

5) Semaiophonic fields

are called networks of nexus that are connected by semaiophonic links.

6) Semaiophonic structures, notation

It is almost impossible to describe semaiophonic structures in linear alphabetic textual manner. We can use the hypertext metaphor of links extending to the related sounds. We assume that a there is a kind of sonic hyper link between similarly sounding words. This gives many-dimensional structures, quite unlike the linear textual sequence.

See ILL: G-2 for a sample semaiophonic structure derived from the thea in menin aeide thea, Illias 1.1.

7) Semaiophonic core structure, the Klang-Sinn

The most important question is how sound and meaning (Klang and Sinn) are connected. [63] This is is a difficult theme that can only be sketched in one paragraph for the present context: The neural representation of the machinery to {produce / recognize} a nexus sound with the human voice apparatus needs some neurological structure that are tentatively (and hypothetically) identified by Calvin with certain hexagonal structures on the cortex. Although producing and recognizing structures need (and can) not be identical, there must be a correspondence between them. Then, the structures necessary for vowel formation must by needs be different from those for consonants, since they involve a totally different muscular activity. And since there is no homunculus somewhere in deeper recesses of the brain to attribute meaning to these sound structures, the meaning we (in our consciousness) attribute to the words, must also be embedded in these structures, or be at least morphologically connected, and be of the same morphae (form).

Several samples of semaiophonic core structures will be given in the further text, like in the example of technae, whose structure is: t, {e/a/y}, guttural:{ch, g, x, k} [64]

In the semitic languages, the con-nexion is more obvious because of the the semitic root principle of consonant trigram (autiot, otiot), like k-t-b for book. But in indo-european languages, this model cannot be applied directly, it is more complicated.

Here we need to apply some working knowledge of current software engineering. There are existing software tools that can be adapted for modeling of onoma-semaiophonic networks. The currently available molecular simulation programs have to maintain the same kind of data structure as we need for the present application. If we add some specialized spatial electron cloud (or quantum field) subroutines, like they are now available in the top of the line molecular engineering software, we can even get a model for the gradated spatial resonance patterns of the voice, which is the base for representing the spatial proximity functions of the AOIDE model. The visualization is given by the standard molecular output functions, and serves the current purpose nicely. The only element missing is a sound output, the "audiali"-zation, i.e. the mapping of the data structures to the human voice capacity. The raw multimedia capacity of producing the sounds is obviously available, but the fine tuning to the intricacies of the human voice apparatus is not trivial. The conversion, if a qualified software engineer would do it (with specialized working knowledge and the molecular engineering software source code available), should be possible to get through in about one man-year [65].

In this way, the system will be a rather unheroic (even if somewhat off-the-beaten-track) conversion of existing software technology can be made, readily, with available manpower and software tools. The matter of technical workability is not concerned with the question whether the model as such makes sense according to current philological or linguistic theories. We have to claim that "the proof of the pudding is the eating", i.e. that it is important to present a research tool first, and try it out and test it, get some experimental results, and not try to prove the consequences and results of the application of the tools, beforehand. This is the technical essentials for the thesis. Following Whitehead, we need "a new tool as a way for new insights". In the Popperian manner the tool gives ways to experiment with falsifiable hypotheses.

In the following I will present some auxiliary material, and some additional and supportive hypotheses.

This was presented as a conference paper at: "Semiotics of the Media", Kassel (1995)

The main semiotic thesis of Platon in Kratylos is formed by the connection: "onoma homoion to pragmati" (the word resembles the thing) and "stoicheia homoia tois pragmasin" (the sounds, ie the stoicheia, be similar to the things also). The paper presents arguments for the interpretation that it is of prime importance to differentiate between Platon's usage of sound (phonae, stoicheia) and letter (gramma), and that the "things" he means should not be taken as objective-out-there-things, but as phenomenal "things" to be interpreted in terms of the modern neuronal presentation of what is happening as brain processes while these things arise in our imagination (phainomenon). Even though Platon could not think in these terms, we may get a better understanding of what he was hinting at.

The molecular model of the semaiophonic structure is suggestive for the following reason: the sound connections in the model extend from the nexus in semaiophonic space like atomic binding forces. As we see with a glance to Platon's Timaios, the ancient cosmology is replete with allusions to a sound combination structure that we can easily match up to modern molecular chemistry models. The geometric connections of the basic geometrical forms, are quite recognizable in the onoma-semaiophonic mapping. Platon speaks explicitly of the geometric figures (like Tetraeder) as the basic "elements" of his musico-logical cosmos [66]. These geometries reappear faithfully in the modern molecular models as the space structures of the electron clouds which form the chemical bonds. The view of Platon's Timaios can be interpreted as the chemical bonds minus (or abstracted from) the atoms. More enigmatic passages in Platon's works indicate that there are "trap doors" which may lead us into an unknown dimension of epic language.

(Proverb)

In his famous chapter in Phaidros (274c-275), Platon talks explicitly about the problems of the alphabet. In another work, Kratylos, he deals with certain aspects of the connection of sound and meaning in ancient Greek language. This material will be taken as starting point for the enquiry. It is always good to start with Platon. Whitehead had stated: "The safest general characterization of western philosophical tradition is that it consists of a sequence of footnotes to Plato " (Whitehead 1969: 53). If Platon had found something important enough to be worth devoting a whole lengthy work, then we might well ask if there is some meaning to be found in what he tells us.

In Kratylos, Platon talks about the connection of words and namings, meaning, and sounds. This would today be considered a discussion of semiotics. He opposes two views:

1) The names of things and people are products of social convention only (the signe arbitraire doctrine), with Prodikos (384b) and Protagoras as proponents. The famous statement of Protagoras is cited (386a):

2) The view of Kratylos is summed up in "onoma homoion to pragmati" (434a), "the name is similar to the thing". This may be called the Kratylos Question, the core of the argument of the dialogue:

If now the word resembles the thing then by necessity must the sounds (the stoicheia) be similar to the things also. [67]

Kratylos is Platon's discussion of the subject of fittingness or adequacy of words or symbols to the things symbolized. The key questions are:

1) Are all words arbitrary? (the signe arbitraire doctrine).

2) Are there some words more fitting than others?

If we assume 2), then we might continue to ask what they may be more fitting to:

2a) the (objective) thing or

2b) the neuronal (re)presentation the thinker has of a thing.

If we assume 1), we might ask why they are arbitrary. Objective realism, or materialism states that there are totally objective things "out there". We now have to concede the fact that humanity has created literally all possible sound combinations to denote, for example, the "horseness" of the horse in tens of thousands of languages and dialects. Therefore one might be hard put to explain why one word would be more fitting than thousands of others. Now if all words are arbitrary, there is no great sense in searching for better fitting ones.

The structure of the semi-monologue in Kratylos is peculiar. As in most other works by Platon, we find Sokrates doing most of the argument. He talks about 90 % of the time and his partners Hermogenes and Kratylos can only interject a few statements like: "Yes indeed", "Sure", "I see", "Why?", "I believe that", "of course", and so on. Therefore, we cannot call this kind of conversation a true dialogue. Unfortunately, the people who are most knowledgeable about the subject, position 1) Prodikos (384b) and Protagoras (386a) are not there, Hermogenes professes being largely ignorant and acts only as dummy or sparring partner for Sokrates in 75 % of the text. And Kratylos, the proponent of position 2), has hardly the opportunity to say two coherent sentences about his view on the matter when he finally gets the word in the last 25 % of the text, starting at 428d, to 440.

Sokrates himself professes, as usual, to be completely ignorant, because he has only heard the "one-Drachme" talk of Prodikos, and not the one for 50 Drachmes (384c). After professing his ignorance, he anyhow goes on developing all sorts of interesting but not very convincing etymologies [68] to support position 2), but finally comes to a position that true understanding is better attained through the things themselves (439b). How this is to be done, he apparently doesn't have the time left to expound, since the text ends two pages later.

So the whole work could be interpreted as some kind of tongue-in-cheek practical semiotic joke that Platon makes to befuddle his students in the academy and us across the millennia. Or it can be assumed that Platon didn't have the right conceptual tools to make a semiotic analysis. This seems to be a modern interpretation which is also proposed by Eco (1993: 25). But there are two questions remaining: First: Platon is known to be one of the most outstanding geniuses of mankind. But humor was not one of his strong points. Second: Why did he go through such an effort to make it known to posterity, that he didn't know very much to say about the matter? If we assume that Platon saw enough relevance in the subject to write about it, or have someone else write down his talks about it, then there are again two possibilities: 1) He knew more about it than he wanted to write, the unwritten teachings being in the background. 2) He was guessing himself, but wanted to preserve something that even he, one of the most knowledgeable men of his time, had only a dim recollection of, so that it became not totally lost to posterity. In this treatment, we will lean towards version 2), and give our reasons why.

In Platon's time, Greek was not yet a standardized language. Every greek region had their own dialect. The Ionian was different from the Athenian, that again different from Spartan, and the Italian greek dialects were different still. Platon makes reference to these differences in Kratylos. Classical greek, as it is known today, is the koinae , the standardized language of the post-alexandrian oikumene, a product of the work of scholars whose main base was the Alexandria library (which served also as research, studying, and teaching center).

It is usually straightforward to find equivalents between classical greek and modern languages for words of common culture use like: house, ship, knife, loom, horse, sheep, river, tree, mountain, etc., because they denote easily identifiable tangible, physical objects that are common in western, indo-european cultures. Philosophical texts though, present a particular problem for translation because of the extreme variance of semantic fields of key terms used as compared with modern european languages. Kratylos is even more problematic because Platon uses his words in a technical sense, and uses them while he talks about them, without having a proper meta language at his avail. We should note that ususally our modern meta languages derive most of their words from greek roots. Here are some of the keywords used by Platon:

onoma - name, denomination, appellation, designation,word, expression.

chraema - this semantic field denotes things of practical relevance and objects of human environment: thing, action, usage, money, belongings, happenings.

There are many similar-sounding, similar-meaning words in the field: chreia, chreos, chreoo, chrae, chraezoo, chraestos, chraestes, chraeo.

chraema was the term used by Protagoras. If the very global meaning of "thing" is substituted for the more specific sense of "objects of human environment" then we get the most obvious and commonsense statement of "the human is the measure of all objects of the human environment". No one in his right mind would want to argue against this. Otherwise what would they be there for? Today, one would call that statement a core requirement of ergonomics. And as ergonomics consultant, Protagoras might still make good money today.

pragma - things done, business, negotiation.

This term is used by Kratylos. There is very slight variance to chraema, but it might be significant. The semantic field of pragma is a little more oriented towards process, dealings, and doings. The word praxis belongs to this field.

Platon uses this term in the majority of places that are translated as "thing".

onta, einai - being things.

With the "to ti aen einai" the thingness of things starts to appear in Aristoteles. Platon uses this term sparingly (385b) and he does not seem to differentiate very much between all the three terms.

