ANCIENT FICTIONALITY

by Stanley Wilkin

Overview

This paper holds that religious texts were initially a product of fictionality, producing myths and stories that thereby were not literally true, nor were intended to be, but were an essential part of exploring, developing and understanding the varying facets of the world in much the same way as modern fiction and film/cinema production. Ancient Sumerians for example were eager to impose order on the world, resembling the order of their urban societies, and explain how the world functioned. These two ideological approaches to existence met it seems within a 'powerful imagination and a poetic sensibility of the highest order' (Kriwaczek: 2010: 29) creating relationships between natural phenomena within an elaborate discourse that included humankind. The idea of distant powerful sensibilities invested with natural force, the destructive whirl of storms, or reflected human qualities remains with us still in the various Abrahamic cults. That the structuring and authenticity of religion is achieved through literary devices, personification, repetition, rhetoric, hyperbole, professional story-telling, is often ignored.
As with serious plays or less demanding television productions the content's association with reality, that is the times and integral relationships between characters, is subject to form, audience, and cultural context. Through all such mechanisms human thoughts and feelings are framed, described and elaborated within a limited if culturally accepted set of intensely articulated paradigms. The ancient world had few methods of analysing and critiquing their environment, therefore an alternative reality populated by gods and other supernatural beings served that purpose. Often through religion the world is set before us in a fashion that competes with the immediacy of our everyday existences in apparent greater actuality.
This paper holds therefore that the dynamics of Mesopotamian and Ancient Egyptian urban cultures demanded the construction of order, and that scribes, priests, politicians, various entertainers met that need through the creation of an alternative dimension in which cultural anxieties were both dramatized and resolved. In this fashion, religious belief based upon discursive or narrative literature can be viewed as absorption in the act, processes and outcome of human creativity-our imaginative need to realign day to day phenomena. Religion consists of metaphors, many several millennium old, which have constructed and construct human reality. The construction of archetypes and metaphors by the first state religions and accompanying literature, religious and secular, remain and influence us today.
This work will also involve the development of ideas such as a universal god and universal religion, a consideration of martial gods, the validity of Biblical and Islamic history, concepts of suffering, salvation and resurrection-the latter important themes in many art or writing based religions of the Middle East and Africa. It will also look at the conjunction formed by Islam, its paradigms of conquest, and its roots in ancient Mesopotamian cultures, Christianity, Roman and Persian state development.
Crucial to the completion of this book's overall argument is the part played by words and writing, see above, in the construction of belief, and that without the former accomplishments belief as it is experienced in the present would not be possible.
Each religion has evolved through the acquisition of knowledge (Mesopotamian and Egyptian), in the face of overwhelming conflict and political oppression (Judaism and Christianity), or through paradigms of social development, competition and conquest (Islam).

Product Details

BN ID:	2940161993705
Publisher:	Stanley Wilkin
Publication date:	06/11/2018
Series:	Ancient Fictionality , #1
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	717 KB

About the Author

Stanley Wilkin is an education consultant and lecturer. He writes and publishers stories , plays and poetry.