In most translations of Platon's works, stoicheia and grammata are treated as synonyms: meaning letters of the alphabet. But for Platon, there is a quite marked distinction: when he talks about stoichea, he talks about spoken sounds, and when he says grammata, he means the written letter. The translation of Kratylos has to be treated with special care to yield any useful information of what Platon was talking about. The semantic field of stoichea is:

stoicheoma: element, fundamental building block, first principle

stoicheoo: to teach the basics

stoicheomata: the 12 signs of the zodiac

stoicheon: letter of the alphabet

stoichos: the rod or stylus of a sundial that casts the shadow by which the time is

indicated on the dial

It is easy to see that the term is heavy with connotations from ancient cosmology. This subject has been treated in another of Platon's dialogues: Timaios . The first meaning of stoicheoma denotes the idea of a first principle of the cosmos . This is also called the archae . The zodiacal signs can be clarified in connection with the sundial . The sundial was introduced in Greece by Anaximander . He is also connected with the original formulation of the ancient greek theory of the four elements and the apeiron (Hölscher 1989: 172 ). The following passage from Timaios gives us the connection between cosmological primitive elements and letters-of-alphabet:

Now we must go back to a second, and new, beginning (archae) which adequately befits our purpose, just like we did with the earlier subject. We must consider the true nature of the fire , the water , the air , and the earth for themselves, before heaven was created, and we have to consider their states before its creation . Because up to now no one has enlightened (illuminated) on their origin. Instead, as if we knew what really is the true nature of the fire , the water and the others, we talk about them as the origins (archa i), in the way that we equate them with the letters (the stoichea or original components) of the cosmos. But it is not adequate that the amateur may even compare them with the form of the syllables . [69]

The four elements as Timaios describes them in the quotation, are also called stoichea . Anaximander had brought the sundial from Babylon . The dial is partitioned in 12 sections, like any modern clock is, corresponding to the 12 hours of the day. The 12-scheme of the hours corresponds to the 12-scheme of the months of the year and the 12 zodiacal signs wich are all of babylonian (or chaldean ) origin. In the world of antiquity, if one wanted to learn about astronomy/astrology , one went to Babylon , because here were the first and foremost experts of all the oikumene on that subject. Timaios, who is the fictional narrator in that monologue, has been introduced to the group in 27a as the one who is the most expert of them on Astronomy/Astrology . Obviously Timaios must have been in Babylon to learn the basics (or stoicheoma ) of the story he is telling in Platon's "Timaios", just like Anaximander before him.

We now have one detail left to clarify: Why and how might the word stoichea have acquired the meaning of letter-of-alphabet which is usually denoted by the word grammata ? Let us create a mental image of a sundial : We see a rod, or stylus, the sun shines, and the stylus casts a shadow. Then we call into memory another memorable fable of Platon , the cave parable . There, Platon talks about a big cave where miserable humans are chained fast to their seats so they cannot move and only watch the shadows dancing on the cave walls, forever entertaining themselves guessing what these shadows mean and what they stand for. The connection to the stoichea becomes immediately clear. The symbols of the alphabet are viewed as the shaped holes through which the pure light of the divine logos shines. The shadows that are cast on the dial of the sundial or the cave walls are the meanings of those symbols as we perceive them from our lowly perspective. Platon talks in Phaidros , 276a of the grammata as the shadow pictures of the living, animated logos . He uses a very subtle word-play here, the opposition of eidotos (true knowledge) and eidolon (shadow image).

(Platon, Werke , Vol. V, 276a)

We also find a statement in the same vein in Platon's revealing (and ominous) seventh letter . With all these indications and examples from different works, it is sure worth trying to find an explanation for Platon's interesting speculation.

When we look at the examples Sokrates gives for the similiarity of name and thing, we quickly see that Platon was careful to choose mostly words that have no physical referent. He derives his terms mostly from mythology and other greek terms of the ethical domain. He starts out with Homer as one of those people who are daemiourgon onomaton, the master in the art of forming words (390e). This is is highly significant because we find a direct correspondence to the daemiourgos of the Timaios, who is creating the world. [70] Then he goes through an assorted list of greek gods and heroes. He follows the genealogy list as given by Hesiodos, and in 409, he comes to the planets and stars, the four elements, and the four seasons. In 411 he talks about abstract and ethical terms like virtue, righteousness, etc. This gives an indication that Platon did not have the intention to show us the relations of names for physical objects but rather, to the thought and association structure contained in the greek epics, cosmologies, and mythologies. And here, it makes much more sense to speculate about a connection between the thing and the name, and the sounds of the names: This archaic thought structure was preserved and transmitted by the ancient aoidoi, as the poets, singers, and bards of greek antiquity were called.

So there is no problem to relate them to the phenomena perceived. The greek gods and mysteries literally "lived" in the rhymes and metres of ancient greek epical poetry, and it would be impossible to extract them from there. Another indication for this is Platon's use of pragma to denote the "things". He doesn't talk about a thingness-in-itself as Kant may have postulated, but about a going-on. That is for example the reciting of an epic text. While the text was recited, the mental imagery unfolded in the inner vision of the aoide and his audience. So the examples Platon refers to, his pragmata, were for the ancient greek audience of epics a true process, of the nervous system, and not concepts. In this respect, we can perceive an auto-poieitic element, as the sounds themselves create their meaning by rhythm, meter, and association. The rhythm and meter component cannot be treated here, so another work will be referred to which does an extensive discussion on that subject: J. Latacz (1979-1991) .

An example can be given to substantiate some statements made in Kratylos. In 434c, the letter rho is presented as meaning dynamis or kinesis, for "movement". And in fact, we can find the following terms denoting different kinds of movement in the semantic field of rho:

Under rho we find rhema , the river, the stream. rheo : everything in dissolution by flowing away and apart. panta rhei , as Heraklit said. This citation in Kratylos is the occasion by which we have any knowldege at all that Heraklit had uttered the statement. rhoae , rhoos , rhytos is again everything flowing.

rhoth - is connected to the sound of moving water.

rhombos is connected to kymbo and kyklos, and the modern derivation rotation.

rhyax , rhyas is the upwelling and breaking forth of forceful currents and undercurrents.

rhythmos is again connected to rhombos, kymbo and kyklos. It is the element of rhythmic recurrence in all cyclical processes, also the (well-formed) proportion of Pythagoras fame, leading us into harmonia.

Another approach supporting the semaiophonic hypothesis is the research on epic trance. The question of self-stabilizing neuronal homeostatic patterns evoked by metered poetry has been treated by Turner and Pöppel (in Rentschler 1988 [71], p.71-90). In their paper, Turner and Pöppel make a strong case for the effects of metered poetry on the development of a wholesome, whole-brained usage of the mind. Metered poetry has the capability of inducing the brain to a mode of functioning that is actually of a higher quality than the free-form prosaic mode of thinking that has become the norm in script based civilization. We thus have an indication that the epic poetry induces mental states and modes of functioning that are today loosely called "trance". This is often associated with the more prophetic aspects of aoidoi. In the indian Vedic tradition , we find the rishis , whose task was predominantly that of seers and prophets. It also gives us an opportunity to reconsider the tradeoffs humanity has bought into by adopting writing, occasion for a reconsideration of the inherent drawbacks of this powerful civilatory instrument. Platon also issues a stern warning about the use of script in Phaidros (274c - 276e [72]).

Pöppel and Turner write:

To reinforce their hypothesis the authors turn to new and speculative fields of scientific inquiry, which are variously termed "neurobiology", "biocybernetics", and "psychobiology". Quoting an Essay by Barbara Lex (1979), "The Neurobiology of Ritual Trance", they state:

We also find the forces that will work to suppress poetry:

They quote from Sidney:

If we apply the scientific findings to our hypothesis of the societal role of the Epic Tradition, we get this surprising picture: The Aoidoi of the past Oral Age served a much more important function than the history writers had allotted to them. They were the guardians of the sacred chants and poems whose purpose was much more than entertaining, or keeping a mythological record of the past, a sort of proto-history. They were the masters of the forgotten arts of attuning the soul with the body, of projecting the past and the future, and healing the cracks and fissures of human society. When civilization arose and humans adopted writing, the use of poetry as cultural memory medium was quickly discarded and relegated to purely entertainment purposes. The important cathartic role played by theater, and especially tragedy, in ancient greek society is one of the last vestiges of this once vigorous tradition. Once the art of the Aoidoi was forgotten, humanity was on full course into the Iron Age, the Kali Yuga, the Age of "Blood, Sweat and Tears".

While the epic tradition rested on a fairly select group of people, all traditional cultures had many occasions for participatory events where the larger part of the population was involved: festivals, dancing and drumming. Tribal african culture has developed the art of dance and rhythm to a high level. A particular case are the polyrhythmic traditions of this globe. These are particularly effective in attuning the brain halves. In such communal rhythmic events, it was not only the single person or a small group who experienced the wholesome effect of rhythm but the total community. Even though contemporary civilizations still have preserved remainders of this cultural heritage, it has become confined to specialist performers, with a passive audience whose role is now to applaud, or to move their bodies after the beat of the metronomic machinery that generates the sound.

The Greek Alphabet can be considered a mapping of the nexus sounds of the Greek aoide language [73] onto a graphemic system (mapping the stoichea onto the grammata, as Platon would have said). This is, while its ingeniosity and innovative value cannot be debated, in terms of information encoding a more or less makeshift and procrustean procedure. When the Greeks adapted it from the phoenician Aleph-Bayt system, they had to transfer the coding system of a very different language model. As semitic notation system, the Aleph-Bayt didn't contain vowel notation. For the Phoenicians, this was feasable because in semitic languages, one can determine the meaning of words by their characteristic 3-consonant root structure. This is not so in indo-european languages where there are many words that are distinguished by different vowels only. The consequence of this shifting around of sound value of symbols was that related sounds were assigned to letters spread evenly about the alphabet. The Epsilon and the Aeta are in different places of the sort order, as well as Omicron and Omega. This makes the after-the-fact detection of the nexus groups difficult, because the alphabetic sort order of dictionaries obscures the sound connections. The vowels form a particularly difficult subject because there are many combinations of vowels which are synonymous or part of the grammatical verbal flexion pattern: ea, ae, ai, io, oi, and so on. Another problem is caused by the spiritus asper, which is derived from the semitic sound value of Aleph, and for which only a diacritical mark exists, so that it is hard to track in the dictionary. Only in the latin alphabet was the letter "h" assigned to this sound.

When we go through many such word fields, we come to a grouping that corresponds to how the sounds are formed by the human voice apparatus. When the first element is repeated as last, this indicates that the structure is closed, i.e. forms a ring (gyros or kyklos). See also: Illustrations ILL:G1 to G5 for some hypothetical mappings of greek nexus sound structures and their connection to Hesiod 's Theogony . Such mappings can of course only be attempted seriously with the necessary technological infrastructure, ie a computer software system that allows to map them consistently. The written description as given here can only be a very makeshift approximation. Then, a multimedia representation is needed for the generation of the appropriate sounds.

gutturals:

The first group are the guttural nexus sounds: chi - gamma - xi - kappa - rho - chi

dentals:

Then there is a group of dental sounds: delta - tau - theta - sigma - zeta - delta

delta in turn connects to the trilled rho.

The combination sound psi connects this group with the labials, and

xi connects to the guttural group

labials:

The next group are the labial sounds: beta - phi (combination) - psi (combination) - pi - beta

liquidae:

Lastly, the voces liquidae: lambda - my - ny

Vowels:

The vowels form a different class: alpha - iota - epsilon - aeta - omikron - omega - ypsilon

Greek morphology allows for a wide variance of vowel combinations that are synonymous, or have slight, but significant differences in meaning, like for example idea and eidea, or eidotos (true knowledge) with omikron and eidolon (false image) with omega.

Of importance is also the vocalization of the semitic Aleph as a, e/i, and o/u below: "The role of Aleph" ->: ALEPH_ROLE, p. Fehler! Textmarke nicht definiert.

Let us picture the semaiophonic field of the words connected with the aoidos. We noted that the Aoidos is not only a poet and a bard but also a seer and prophet. Hesiod (1978) uses the word in numerous locations in his theogony . We can consider his work as a path leading us back into the aoide thought structure. Just by outlining the semaiophonic connections contained in the word aoidos are we able to set a starting point for the uncovering of this archaic thought system. Since european thought has been shaped so intimately, using the words of the european mother language, greek will serve best to introduce us back into this territory that humanity has lost 2500 years ago.

aoidae is the hymn or poetry, the myth.

audae is the sound, the voice, the call, the message.

aeido , aeisomai , asomai , means: to sing, call, shout, or making any sound when struck (like metal objects).

aoidos and eidos are sound-connected, leading into the field of idea.

In modern european language, the German and English word ode gives us the connection to audae. A hypothetical connection can be made to the Germanic god Odin, and still a little further, the Edda, the ancient nordic lore of which he is the main protagonist.

In direct connection to the nexus sound of aoidos is the verb aio . A remarkable aspect of aio is its omnidimensional meaning: It simultaneously means: to hear, to perceive, to sense, to see, to understand, to know. Then it also has the meaning of the aspiration, the spirit.

I will now explain the sound slide technique of singing aio. Most interesting is the semaiophonic structure of aio - it consists of vowels only. When this is pronounced in a specific way, sliding the vowel sounds into one another, we get all the possible human vowel productions wrapped up in one word. It must be noted that the epos is not supposed to be recited in flat prose voice but in singing, and so the tonalization has to be considered also:

aio -> A, {aeta/ä}, e, I, {ü/y}, U, Omikron, Omega [74]

According to the Kabbala, Aleph is the origin of all creation. This finds its parallel in the sound creation mythologies described by Marius Schneider. Marius Schneider gives a vowel sequence similar to aio in his explanation of the sound structure of the Sanskrit mantra aoum. Apart from the ending "m", the aio has a direct sound connection with the aoum .

There is a strong connection to the mythical cabbalistic meaning of Aleph in hebrew and Alif in arabic mythology. The significance of this field cannot be grasped with our common categories of knowing. The aoidos was the knower of a different kind of knowledge. This is the archaic knowledge, the living, breathing, aspirating pneuma of logos , of which Platon talks in Phaidros (276a) .

Possible semaiophonic connections are:

aer: air, wind, mist, fog.

aeros or eros.

aiora aiera : suspension, hanging or floating freely in the air.

aion : eternity.

The semitic language pattern knows sounds that are unusual for untrained european speakers. The most important of these is the Aleph, (in Hebr. also called Alif in Arabic, and Alep in linguistic usage). This Aleph is usually called glottal stop, and in the vocalized versions of Semitic script like Ugaritic, it was connected with a, e/i, and o/u [75]. Thus, aio is the one greek word consisting of all three vocalized forms of Aleph, and only these. In Semitic mythology, the Aleph is connected with the origo / origin, whose sound transforms into orchin, and it is called in Greek: the archae, in German: Ur-Grund. The common semaiophonic pattern of these three words is:

{a/o/u},{r/ch/g},{ä/i/a/u}.

Apart from mythology, the simple production of any language sound begins with a flow of breath, and exactly this beginning of breath is the Aleph. Therefore, Aleph is quite literally the beginning of all language.

To {validate / refute} the hypothesis, we can now go systematically through the hymns and epics of Homer, Hesiodos, and the other examples of the epic legacy and search out and map all possible semaiophonic interconnections. If one wanted to do this in the manual way, charting all these interrelations and interdependencies, it would take a very long time. It would involve following through all the semantic field interconnections with the conventional philological tools we have: dictionaries, or thesauri. The alphabetical ordering is a linear mapping of the semaiophonic fields cut up, mutilated and thoroughly mixed and distorted by the completely arbitrary alphabetical boundaries.

This is the Biblical creation account which one might call the male myth of {in-formation / in-saemination}, as it is related in the abrahamitic religions, and filtered into western philosophy. Using the term in-saemination is a slightly un-etymological superimposition of homoio-phonic words derived from two different, but related languages. In Greek, the word saema- means sign, and from it are derived the modern terms semantics and semiotics. In Latin, there exists the word semen- for seed / semen. The Greek word for semen- in turn is sperma. This again connects easily to spiritus. The theme opened by Vilem Flusser can be mirrored with this superimposition. See also: Derrida (1981).

Vilem Flusser has kneaded the Biblical account into a creation myth of in-formation. Flusser (1990: 14-17), (Transl. A.G., insertions in square brackets [...] are by A.G.). When (the right kind of) dust is mixed with water, it becomes clay. And God formed the clay adamah, into the first human, Adam. Apparently, the hebrew adamah serves a double semantic role of meaning both dust in dry form and clay in wet form.

According to this myth, God had in-formed his image into clay (hebr. adamah), and had engraved his breath into it, and formed by this the first human (hebr. adam)... Clay is the material (the great mother) [hylae , version Aristoteles], into which god (the great father) has engraved his breath [76], and thus did we come into existence as inspired materials from this coupling/copulation [Flusser orig: Beischlaf]. In this act, we can recognize the origin of writing without denying the original myth. The mesopotamian clay to which the myth relates is formed into a brick and the divine cuneiform stylus furrows [77] it. Thus has been created the first inscription i.e. the human being...

What did God really do when He inspired/inscribed His breath into the clay? First he handled it [orig. German: begreifen [78], i.e. manipulate and to understand]. Then He formed it into a parallelepiped [mathematical equivalent of brick] (He has done work), and finally He has in-formed it (has furrowed forms into it). Of course we know that here the matter didn't end: Because He had baked the in-formed brick to harden it. That tale is not being told in this specific myth but in the one relating about the expulsion from Paradise ...

. The issue is: to create in-formations, to communicate [transmit] them, and to store them durably (if possible: aere perennius). This way the free spirit of the subject and its wish for immortality is counteracting against the treacherous inertia of the object, its tendency for thermal death . Inscribing writing, the inscription, seen this way, is the expression of free will

The {sexual / phallic} connotations that Vilem Flusser presents in the above account, are clear. Flusser has taken the opportunity to show us the equivalence of the ancient mythology with modern scientific and technological terminology and thought patterns. The structural ur-pattern (Ur-Muster) is a mode of "inscription" presented from the viewpoint of the {in-formation / in-saemination} device, the stylus (or spirit [79]), that furrows (in-forms) the "materia", the inert and passive mother substance, which is called the hylae in the writings of Aristoteles (hylae and morphae) [80] . The Mesopotamian clay adamah is the protoypical mother substance from which the mythologies of {in-formation / in-saemination} of western thought systems are fashioned. In the Freudian interpretation, this is of course the archetypical image of the phallos or the penis, that is the {in-formation / in-saemination} device, which is plowing the fertile fields of the female mother substance in the male-orchestrated game of generation and procreation, as it is so clearly described without any equal-rights pretense in the account of the proverbially patrist manifesto of Islamic culture, the Koran. (Eisler 1995: 19-20, 94-95, 212-215, 312, 326, 333, 411-412), also DeMeo (1986), Daly (1978), Rotter (1996). More on the phallic psyche in Margulis (1991: 153-184).

These results can be now used for the uncovering of some nexus patterns in the archaic history of european culture, which became obscured after the invention of the alphabet. By the preservation of the archaic thought structures in the Aoide epics, namely the Homeric and Hesiodic works, it is possible to reconstruct and re-connect the semaiophonic morphology of the old thought systems.

Now we will come to decypher an archaic nexus sound pattern of fertility as preserved in the greek language. It has to be emphasized here again, that these nexus sound patterns are not etymological roots. The matter discussed here does not belong to conventional indo-european linguistics [81]. There is a nexus sound connection of the bath and the water with a great many ritual and fertility contexts: the greek balaneion and latin balneum, the warm bath. In the earlier european {popular / rustic / pastoral} pharmacopeia, when a marriage was childless, the woman was sent to a warm bath spa. She usually came back home pregnant (personal communication, Andreas Kopp). If a b-w semaiophonic shift is made, we reach a connection leading to water:

{ba} -> {wa} -> {uva}

Then bamma, baptae-, baphae-, expressions connecting with dyeing (like the priced antique purple dye, the sign of nobility and royalty) and submerging in aqueous solution like the bathing of red hot steel in water for hardening. Then baptizo, baptiso, to submerge in water, to pour water over, this is the nexus of baptism. (It can be debated if there is a connection between baptaes, the baptizing priest, and papa, Papst and pope. The other, more common linguistic derivation is from the pater nexus.) The german word bad for bath. The baign in french.

Further examination of the greek sound morphology yields: bathys, bythos, bythios, bathos, bysso-deep, also high, broad, wide. The english abyss derives from byssos. A related nexus for deep is brychios. The German Grund gives an almost exact match for the greek nexus as ground, depth, profoundity, origin, etc [82]. When the vowels are omitted from bathys in the semitic manner [83], this gives bths. By this, the english plural form baths is identical to bathys. Then we have depth which is also derived from the bth pattern.

Bath cultures are strongly connected to archaic water and maternal cultures, like water nymphs, nereids, caves, maternal (womb) elements. See the cult of Aphrodite in Cyprus which carried over an extremely old middle-eastern and mediterranean water and fertility culture to the Greeks [84]. Its center temple was a bath cavern. Because of this strong connection to ancient heathen cults, the founding fathers of christian religion probably thought that bathing should be restricted to baptism, and that it should better be left at that, the good christian never allowing water to touch his/her body until death.

The rite of baptism corresponds, in the elevated form, to the rite of chraematizo, ie the anointing, using the holy substance of narde oil [85]. Derived from this, is the christos in greek version and messias in semitic, both meaning the anointed one. In christian tradition, the anointing has extended to the last sacrament given to the dying, and also to the rites connected with elevation to higher pontifical status among the christian hierarchy.

Together with the holy wine (mentioned above) as euphemism for blood (preferably menstrual [86]), we now have the cultural pattern of the holy water as euphemism for tears (and/or urine), and the holy oil, as euphemism for the semen or mother's milk (See below). They together make the holy trinity of body fluids [87], as elevated into higher ritual abstractions by the civilized religions, but among the native cultures, used quite often in their original appearance, as they are the products of the human body.

The greek nexus for grape is botry-, and the word for the pre-wine culture mead and beer alcoholic drinks is: bryton, leading to the modern ine-briation. brytikos the word for a drunkard.

bryo- bryazo- and boubo- (further down) are the words for swelling, being full of sap, like the vegetation in spring. As Frei Otto has noted, the property of swelling, which appears in a very interesting bio-technical principle called pneu [88] (see the pn nexus connection to penis, or is it rather pneuma as the linguists may have it?), is used everywhere in nature, and has been brought to the rest of us by Dr. Dunlop, and the Michelin man, but is otherwise quite tabooed, culturally. The bulbus reappears, innocuously, as the humble but ubiquitous electrical lightning bulb in our homes. The garlic, or greek bolbos, has a long history of being renowned as a sexual potency enhancer. (Nomen est omen). The same potency myth applies to that particularly highly swelleable animal, the leach [89].

Conversely the nexus word brotos- is used for the running blood of a wounded human (by Homer ). This giving the immediate connection to the christian blood-wine equivalence (and all other like myths). Also strong connection to human sacrifices. The nexus broto- applies to being human, being mortal. This means that archaic greek preserves a connection to creation mythology of humans out of blood [90]. The other, more recent (or aryan, patriarchic) word for human, anthropos is connected to andro- meaning male, man, manly, upright, brave, bold, courageous.

brocho- is a nexus for swallowing (note the english connection between swallow and swell), drinking (blood, wine, water, etc.). brochetos is the rain and everything connection to the sprinkling of water. (In New Guinea, the natives say for rain: The gods are pissing on us). See also the Australian Aborigine blood/ rain rituals, Strehlow (1971). brochis/os- is connected to loops, nooses, and snares, to catch and to strangle, or to hang. The direct connection between strangling and swelling is obvious, since the blocked blood flow makes the head swell, and its connection to the sexual domain re-appears in the black tantric and sado-masochistic practices of strangling connected with orgasm. Strangling tends to increase the intensity of orgasm, which seems to be more pronounced, the closer to real death it comes. When men are strangled to death (or hanged at the gallows), they often (or always???) have an ejaculation. With women, there is obviously no observable direct connection, but it can be assumed to hold the same. brogcho- and brochthos- is the gulp, swallowing, and the throat. broma-, bromae-, brosis-, brotis- is connected to biting, eating, but also the eaten up, as in wasted, deteriorated, worn out decrepit, depraved, and corrupted.

Then, the greek nexus for cow, is bous, or lat. bos, connecting to baca, and vaca [91], both nexus contain a strong connection to boubo- bykto- and byzo-, all nexus denoting swelling, which is a marked occurence of fertility, like the ripe grape, connecting with Bacchus, (Dionysos, or the regional dialect variations: aionysos, oenoysios [92]) the bacchanalian rites, then to the ripe breast, english slang: boobs, or udder, and the swelling of the female vulva or bulba, (most markedly to be seen on chimpanzees in estrus), english slang: pussy, and the swelling of the penis in erection. The Greek Baubo myth [93] is just one single appearance of a seemingly world-wide mythical / archetypal pattern of a woman who displays her pussy, in order to cure infertility. [94] [95]

The boubo- nexus is also, not by coincidence, the sound symbol of rotting, before the final wasting away and decomposing, like the swelling of a corpse, and the nexus for bubonic plague.

The Genesis creation mythology [96], as well as greek accounts: Platon, Timaios. These mythologies are always given from the vantage point of the active-principle-centric thought system, ie. an active agent doing some kind of in-formation with some essentially passive matrix substance [97]. This cultural complex is common to all Christian, Judaic, and Islamic, as well as many other widespread thought systems, but it is not the only one possible. The polarization between active and passive principles is best exemplified by its greek nexus [98]: poie- and pathe-.

The nexus poie- indicates anything relating to actively doing, creating, bringing forth, and extends into the latin nexus pote- with all its european-language descendants: potestas, potency, potential, despotic etc., as well as the nexus pater, father, Vater, patre, patria, papa, pope, pitar (Sanskr.). Maturana makes direct use of this concept with his principle of autopoiesis. Between the nexus poie- and pathe- extends an expanse of greek key terms that can be found in the ancient natural philosophy treatises. The nexus poinae for the doing of penance. Anaximander uses the words tisis- or tino- for the doing of penance in his cosmology [99] , which is an exact correspondence. The nexus poinae is in the onoma-semaiophonic sound space near poie-, and so gives some explication what Anaximander may have meant in his treatise. Further related to poie- is the nexus pono- or pone-: doing great work, duress, fatigue [100]. Then we can list the nexus prag- (ma), also extending to all things being done or worked. The particle pos means: how, why, in which manner (is something done). The nexus poth- denotes wish, desire, craving. The greek morphology shows a corresponding nexus connection between poie- and technae- (also pertaining to creating things, see below) which also gives a connection for the use of tisis- and tino- by Anaximander. The nexus paid- extends to matters of childhood, education, and instruction. The word paidotribe-, literally "to rub the boys", [101] extends to all matters of greek physical education. (See also the transmission of araete in Greek society.) The connection to the German words Zeugen, Zucht, Erziehung, und Züchtigung is also notable.

Extending from poth- we reach the nexus of pathe- and the related pas-cho-, pas-chein-, the nexus denoting the receiving of impressions, suffering, being emotionally impressionable (pathetic, pathos, em-pathy, pathology, etc.). It is specifically connected to sensation due to embodiment. The nexus greek: meter (mother) lat: mater, matrix, materia, material, matter, indicate the impressionable substance as the terms developed into modern scientific usage. The latin word substance is in itself an expression of hylemorphism, since its original meaning is "that which stays the same when all the impressions are subtracted [102]".

Then, there is the semaiophonic field of technae, where we find many similar-sounding words that bear some connection with creation, and crafting, but also deception and fraud. The field of technae and its nexus relations has the core semaiophonic field structure:

t, {e/a/y}, guttural:{ch, g, x, k}

teucho, teuxo,

tetykein: to create, form, manufacture, smithing, carpentering

the nexus verb form of the field

technae: art, craft, skill, trick, fraud

tekton: carpenter, constructor, smith, creator, procreator->tekno

tektaino: woodworking, carpentering, metal working-> texis

tektonike: the art of woodworking (giving the hyle a morphe)

teuchos: tool, gear, ship gear, vessel, armor, weapon

tykos: stone hammer -> tykisma -> typis -> teich

tykisma: stone building, stone wall

teich-: everything pertaining to fortification walls

tekmar: to set a goal, to judge from signs, conclude, to reckon,

to calculate

tekno: to procreate children

texis: melting, dissolve-> etaxen, ->taxis

etaxen, etakaen:

to change appearance through dissolution

takeros: molten

taxis: order, battle order

tagma: the thing ordered, positioned

taktikos: pertaining to the battle order, tactical

typis: hammer

typo: everything created through impression, embossing, printing, engraving

An almost identical semaiophonic field is found with the nexus maechanae, from which derives our modern word mechanics.

An enquiry into the pre-history of the Greek language and the archaic history of european thought, especially if a non-conventional stance is assumed, is highly charged with dangers [103], and potential for conflict. To stay clear of such conflicts as much as is possible, I repeat that the present hypothesis is not aimed at constructing a culture development model that is to supplant the presently existing models. Instead, it will be conducted as a purely formal exercise, a Gedankenexperiment or a sort of Glasperlenspiel [104] using certain possible formal structures of the CMM of oral cultures, and tentatively applying them to structures found in the ancient greek Aoide material. No claim is being made to state any cultural theory [105].

The working methods described here are quite independent from current academic paleo-linguistic research, and go quite against the grain of that method, on the following grounds:

1) Current paleo-linguistic and etymological research is based on a biologic-genetic derived tree-descendancy model for languages [106], and eliminates non-invasive diffusion and cross culturation and assimilation patterns [107], or issues of design in language generation. In the view of the present study, this method is in itself a culture-centric pattern, that is derived from hierarchisation schemes common to the western european civilization system, which is also the origin of its political power structure. The methodology of 'divide et impera' is incorporated into the scientific methods that follow Descartes' treatise on method. While this method may be appropriate to the mindset of societies after the "aryan invasion", it is decidely not the mindset of the cultures of Old Europe as hypothesized by Gimbutas. The nexus-oriented system described here seems more fitting to that mindset.

2) With the different social organization of Old Europe before the advent of the indo-european peoples was associated a different CMM. This older social system was networked, and interlinked. A data and memory processing model is outlined based on such a structure. The Aoide CM model is based on this social structure, and in turn, makes it possible.

3) The Aoide language was a special system used only in the context of epic transmission, and this means the highest sphere of the sacred CM. It was a different language than the common vernacular (and regionally differing dialects) of the population [108]. Therefore a certain amount of creative freedom for the Aoide can be assumed in the forming of this language [109]. Strict linguistic tree descendancy theories do not apply when there is a special class of people who have a certain authority over the material transmitted (and worked upon) by them. Much as certain excellent individuals were instrumental in shaping modern european languages (for example the influence of Goethe on the German language), so can it be assumed that there was an influence of the Aoide on ancient proto-greek languages which later developed into the Greek koinae.

4) Aoide language creation involved the elaborate construction of mental imagery utilizing all the artistic and mnemotechnic methods like breath, body motion, sound, rhythm, meter, association, synonym, homonym, antonym, etc. that were available. The Aoide did not just tell stories in the order of a narrative, as is so often assumed. The very special nature of their transmission has to be emphasized again, the matter of Aoide transmission was sacred cultural ground. Only when the Aoide system had begun to deteriorate under the influence of a hierarchic, autocratic rule, and writing had taken its position at the courts, was the Aoide relegated as entertainer at the courts of the nobles [110]. The memory models of the singer/entertainer on which Parry and Lord (and the school of thought after them) based their work on the Aoide may be correct in principle, but their methods neglect the entirely different social setting. There is simply no comparison between the Aoide at the height of their influence and the low social status, standing and importance of the Jugoslav Guslar singers who had been relegated to a very small fringe sector in a society governed by writing. In another era, when oral memory was the only CM available, the role of the Aoidoi was much, much higher. An example from the African Griot tradition may serve as illustration. The memory material of the Griot was considered so important that death penalty was posed on remembering the lines incorrectly. The same holds for the Australian Aborigine tradition (Strehlow 1971). This clearly collides with the Parry / Lord interpretation.

The work of Marija Gimbutas [111] has given a highly controversial account of the archaic history of Europe between -6500 and -3500 as a culture of quite different characteristics than in the later eras. Gimbutas describes this culture as:

"matristic, matrilinear, ... this was not necessarily matriarchy", [112] distinguished by a "religion of the Goddess... a matrifocal tradition continued throughout the early agricultural societies of Europe, Anatolia, and the Near East, as well as Minoan Crete. The emphasis in these cultures was on technology that nourished people's lives, in contrast to the androcratic focus on domination". "The Old European society lacked the centralized structure of a chiefdom of the Indo-European type. [113]

More generally, the political and social organization of Old Europe in the interpretation of Gimbutas is portrayed as heterarchical [114] and network- or matrix-oriented [115], with no visible political center and no special concentration of wealth and military power associated with political centers. In my sketch I employ a similar political structure of a network oriented oral culture model by using the AOIDE technology, with the aoidoi functioning as vital communication, relay, and Cultural Memory Bearer elements.

In the dramatic picture drawn by Gimbutas, this culture was invaded between -4400 and -3000 in several waves of infiltration by Indo-European peoples, coming from from regions of the Volga Steppe and north of the Caspian Sea, whom Gimbutas calls the Kurgans. These were pastoralists, cow-herders, horse riders [116], using metal weapons [117], and had a hierarchical patriarchic social structure. Gimbutas describes the scenario with the following highly emotional terms:

The gentle agriculturists, therefore, were easy prey to the warlike Kurgan horsemen who swarmed down opon them. These invaders were armed with thrusting and cutting weapons: long dagger-knives, spears, halberds, and bows and arrows [118].

Under this onslaught, the fabric of the cultures of Old Europe was destroyed. The repeated incursions of the Kurgans went deeper and deeper into Europe and transformed it to the social structure that it had in historic times. The memory of these aboriginal populations has been almost completely extinguished. In Greece, they were called the Pelasgians. Marija Gimbutas mentions that the people of the Basque country may be one of the last remaining strains of this aboriginal population.

Only where the horse riders couldn't penetrate as easily, the islands of the Aegean, the Cyclades, and Crete, could the culture of Old Europe hold out longer, and the Minoan civilization and the culture of Thera preserved these traits into historic times [119].

There are many professional points of doubt with this model, and there are many questions that one will never be able to answer, for example the difficulty of discerning between culture, ethnos, and language, over so many millennia, with hardly any trace left. Whether this picture is historically correct or not, it is beyond question that ancient Greek culture contained under its indo-european surface substrata of another culture, called Pelasgian by the Greeks themselves. Another piece of evidence is the fact that the ancient Greek language contains an almost identical double set of synonym words for the same things. A Comparison with English shows that here the foreign invasions of Romans, Saxons, and Normans, have also given rise to double-track vocabularies. The present study assumes that there are remnants to be found of older culture sub-strata in ancient Greek Aoide language, as well as the mythology of the epics, and that the examination of the archaic Greek nexus sound patterns can reveal confirmation for those different substrata of Greek language, giving two entirely different cultural and language models and association structures mixed, meddled, and melded into each other.

The following scenario attempts to give a description of what a highly advanced oral culture could have been. It is entirely hypothetical and is based solely on the information technology considerations of the AOIDE model. Its positioning into the archaic european theatre is for demonstration convenience only. No claim is being made that such a culture has ever existed. What is claimed though, is that such a culture could have existed (or could possibly exist in some utopian future). We could also implement this in a computer simulation with the appropriate tools.

Prior to the age of civilization that began about 6000 years ago, there is no clear historical consensus what existed (and where) in the period starting with the Neolithic Revolution around -10,000 ending at the onset of the first civilizations -4000. In this vast temporal expanse of 6000 to 8000 years, which is as long as the whole historical documented development from the beginning of writing and the first civilizations in Mesopotamia and Egypt, to now, all the inventions and developments for all the main human cultural implements had been made. A very important consideration is the different climate of the post glacial age. There was considerably more rain and fertility in regions suffering from drought now, like the Sahara, and Mesopotamia. It is unjustified to call the cultures of that early age "primitive" and the attempt will here be made to sketch a hypothetical picture of a very highly evolved cultural system that may have covered all those areas of the Eurasian and the African Continents that were still extremely fertile in those days [120], which are desert now, like the North African Sahara, Mesopotamia, the Gobi Desert, etc.

The names of these cultures are 'gone with the wind', their remains have been obliterated by the later civilizations, or they have been covered by the deserts. Some remains have come back to archeological notice: Mohenjo Daro and Harappa , Minoan Crete , the Pelasgian cultures [121]. Others are completely mythical, like the famous Atlantis, or the cities of the Gobi Desert whose names are not known any more, but whose ruins still litter the sands. The oldest well documented remnants of an early advanced culture are those of Catal Hüyük , about -8000 [122], and Jericho, about the same time.

To he typical implements of culture shall be listed:

Basic traits common to all human culture are:

- fire

- language

- decoration of bodies, and objects

- tools and manufacture of objects of daily environment

- dance, song, jokes, lore

- rituals

The traits of higher, sophisticated, or neolithical culture are:

- plant and animal domestication, horticulture

- arts and crafts, tools and specialist manufacture for objects of daily environment

- spinning, weaving, knotworks, ropes

- pottery (when in permanent settlements)

- woodwork

- trade

- decoration of bodies, objects and buildings, ornaments, jewellery

- instrumental music and rhythmics

- dance, song, poems, epics, jokes, lore

- a system of knowledge and cultivation of the transcendent, commonly called

a religion, sometimes with architecture or landscaping devoted to the purpose.

also mostly associated with a culture of the dead.

We are focusing here on the role of the oral cultural memory-bearers or aoidoi. This is how the story tellers, bards, poets, seers and prophets of ancient Greece were called. Each language group had their own name for them, and they were present in every culture. In ancient India, they were called the Rishis, in the Semitic countries, the Nabijim [123], in nordic countries the Skalden, in later Europe they were bards and troubadours [124], in Africa, the Griots. In Australia, all the tribal elders (the aboriginal men of high degree, as Elkin calls them (1977)) were carriers of the tradition. In all places where there is a still living oral tradition, mainly Africa and Australia, there is the danger of its extinction because of scarcity of younger people who are willing to pursue the ways of their ancestors. In the following text, we are using the term aoide as generic, for all the bards, seers and singers of the oral cultures.

The aoidoi about whom most people will have heard before are Homer and Hesiod. They were the last exemplars of this vanishing species of cultural-memory-bearers, relics of the preceding oral era, who died out quickly after writing culture emerged in ancient Greece about -800 to -700. Their special deed was to have preserved a good part of the lore circulating in ancient Greece by translating the formerly oral material into the newly invented alphabetic script. Havelock's writings contain many details on the technological aspect of the alphabet, and its value to preserve the ancient verses quite accurately so that they survived the next 3000 years in the books and archives long after human minds had become too feeble or too occupied otherwise to carry them in living memory.

Considerable material on cultures before civilization has been brought about by workers like James Mellaart in Çatal Hüyük from about -8000 to -6000 (MELLAART) and Maria Gimbutas in the "Old Europe" cultures situated in the Balkans (GIMBUTAS), especially the Vinca culture dating about -6000 to -3500. The rich findings prove that these peoples had evolved a very high level of culturization, with exquisite art and craftsmanship that required extensive division of labor. A strong prevalence of female idols and fertility signs has prompted researchers to assume that these cultures were mostly matristic in orientation. The Vinca culture displays a wealth of objects marked with symbols that bear a certain resemblance to Minoan Linear A and old Phoenician script. Before there is a definite (and quite impossible) proof that these symbols have been used as script, they are regarded by archeology as ornaments (HAARMANN).

The cultural attributes listed above were handed down and evolved from the beginning of the Neolithic over 300 generations, that is 6000 years spanning the whole age of pre-civilized but cultured humanity. That this tradition was at countless occasions locally broken, uprooted, or dispersed by natural desasters and invasions with consequent loss of population has no consequence to the overall continuity that can be observed in the whole mediterranean and near-eastern theater. As Mellaart noted: Once a cultural invention has been made, it will remain. The fact of a 6000-year tradition without the written record poses some exciting challenges for a project of reconstructing and re-engineering the informational requirements and implementation of such a persistent Cultural Memory medium based on the human mind solely. This is the motivation for the present work. The oral transmission involves all sorts of mechanisms which can be classed in three domains:

1) Language, Voice, and Melody, Song, Instrument Music and Rhythm (Drumming).

These mechanisms are ephemeral and could only be kept in living memory before the advent of scriptural and technological recording mechanisms. They had to be handed down from person to person.

Epic or Aoide tradition, metered verse:

hymns, epics, poems, sung and transmitted by professional bards or Aoidoi

Prose: fables, fairy tales

Games: for adults and children

Jokes, riddles

Songs: There are special songs for all crafts and professions:

workers, sailors, hunters, warriors and soldiers, priests

as well as for all occasions:

festivals, ceremonies, rituals and daily and seasonally recurring works like planting, harvesting, building

Rhythm and Drumming:

African Cultures have a drumming rhythm for every occasion. When coming to a village it is possible to hear from miles away what kind of event is taking place.

(See also: FLATISCHLER-RHY)

2) Non-vocal ephemeral body cultures (like martial arts, and dance), transmitted through the master-apprentice system.

Healing, Massage, Marital Arts.

Many physical skills are hard to impossible to put into words so they are still today transmitted the same way they always were.

3) Arts and Crafts Tradition, transmitted through the master-apprentice system.

These mechanisms involve non-ephemeral stages.

The objects created can serve as information carriers.

Ornamental encoding are more than purely decorative. Patterns found on the wall paintings of Catal Hüyük showed up unchanged on Anatolian Kilims woven 8000 years later.

In this picture, the epic tradition represented by the Aoidoi is just the tip of the Iceberg. The hypothesis developed here is that the material cultivated and transmitted by them served a specific function, and had a different cultural value than the other categories. Therefore, the Aoide tradition is used as representative of this era, the Leitcode in the study of archaic memory systems.

Up to about 200 years ago, the greater part of humanity still lived mainly under the influence and direction of oral tradition. Even where there existed script based power elites, rural society was largely oral. All tribal cultures of Afrika maintained this tradition which is just today becoming extinct.

When we want to deal with the mental system of the oral CMM of the pre-scriptural era, we have to suspend our usual thinking patterns. And in the process, we might trip and fall, get lost in wrong turns and dead ends. This is a risk that has to be taken if we want to leave behind the thought frames that have supported our cultures since 6000 years. It is important to note that even our expression "thinking" may be misleading here because the type of mentation typical for those other cultures may be of a quite different, and maybe even uncomparable, mode than our contemporary mental organization.

When we are focussing on the cultures preceding civilization: The culture of Catal Hüyük, discovered by James Mellaart, the "Old Europe" cultures known through the work of Maria Gimbutas, the Pelasg ian cultures of the northeastern Mediterranean, and the Megalith Culture spanning all of Europe. To mention all these cultures in one breath may cause some archeological protest. What do they have in common? Let us try to sum it up: They experienced a fairly high level of cultural well-being with very low grades of centralized authority and organization, and had no (decipherable) phonetic script [125], that is, they relied heavily on oral tradition as cultural memory mechanism. What we are arguing here that in this oral tradition is a possible [126] cultural substrate, organization and stabilization process that was extremely efficient and enduring, kept culture alive and happy for at least six millennia, and that we as humanity have a lot to learn from what they created - even if the intervening script based civilizations did their best to eradicate and destroy all and any remnants and memories of the earlier era to the last vestige. They did not succeed completely. An old Taoist saying states that the more you try to forget something during the day, the more persistently will it reappear in your dreams during the night.

To understand Aoide thinking, to understand the underlying memory system base of the epos, it is advisable to suspend what we might have heard about greek or other mythologies before. We should forget the stories of mythology, of brave heroes, of fidel and infidel wives, of gallant elopers, of all the fairy-tale ideas of the Greek pantheon of partying, gossiping, fornicating, and fighting gods. Let us consider this is as convenient cover-up, as the meat, but not the bones of the message. Let us look at the story from an information processing view. We all know that there are certain subjects that people will not easily forget: blood and gore, daggers and dungeons, romance and love. We only need to watch TV soap operas today to find that the old subjects are still popular. Human nature hasn't changed much in all those millennia.

Now it is possible to encode a different material in this cover-story material, to be decoded only by specific people, some sort of archaic public key method. It is quite possible to think of some sort of modulation technique by which one could vary certain elements of a story, which would be very innocuous to unsuspecting outsiders but very significant for those who know.

The Aoide had a vital function to fulfil in archaic oral cultures: They were the decentralized, networked cultural memory carriers and processing service for the whole culture. There was no culture without them. They were called by different names in different places. They were not only singers and poets, but also prophets and seers. In the semitic lands, they were called Nabijim, and through their recountings was originally formed the body of lore that is today known as the Old Testament. In ancient India, they were called the Rishis. In later Europe they were bards, troubadours, and so on. In the decentralized networking structure of a rural society where message propagation speeds are mostly limited by the leisurely pace of a wo/man walking from one village to the next, and the message packet carrying capacity limited to what s/he deems worth remembering, there is a very specific outlook on what is regarded as news. We could say that this kind of messaging system limits itself to relaying news that will stay news - as it was once coined by Whole Earth Review (WER).

In such a society the only people traveling regularly were the traders and the Aoidoi who were often traveling with them, being welcomed on board a ship, or with a caravan crossing the empty reaches of Central Asian steppe between China, India, Persia and Syria [127]. They were a much sought-after source of education, information, and entertainment, in about this order of precedence. Every few years a local noble who had some money to spend and some wine to offer threw a big party, and took care to make it known many months in advance. There were always a few Aoidoi on such events, and it was among them that much of the action of the feast occurred. While they were recounting and interrelating their stories and chants, contesting for the golden bough [128], the equivalent of the poet laureate today, or the prize of the golden ring, and a pretty wo/man from the audience as willing consort for the night, they educated and entertained the audience, while at the same time refreshing and re-organizing their personal store of knowledge. By this the body of lore accumulated over the centuries grew, was modified, changed, renewed. It changed on a very leisurely pace of maybe ten verses out of ten thousand in a hundred years. But if you add up two or five thousand years of story telling and chanting, you will get the picture of a quite vividly evolving information culture. People were in no hurry then. And it is easy to see that the body of epical lore accumulating and renewing over these thousands of years was not something composed at the whim and idle will of the CM bearers, the Aoide. The CM material transmitted was valuable, and it was sacred. Only after considerable social changes, and after many millennia, when the old Aoide tradition had already declined, and when writing was invented, and specifically, alphabetic writing, could such a thing have happened.

In the present discussion, the person Homer, if ever he lived as a person, was not to be considered a composer of the Odysse, as we today think of an author, except maybe that he had collected what scraps, bits, and pieces were left of the epic fabric of the archaic Aoide tradition of Ancient Eurasia. There is a historical debate whether Homer was capable of writing. If he was, he could actually write down the story and edit it. But it needs to be kept in mind that an epic poem is not a piece of linear writing but something where everything is connected to everything else by melody, rhythm, rhyme, meter, and association in a very homeostatic self-stabilizing dynamic structure. It is next to impossible to just take out a piece here and paste it in there. So, there were only very few occasions when something like this happened, and it was most likely to occur during one of these Aoide contests, when excitement was high, and a few improvised well fitting verses might win the prize. The winner was the one who excelled everyone else in melody, rhythm, rhyme, meter, and association. The Aoidoi formed guilds of a sort. The rules of epos were their organization code.

Here we would have to fill in the material of the Australian songline tradition, which has preserved the messaging system up to the present century... ->: ABORIGINES, p. Fehler! Textmarke nicht definiert.

Even if one Aoide might not travel very far from the place where s/he was born [129], there is a very efficient way for the messages to travel much, much farther. We should keep in mind that the coding of epics had a very efficient sort of self-stabilizing mechanism as indicated above. This can cross language barriers. We should remember that in the olden times before national states that rigidly controlled one national language opposing another, there were only quite flexible boundaries of dialect. The famous example is China, where it is said that at a distance of 100 Li, people spoke a different dialect but could understand each other fairly well, and at a distance of 1000 Li, they couldn't understand each other any more, even though they both were speaking some dialect of Chinese. Ditto for the large indo-european and semitic language groups in the western half of Eurasia. So it was no problem for an Aoide of one dialect to adopt a story from a colleague of a different, but related dialect. Even if the colleague was from further away, chances were good that they knew to speak and sing a dialect common to both. If the story was interesting enough, it was always worth the effort. By this, a story could travel, at an even slower pace than a man on foot, not only a continent, but the whole globe. 500 years is an appropriate time it took to travel across Eurasia from the farthest East to the extreme West. This is the basic mechanism explaining the curious similiarity of myths all over the globe that Hertha von Dechend and Santillana are referring to (SANTILLANA).

The tradition survives into modern times in fringe areas of Europe, more of it in Africa [130], but it has degenerated and long been pushed aside by writing civilization. After writing had supplanted the memory functions of the bards the few remaining ones were employed mainly for entertainment purposes by the noble courts, as we see in the troubadours and the welsh bards [131].

It will be easier to understand the Aoide knowledge in connection with the initiatic tradition. In order to function as an Aoide, one has to alter the functioning of one's mind. Reaching that state on one's own efforts is usually quite impossible, and normally an initiation is needed, although there were (and are) cases where the initiation happens spontaneously, without a master guiding the path. The gruesome rituals performed by the Australian Aboriginals certainly served their purpose, shattering the novice's mind out of its foundations and readying it for a new imprinting [132], of a different kind of functioning in the "dreamtime mode" as what this has (falsely) become known in the West. But such methods clearly are not what suits my own tastes nor those of the intellectual educated mnemonautic explorers of modern western civilization. The subtler methods of Indian Yoga provenience, mantras, asanas, mudras, bandhas, japas, tratakam, etc., do not seem to have much of an effect on the psychophysical condition of the modern westerner at all, contrary to what the rich propaganda of their proponents may promise, at least what concerns my own experience with a host of methods from different traditions, over more than twenty years. I might have as well scratched my back for an equal amount of time and the same would have come out of it. So, there is a quite open field for experimentation in novel initiation rituals. Multimedia is one of the more interesting and fascinating playthings to experiment with. Trance in connection with biofeedback has been used for some time (techno music), and we can expect interesting novel applications of these principles with the new tools.

We will now look at the phenomenon of Aoidoi from a information processing angle and try to give an account of the requirements of oral culture. These are extremely stringent: To pack everything to be preserved over many generations [133] into packets of verse that must not exceed the limits of human verbal memory. This can be vast. We know of several megabytes of text that a single Brahmin scholar will recite faultlessly. But the amount of text in ASCII (or Omnicode) characters is not all. The whole epos had to be remembered with all rhythmic and melodic details, with the exact intonation, duration, pitch and what not [134]. If we measure this in multimedia data requirements, we can easily fill a gigabyte hard disk. The Aoide also has instant random access to any verse and to all the connections of all the verses with similar-sounding, similar-associating, similar-rhyming, verses in the whole epos. This means that for each verse entry, there has to be a hypertext key database pointer field connecting to many, or all, of the other verses, multiplying the data base by some, quite considerable factor. If we calculate this up in terms of data requirements we will end up with a hyper link data base maybe ten times as big as the original data (it can be as high as the square). This is well beyond the limits of present storage technology. When we now calculate the data access time limits to get any possible connection within the absolutely essential time lag factor of a maximum of 100 milliseconds [135], then we come to the conclusion that the Aoide memory system must have been quite a marvel, and still a little better than the best of our present-day computers.

While there may be a barrier against thinking in terms of semaiophonic fields in the european intellectual theater that has been imprinted by hellenistic and roman thinking, there is a different situation in India. Of course, there it is called by a different technical term. Semaiophonics is the old vedic science of mantra, connected with the vedic cosmology. The connection between Sanskrit and ancient Greek is through the ancient indo-european language family: Ancient (homeric and pre-homeric) Aoide Greek, persian Zend Awesta , and Sanskrit. The archaic Rishi Sanskrit is still found in the Rg Veda, and it relates to classical Sanskrit much as Aoide Greek relates to the Greek koinae . The nexus sound connection means that words bearing a similar sound will have a similar or connecting meaning field. The interconnection of such fields as we find in the old hymns and epics gives a structure that is vastly beyond the meaning attributed to the words as defined by philological methods [136]. This mode is the thought structure of the archaic seers, bards and prophets: the Aoidoi. Our understanding of archaic pre-literate thought of oral cultures will gain another dimension when we perceive their words as diffuse, field-like, interconnected entities.

In Vedic science, the nexus sound structures are called bija mantras, and we find there a complete thought system or cosmology of how these nexus sound structures combine to form the whole phenomenal universe. The works of Homer, Hesiodos and the proimion of Parmenides' work also contain still a vestige of this old cosmology.

I will give here a few outlines of information on the Aborigine songline tradition as much as I was able to gather. Through a friend, I became acquainted with Wighard Strehlow (1996), whose book commemorates the work of his grandfather Carl and his uncle Theodor. Carl had been a missionary in the Australian Aranda territory at Hermannsburg from 1894 on and he was one of the first white people in Australia who didn't just consider the Aborigines as fair game for extermination hunts. He gave them shelter and protection from the man-hunters, tried to convert them to become good christians, and all the while learned a lot of their lifestyles which he documented in several books. After Carl's death in 1922, his youngest son Theodor (1908-1978) continued the ethnographical work of his father. Strehlow (1996: 20-21).

Theodor Strehlow is one of those exceedingly rare cases of an anthropologist who could view the culture that he studied, from the inside, with the eyes of a native, since he had grown up among the Aranda children, and he could see their culture also from the viewpoint of the scientist. He was one of those rare cross-cultural individuals whose cognitive system enabled them to entertain otherwise mutually incompatible worldviews. He was able to perform a cognitive Gestalt flip of perception between the extremely disparate perceptions of reality as those of the whites and the Aborigines are. Because of this intimate insight, T. Strehlow's work offers some aspects that can hardly be found in any other studies on Australian Aboriginal culture. The essential factor that makes his work vital for a study like "Alternatives to the Alphabet" is his primary socialization into Aranda culture (see Chatwin, below). There is a possibility of a cultural "faculty X" that can remain hidden from view for any observer who comes from a civilization to an indigenous setting as distinct as the Aranda life is: the factors of somatic conditioning that are "imbibed with the mother's milk" in the first year of life. These factors will tend to stay completely hidden from conscious observation, equally for the natives of the indigenous tradition, as well as for visiting ethnographic researchers (if they are not especially trained for this). These hidden factors must be counted among prime candidates for "unobservables" as Frits Staal calls them. They can be so unobservable that Strehlow himself wasn't aware that he could notice something that no-one else from the white culture was able to discern. Of course the Aborigines knew that he could perceive (even though he wasn't able to let this percolate through to his rational verbal language thoughts) and therefore they let him partake in rituals that neither before him nor after him any Western person had been allowed to see and hear. Moreover, they allowed him to film and tape that material. And today this priceless treasure of human cultural memory lies at the Strehlow Research center. In the works of T. Strehlow that were reviewed (1964), (1971), and the description given by Chatwin, one gets the feeling that T. Strehlow was a man who lived "between two worlds" and belonged to neither. This would have to be validated through further research, and more would have to be found out by which "faculty X" that could have came about.

Chatwin (1988: 76-79) describes T. Strehlow and his work thusly:

. Aranda Traditions, his earlier book, was years ahead of its time in its thesis that the intellect of the 'primitive' was in no way inferior to that of modern man. The message, though largely lost on Anglo-Saxon readers, was taken up by Claude Levi-Strauss, who incorporated Strehlow's insights into The Savage Mind

My own experience reading Strehlow's book closely correlates with Chatwin's.

The ecological setting of Central Australia forced the Aranda into a nomadic lifestyle, since the rainfall is extremely sporadic, there is no predictable rain season, but irregular thunderstorms that appear very locally and at long time intervals (around ten years, as I could gather from the material). So the people had to be constantly on the move to places where there were foodstuffs, animals, and water. There were no pack animals that could carry any belongings, and so the people could carry with them only very few material possessions. Whatever CM material they wanted to preserve, they had to keep in their minds and memories.

Even though Aboriginal culture was almost erased by the whites, some material remains, but how much needs to be determined. Further studies are necessary, of special importance seem to be the data collected in the Strehlow Research centre, the films of the last Aranda rituals that the elders performed for Strehlow before they died without successors to carry on their tradition. From what I could gather in conversations with people involved in Aboriginal research and with W. Strehlow, there seems to be a double research problem. One is that the revival movements of the Australian Aborigines (the 'activists') are actively prohibiting research into this area which they consider secret and property of their nation(s), even though they themselves haven't learned any of that and wouldn't want to learn it either. The "Songs of central Australia" for example, has been forbidden to be reprinted, on account of the political pressure of the activists, and it seems as if even the curators of the Western ethnological museums are bowing to the pressure of these groups and inhibit further research. Another problem seems to be that white Australia is still "ashamed" of this heritage and would rather have it disappear altogether. These research difficulties and the late discovery of the Aranda case prevented a more detailed study which would under any circumstances have to be conducted in Australia at the Strehlow Research centre, if-and-only-if the political Aboriginal activist pressure hasn't already closed this door of research.

The Aboriginal Aranda tradition may present the last, largest, and purest case of a CMA that has been preserved up until our days. They had to concentrate all their knowledge in a non-material transmission form of dance and songs. Chatwin (1988: 119-120) indicates that it is not the words of the songlines which convey the information but the melody, or the rhythm, or both. This gives a hint that there is an important element in aboriginal transmission that is non-verbalizable. In order to substantiate that, more research would be needed. Perhaps the films and tape recordings in the Strehlow Research centre are the very last materials that humanity has for documentation of the wealth of this material.

Bernal , M.: Black Athena: the Afroasiatic roots of classical civilization
Vol I: Free Association, London (1987)
Vol II: Free Association, London (1991)

Bernal , M.: Cadmean letters, Eisenbrauns, Winoa Lake (1990)

Chatwin , B.: The songlines, Picador, London (1988)

Dechend , H v.: Bemerkungen zum Donnerkeil, Prismata, (Festschrift für Will Hartner), Franz Steiner, Wiesbaden (1977)

Dechend, H v., Santillana, G.: Hamlet's Mühle, Kammerer & Unverzagt, Berlin (1993)

Dechend, H v.: Archeoastronomy, draft (1997)

Diamond , J.: The third chimpanzee, HarperCollins, New York (1992)

Diamond, J.: Guns, germs, and steel, Norton, New York (1997)

Eco , U.: Die Suche nach der vollkommenen Sprache, C.H. Beck, München (1993)

Eisler , R.: The chalice and the blade: our history, our future, Harper & Row, San Francisco (1987)

Eisler, R: Sacred Pleasure, UK: Element, Shaftesbury (1995)

Foster, Mary LeCron: The reconstruction of the evolution of human spoken language, Ch. 25, p. 747-775, in: Lock , A. (ed.): Handbook of Human Symbolic Evolution, Clarendon press, Oxford (1996)

Gadamer , H.G. (ed.): Um die Begriffswelt der Vorsokratiker, Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, Darmstadt (1989)

Gimbutas , M.: Old Europe, Jrnl of Indo-European Studies 1, 1-21 (1973)

Gimbutas, M.: The Goddesses and Gods of Ancient Europe, UCal. Press, Berkeley, CA (1974)

Gimbutas, M.: Die Sprache der Göttin, Zweitausendeins, Frankfurt/M (1995)

engl: The language of the goddess, San Francisco 1989

Hölscher, Uvo: Anaximander und die Anfänge der Philosophie, in: Gadamer (1989: 95-176)

Jaynes, Julian: The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, Houghton Mifflin, Boston (1976)
dt: Der Ursprung des Bewußtseins, Rowohlt, Hamburg 1988

Karbe , L.: Venedig oder Die Macht der Phantasie, Diederichs, München (1995)

Kyriatsoulis , A. (ed.): Die Geschichte der hellenischen Sprache und Schrift, Verein zur Förderung der Aufarbeitung der Hellenischen Geschichte, Weilheim (1996)

Latacz, J.: Homer. Tradition und Neuerung. Wiss. Buchgesellsch., Darmstadt 1979

Latacz, J.: Homer. Der erste Dichter des Abendlandes, München 1989

Latacz, J.: Homer. Die Dichtung und ihre Deutung, Wiss. Buchgesellsch., Darmstadt 1991

Lex, Barbara: The Neurobiology of Ritual Trance. in: D' Aquili (1979), 117-151

Parry, Milman: Studies in the Epic Technique of Oral Verse-Making, Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 41, Harvard Univ. Press, Cambridge (1930)

Platon, Werke in acht Bänden, Hrsg. Günther Eigler, Wissensch. Buchgesellschaft, Darmstadt
Band 3: Phaidon, Das Gastmahl, Kratylos, Band 5: Phaidros, Parmenides, Briefe, Band 7: Timaios, Kritias, Philebos

Rentschler, Ingo et al.: Beauty and the Brain. Birkhäuser, Basel (1988)

Salthe, S.: Evolving hierarchical systems, Columbia Univ. Press, New York (1985)

Salthe, S.: Development and evolution, MIT Press, Cambridge (1993)

Schneider, M.: Die historischen Grundlagen der musikalischen Symbolik, in: Die Musikforschung, IV, Kassel, Basel, (1951)

Schneider, M.: Die Bedeutung der Stimme in den alten Kulturen, in: Tribus, Jahrb. d. Lindenmuseums, Stuttgart (1952)

Schneider, M.: Singende Steine, Kassel/Basel (1955)

Schneider, M.: Die musikalischen Grundlagen der Sphärenharmonie, in: Acta Musicologica, 32, (1960)

Schneider, M.: Das Morgenrot in der vedischen Kosmogonie, in: Symbolon, Vol. 5, Basel (1966)

Schneider, M.: Klangsymbolik in fremden Kulturen, Beiträge zur harmonikalen Grundlagenforschung, Heft 11, Wien (1979)

Schneider, M.: Urweltmythos und Sphärenharmonie, in: Festschrift Rudolf Haase, Eisenstadt (1980)

Schneider, M.: Kosmogonie, in: Jahrb. f. musik. Volks- und Völkerkunde, Vol. 14, p. 9-51 (1990)

Schneider, M.: Kosmogonie, unpublished manuscript, 2000 typewritten pages, Inst f. Völkerkunde, LMU München, Prof. Laubscher, (xxxx)

Visser, Edzard: Homerische Versifikationstechnik, Peter Lang, Frankfurt/M (1987)

Whitehead, A. N.: Process and reality, The Free Press, Macmillan, New York (1969)
first edition: 1929

Zangger, E.: Ein neuer Kampf um Troia, Droemer Knaur, München (1995)

[48] In the sense as Platon in Kratylos (390e) calls Homer the daemiourgon onomaton.

[49] I had designed this model starting around 1994, first holding a speech on it at the "Semiotics and the Media" conference, in Kassel, 1995 (organized by Winfried Noeth). I submitted a paper for publication (Onoma homoion to pragmati...), but didn't get into the proceedings. Prof. Noeth was so friendly to make a host of corrections in the version I submitted, but when he was finished and had sent them back to me, it was too late for the printed publication. I also have the annotated version of my submitted paper together with Prof. Noeth's letter in my notes, should the need of proof that I presented the paper at that date, ever come up. Also several people from Prof. Noeth's department were at my talk. Another talk was given in Aug, 1996 in Baden-Baden at the Intersymp conference: "Onoma-semephonics and the lucid trance techniques of the aoidoi". Among the audience of the talk were: Tetsunori Koitsumi, Soren Brier, Axel Randrup, and Georg Lasker's conference organization manager whose name is unfortunately not in my notes. William Graham had received a copy of the aoide project in Aug, 1997, also at the Intersymp (=International conference on systems research informatics and cybernetics). A further version of this material was presented on the conference: "Sex and the meaning of Life", March 26-29, 1998, Institute for Socio-Semiotic Studies ISSS, International Association for Semiotic Studies IASS.

[50] CAPS for distinction of the generic world-encompassing principle of AOIDE mental functioning from any actual historical (???) incorporation, like the greek aoidoi whom we know as Homer and Hesoid.

[51] For sources of the ideas, I have to state that I have them from the same sources where all the aoidoi got theirs from. Unfortunately this quite outside the academic scope. There are numerous works aimed in a similar direction, which I discovered over the years, but mine was developed independently. I have found some allusions to similar thought patterns in the works of W.v. Humboldt, Herder, M. Schneider, Weißgerber, Rossi, .... I would call Heidegger ("Was heisst uns Denken?") the most important onoma-semaiophonic thinker of this century, unfortunately his grand oevre was marketed under the misleading label of philosophy (conversations with Johannes Heinrichs).

[52] I.e. I am applying the methodology she develops, while being uncommitted on the content part of her works.

[53] ->: ABORIGINES, p. Fehler! Textmarke nicht definiert.

[54] I am using this term to denote ways of using our brain in some ways that are outside of the normal modes we call thinking.

[55] onoma- = name, saema- , saemeion = sign, meaning, phonae- = sound. short form: semaiophonic

[56] Which can be viewed as a special interpretation of the phememe model by Mary LeCron Foster (1996).

[57] Following a hint from Michael Meier-Brügger, personal communication.

[58] In Greek: plexis, synapsis. The plural of nexus has a long "u" and is properly written with a bar over the 'u', but this character doesn't exist in the Win standard charset, so will be written nexus.

[59] ->: STOICHEA, p. Fehler! Textmarke nicht definiert.

[60] The strange indication given by Chatwin, that Australian songlines are easily transferred between the different Australian languages, means that there must be a sound-principle of meaning. ->: CHATWIN, p. Fehler! Textmarke nicht definiert.

[61] The exact connection of this study to Whitehead's philosophy would take an inordinate amount of time and effort to discuss thoroughly. To outline the principle in a few words: Western philosophical notions of ontology are {pervaded / tainted / burdened} by the effects of the primary CMM, the alphabetic principle, fixating the living sounds of speech, the stoichea, into the grammata. If we want to get an alphabet-neutral ontology and epistemology, we have to backtrack to the Heraklitean philosophy of dynamics and relation (which was concurently formulated as the principle of pratitya samutpada by the Buddha). The modern western philosophical application of the buddhist principle was essentially presented by Whitehead (in a somewhat difficult to interpret form). The computer model presented here is aimed to avoid the theoretical difficulties, and takes a purely empirical path, assuming that "the proof of the pudding is the eating". My own findings in 15 years of software practice have convinced me that some things are much easier done, than said. And what would need a huge scholarly effort to prove theoretically, can be quick-fixed in a few lines of code. Who, after all, could have scholarly predicted the rise of microcomputers, and who, could then have predicted the subtle and profound effects that the exposure to a lot of personal-programming these little daimonos devices would have on the brains of the programmers?

[62] Due to the different usage and context, the conventional term could lead to misleading impressions, especially that the present subject matter could be treated with linguistic or etymological methods.

[63] See: W.H. Calvin: The cerebral code.

[64] ->: TECHNAE, p. Fehler! Textmarke nicht definiert.

[65] With the normal software project estimate sliding factor of about five.

[66] See also the works of Marius Schneider.

[67] Kratylos 434a, Platon, Werke, Vol. III, engl. transl. A.G.

[68] They may be sufficient to impress his sparring partner Hermogenes, but we can be quite sure that Protagoras himself would have torn them to shreads.

[69] Timaios 48b , Platon, Werke, Vol. VII, engl. transl. A.G.

[70] This connection even evokes the English similarity of the two terms: the world and the word. The creator of both the world and the word are thus related through the sounds of the language.

[71] The article by Turner and Pöppel: "Metered Poetry, the Brain, and Time" in Rentschler (1988).

[72] Unfortunately, Platon himself must not have taken his own words too seriously since he left us with the largest volume of written material produced by any individual up to his time. For his defence it could be mentioned that he probably never wrote anything himself. Platon was an aristocrat und thus still bound up with the class struggle against writing. As Havelock has noted, the greek aristocracy resisted for very long time the writing introduced by the lowly people: the merchants and craftsmen. The aristocracy considered the epic tradition the only culture befitting them. Nevertheless, Platon allowed his scribes to note down his diatribes that have been handed down to us well-preserved over 2400 years.

[73] Arguments for this in Powell (1991).

[74] The german sounds ä and ü indicate the in-between tonalities between the conventional vowels. The ypsilon is equivalent to the german ü sound. When we sing the vowel scale, we get all these in-between vowel values. Unfortunately this unfolding of the sound structure can in no way be demonstrated in writing. For the understanding of its effect, a live demonstration or at least a sound recording is needed. The effect is quite remarkable. The phenomenon that occurs is the generation of overtones.

[75] Bernal (1987-1991: 59).

[76] See also Illich (1988: 11): Breathe upon the slain, give thy soul, nefesh, to them...

[77] Muhammad had said in the Koran (2,223): your women are your field, plow them well. (Rotter 1996: 117). Also, the Freudian sexual significance of plowed fields is mentioned by Kallir (1961: 31).

[78] Kallir (1961: 28) remarks on the biblical use of the word 'to know' with reference to woman, in the sense of 'to know a woman sexually' (e.g., Gen. xxiv, 16).

[79] I cannot prove any etymological connection between spiritus (sanctus, amen) and spermatikos but the connection can hardly be avoided.

[80] For a philosophical discussion of the history of the concept of information, see also Capurro (1978, 16-49).

[81] In the present stage, one should make as few hypotheses on the linguistic questions as possible. Possible candidates for further exploration (speculation) are: proto-indo-european language substrates like Pelasgian, or Afro-Asian (Martin Bernal, Black Athene), or Proto-Altaic (Siegbert Hummel: (I: 1992, II: 1995, III: 1996, IV: 1997), Die meroitische Sprache).

[82] See the many creation myths connecting with deep abysses, like the Chaos myth of Hesiod, Semitic Sanchunjaton / Sanchunjaphon , nordic, etc. etc. They are all mythologies of the ultimate grund, which are well conserved in that one German term.

[83] Again, this is highly charged with cultural dominance politics, because it could be interpreted with Martin Bernal, that there was a high influence of Semitic people on Greece. (Bernal: (1987) (1991), Black Athene I,II). I am in no position to take a side here, all I do is record patterns (morphologies), and I am content with that.

[84] Grigson, 1978, Rätsch 1993, Reisberg 1989

[85] See the reference in the New Testament of Mary Magdalene anointing the Christ with Narde oil. The substance used was priced at around the present equivalent of several thousand dollars. Small wonder that people were excited about this luxury and seeming waste of money.

[86] Voss, Jutta: Schwarzmond.

[87] See also Campbell (1978: 152).

[88] Frei Otto (1977: 18), (Pneus, FREI-OTTO77)

[89] Nefzaoui (1995: 138): The Perfumed Garden of the Sheikh Nefzaoui. Old arabian love manual. The recipe was: Take a good handful of leeches, mince them up finely, put them in oil, and deposit them in a bottle in the sun or a warm dung heap for about one month, until the contents have become a quite seamy, creamy, sauce. Then, rub it onto your member on several consecutive days. When the night of test comes, this will give pleasure to you as well as her.

[90] These mythologies are found world-wide. See Campbell (1978), Strehlow (1971), Aranda initiation rites and fertility rites.

[91] Spanish vulgar for voluptuous woman.

[92] T. Palaima: Linear B and the Origins of Greek Religion, in: Kyriatsoulis (1996), from a hand out paper at the conference. (The proceedings are supposed to appear sometime in 1997):

[93] Literature: Gerburg Treusch-Dieter, p. 115-144, in: Dietmar Kamper, Christoph Wulf: "Lachen - Gelächter - Lächeln", Syndikat, Ffm (1986)

[94] The Japanese Kojiki mythology (Nihongi ?) attests to the world wide (quasi universal) spread of this theme.

Semiotica 119-3/4 (1998), p. 403.

[95] As described in a film on fertility practices in Africa: "Die frechen Frauen von Gambia". Ulla Fels, 1974, by personal communication: Ludwig Lambacher, Griot e.V. München.

[96] See the Flusser account in the appendix, ->: ADAM_INFORM, p. . Fehler! Textmarke nicht definiert.

[97] This can also be equated with an ideology of preference of male behavior patterns, like it occurs in patriarchic societies. In all of western and social natural history, the imprinting, or informing factor was considered more important, more valuable, etc. than the yielding, receiving, accommodating, substrate factor. An interesting case in point is the female Taoist Chinese usage which appeared in an otherwise arch-patriarchic society.

[98]As they appear in the discussions of Aristoteles and Plato's Timaios.

[99]Anaximander, fragments:

The Beginning and The Origin of all Being Things (of the all-there-is) is the apeiron.

and wherefrom is the emergence (waxing) of the being things

thereinto is also their waning (destruction, annihilation) according to their fate (chreon).

and they pay each other (allael-) their justified debt and penance (tisis) for their injustice (adikia) according to the law ot the Time (chronos). (DIELS-VORSOKR, 12, transl. A.G.)

Possibly the concept of pera- as used by Anaximander in apeiron, pertains to a form of poie-, indicating that anything created must have boundaries. The word para- may also be related, since it denotes a very versatile relation derived from the spatial relation of nearness, or adjunctness, or contingency.

[100]See also: Hesiodos: Erga kai hemera: Works and Days, Nibelungen-Lied: Eine große Arebeite.

[101] where, exactly, is up to the interpretation, and to the willing participant. It is still preserved in English language usage: "this is the rub".

[102] See the discussions in Aristoteles, metaphysics (the hypokeimenon) and Plato, Timaios, as well as the earlier Greek natural philosophers.

[103] For the career of the researcher, who can be quite certain that s/he will never ever be invited to any conference, or be allowed to publish in any of the academic journals. Voicing heterodox opinions on this subject is tantamount to professional suicide. Beyond purely scientific / academic considerations, there seems also to be an influence of political and ideological vested interests in particular culture models. At least that is the impression one gets when reading the works of outsiders like Martin Bernal (1987-1991). My own impressions were not very much better, as I have witnessed some highly charged emotional battles in conference rooms. One might think that some creative disagreement might enliven the debate. But not so: the conference organizers were threatened with withdrawal of (state and organization) funding if they invited the offending dissenter again. So much for freedom of speech in the academics.

[104] Hermann Hesse, (1971) Glasperlenspiel.

[105] I have had a few discussions with some friendly experts on these points. I want to expressly thank Prof. Meier-Brügger for taking the patience to go through some of my drafts and patiently pointing out to me where my view collides with traditional indo-european language theory. I take this into account, but still maintain that my model is situated in a different framework so that I feel it warranted to carry on data which may be in conflict with the presently reigning academic consensus. I need to have a zone of epoché keeping away from immediate judgement, to invoke a term from Husserl.

[106] See short synopsis on this in Diamond (1992).

[107] As was suggested by the German Kulturkreis Lehre and cultural diffusionist schools.

[108] See Meier-Brügger (1992).

[109] Platon: Kratylos. Homer described as demiourgon onomaton, a creator of words.

[110] The late Mycaenean time, of which the Homeric epics narrate, should be considered the last dim moment of Aoide tradition in ancient Greece, not its heyday.

[111] Gimbutas, M: (1973) (1982) (1989) (The Civilization of the Goddess) , (The Goddesses and Gods of Old Europe), (The Language of the Goddess). Her theories are quite controversial in the academic arenas. The feminist literature has taken them on the more vigorously. See Riane Eisler (1987), The Chalice and the Blade. A through discussion of the weaknesses of this approach is given in Roeder (1996) "Göttinnendämmerung". Since the present purpose is not to add to this discussion but to give an example for a different cultural scenario which is purely hypothetical, no attempt is made here to interpret that discourse.

[112] The archae exerted through women power is of quite different nature and flavor than a patriarchic rule.

[113] The Civilization of the Goddess, p. x, xi

[114] There is a lot of confusion about the difference between hierarchy and heterarchy. A heterarchy is not a confused jumble, which would more appropriately be called anarchy. (See: Ken Wilber: Eros, Chaos, Logos).

A heterarchy is structured in layers of increasing complexity and organization much as a hierarchy is, but there is no predefined constantly governing uppermost single element. In social terms, the control and power is exerted through distributed institutions, where none holds the absolute summa potestas. Decisions are reached through negotiation at the appropriate levels. The corresponding political model has been given by Lars Karbe (1995) in his book on the political structures of Venice. Biological applications in: Salthe (1985) (1993).

[115] The matrix is of course derived from the same root as mater (lat.) or meter (gr.), but is more culturally neutral in that it doesn't presuppose a gender based power system, but indicates a social ordering principle based on the network structure.

[116] This seems to be a serious lapse: By academic consensus there were no rideable horses around in -4000. ("Die Indogermanen und das Pferd", Akten des Intern. interdiszipl. Kolloquiums, Freie Universität Berlin, 1.-3. Jul. 1992). The post-glacial horse races were about 1.5 m in height, and were too weak to carry a man. Horses were originally kept much as cows, as a source of meat. Only after a prolonged period of horse-breeding arose horse races strong enough for a rider. And only much, much later, in the middle ages, were there horses that could carry a heavily armored cavalryman. The first decisive influence of the horse on warfare was by the light, spoke-wheeled chariots which were the super-weapon (Geheimwaffe) of the bronze age.

[117] arsenic copper. Arsenic is a dangerous poison, and I would think that the mental effects of a steady arsenic intoxication of indo-european copper smiths must be considered in the picture of the cultural effects of the "Kurgan Invasions". Unfortunately I haven't seen any studies dealing explicitly with these effects.

[118] aao. p. 352, to 401. since bows and arrows are paleolithic technology, their mentioning here does none to emphasize the effect. Everyone had these weapons since at least 50,000 years.

[119] Christos Doumas: The Wall-Paintings of Thera (DOUMAS-THERA), DOUMAS-AEGE1, DOUMAS-AEGE2.

[120] There are many accounts that those areas that are now deserts formerly had humus layers of one to two meters in thickness.

[121] Those are not really that old, but their predecessors may be.

[122] See Mellaart.

[123] In the Islamic tradition, Mohammed is remembered as the greatest of Nabijim.

[124] See Ranke-Graves: The white Goddess.

[125] See the discussion on the pottery marks of the Vinca culture. Were they geometric ornaments or were they script?

[126] Since evidence on this subject is uncertain and hard to come by, this discussion must be lead on a highly hypothetical "what-if" level. No claim is made "that it was exactly so to the exclusion of any other way".

[127] It must not be taken for certain that Inner Asia of the early Neolithic was as deserted as it is now. The numerous remains of ancient cities in the middle of the Gobi desert attest to a different climate in earlier times. The same applies to the Sahara region. The early Sumer and Indus valley civilizations had a vigorous trade. Only in historical times, when the regions started to dry out, was the passage more difficult. And then only with suitable animals, like camels, could the trip be made. However that might have been, there have been lots of long nights to spend story-telling through the millennia. This is how arose the famous body of lore called the stories of Arabian Nights much later. They were not Arabian but Persian, generated during hundreds of thousands of man-years on the caravan lanes of Central Asia.

[128] Frazer

[129] Except in the case of caravan and sea voyages.

[130] The griot, See Assmann

[131] Robert Ranke Graves makes note of the extinguishing of the latest remains of celtic bards in Britain and Ireland around the 18th century. Graves (1985).

[132] And these techniques probably work only when applied around puberty, while the nervous system is still flexible enough. Similarly the popular adage: "was Hänschen nicht lernt, lernt Hans nimmermehr" (What isn't learned as small child, cannot be learnt as adult).

[133] Archaic cultures capable of erecting a Stonehenge certainly had to plan ahead for about 1000 years that it took to construct the whole thing. They were thinking in terms astronomical movements and constellations. The span of one human life was of no concern here.

[134] For example the 100,000 line Mahabharata Epos.

[135] You wouldn't want an Aoide to stop in the middle of a singing contest, and say: "uh, ar - this mighty god, oh well, I don't quite remember what, did about this and that" would you? Neither did he.

[136] This should not be construed to imply that the methods and the rigor of philology as it has evolved since the days of the library of Alexandria are to be discarded: On the contrary, philology is the solid base on which to build all further excursions. (For further introduction to classical philology, see PFEIFFER78). With the mental tools available up to now, the methods of philology are the best available. The difference here is that there will be new mental tools, and with the new tools, new methods of investigation.