Solving the world or sustaining it

Saint Augustine of Hippo. Vittore Carpaccio 1502

 Triadic Structures are very present in Jacques Lacan's thinking. He uses a slight modification of Hegelian Idealism. Lacan pulled desire and recognition out of the master/servant dialectic, he proposed the desire was the slave, and recognition, or the desire to be recognized  was the master. His Real, his Symbolic and his Imagery achieve a balance of circles, each circle dependent on the other two, if ever the connection between them was lost or upset, then "emotional well-being" and "psychological distress" found work.

I think it was yesterday we looked at Triadic Structures in Zarathustrian monotheism and began to suspect that the Lord of Wisdom in and of him or her self was all very well as long as his or her person was present. If they weren't then doubts went unanswered. Some time ago I remember harping on a little about Sumerian and Ancient Iranian Goddesses of war having femme fatale quality that launched ships unless you were a fan of Pindar, or like Gilgamesh in love with a hairy barbarian sent to teach you the lessons of modesty and your Goddess of War was notorious for and indeed appeared to take joy from breaking the hearts of good looking, powerful young men. You could say "no" to a Goddess, it was part of the give and take, but you couldn't really say "no" to the One God, whose decision making processes passeth all understanding.

In other words we have discussed the possibility of the inspiration of this or that reasonable and new thought pattern having a limited capacity to outlast the mind from which it emerged unless the pattern of thinking was modified to include older and more widespread patterns of thinking, and the new idea was considered a step forward.

With Zarathustra's teaching, after he was gone, there was a firming up of dualisms between good and evil, a choosing of sides encouraged by linear thinking. The role of Public Relations for Zarathustrian thinking was taken on by Shaman communities from North Western Iran who were famous and highly sought after by the Political Classes, for their wisdom, their knowledge of the world, their wealth and their capacity to do magic. In the established Zarathustrian Communities these Magi liaised with kings, princes and they took responsibility for the funeral practices of the faithful, including the sanctity of the Tower of Silence. They were close to and trusted by the community. 

It's also the case, even back then in those days of the final two millennium BC, the further west you went the more magically powerful, spiritually aware and mentally together the East seemed to be. They were wise and they seemed to have answers. Three of them turning up with gifts in a Bethlehem barnyard for the birth of child, pretty much silenced doubts about the child having been born of a virgin. 

In Third Century of the common era, when Saint Augustine of Hippo was a callow youth, a man called Mani, he was from a Persian, Jewish, Christian, Gnostic family, took to preaching his own version of the word. He saw himself as a prophet like Jesus, he'd been predicted by the bible and his message was very much a Christian message presented as a battle between darkness and light, if you were bad you were consigned to the flames of hell and that was it for you, if you were good you had a shot at become a star in the sky and finding eternal calm and happiness. Mani died in prison, his corpse was stolen by his supporters who then started the rumor that like Jesus, he too had risen from the dead. Manichaeism spread rapidly across all of Eurasia. It's message briefly outpaced the Christian message and might have succeeded had Constantine not modified his attitude to the Christians.

Saint Augustine was a disciple of Mani until he became disillusioned and converted to Christianity, but even while he was laying out a formal set of understandings for the Christian communities to unite around, he wrestled with how to address good and evil, his point was always the question "why would the fountain of all creation allow evil?" At least Mani came right out and just said it, evil was always going to win, take no notice of the bastards, they are not long for this world, none of us are, be good, find a place in the stars, the best for you is yet to come.

Our own friend Can Bobby will take notice of a distinction between the relationship Triadic Structures have with linear thought and the relationship they have with non-linear thought. Put in an easy to remember way: Linear Thinkers through their Triadic Structures try to make history so they can solve the world: Non-linear Thinkers through their Triadic Structures try to circle history back to the beginning so they can sustain the world.

Go ahead, say what you like about the name Mani as the founder of a religion before we risk accusations of blasphemy by wondering why Jesus was called Jesus because next time we are going to ask a question that does rather tie reason up, pop it in a burlap sack and toss it over a cliff. We're going to ask "Why do Christians need the Trinity?"

 

Triadic Structures in an early monotheistic religion

Jan 13th 2026

 Even Zarathustra had a struggle with a Triadic Structure. His one God, the Lord of Wisdom, if not the creator of knowledge was at least a fountain of knowledge, and he made a theoretical sense, but when you ask  people to believe something there has to be more to it than "This is your idea, do as it says!" People wanted Angels, they wanted lots of Gods, they never really wanted a marked difference between good and bad, they needed to have sides to chose from, and given a choice they preferred to have the option of bribery than some goody-two-shoe figure that didn't smite trouble makers or win battles.

The attempts to wed men and gods into a sacred union became increasingly complicated when the preoccupations of one god so dominated the cultural scene that all other gods were strongly discouraged then outright banned.

I think it safe to say Zarathustra was more of a Nerd than he was a Saint or a Politician, and like all Nerds he was bound to be disappointed in his fellow human beings, he expected an intellect from them that shaped their world in the way that his intellect shaped the world for him. If only people would think before they acted or even if they just sat down and had a think about it before flying off the handle and setting fire to the neighboring village because a goat was missing.

One of the very first things Zarathustra found himself doing was to engage his thinking to a more linear process. Non-linear thinking was altogether far too forgiving, a mind had to look into a future and start taking responsibility for it to grasp the value of a Wise Lord. In a Monotheist understanding both a single Uncreated Creator and a beginning, Middle and End became a central feature of the answer to the question why. Things didn't go round and round, except for the Uncreated Creator, everything else had a beginning and an end. Yes indeed if you weren't ready for it, death was to be feared. And yes, it could be argued that demands for compromise from the non-linear thought merchants resulted in the end becoming a chance for the the responsible individual and the irresponsible universe to rid itself of bad people, freshen itself up and return again renewed.

Zarathustra's early attempt at dogma came up with a simple instruction that had a triadic structure. Good Thoughts, Good Words, Good Deeds. Useful action started with thinking, then moved on the discussion and only then as a last resort, were neighboring villages justly burned.

Zarathustra himself was persuaded that the Ahura Mazda, the Lord of Wisdom needed a little moral support from the traditional spiritual world. If you wanted to be taken seriously you couldn't just dismiss thousands of years of war gods, animal gods, river gods, love gods the whole panapoly of male and female guardian spirits who had always had to be sacrificed to and appeased. No, Zarathustra allowed what the faithful chose to call the six Amesha Spentas. These were not gods or spirits, not at all, they were emanations from Ahura Mazda himself and as emanations they were attributes of the Uncreated Creator.

400 or 500 hundred years later Zarathustra's influence over the one god narrative had begun to wane a little. Pedants were wondering why an uncreated creator, unless he or she or it was a malignant narcissist would have anything to do with creating badness. The story tellers saw their chance, and prime among them were a collection of Shamans from North Western Persia whose influence on power brokers in the political and warrior class was considerable. To maintain Zarathustrian legitimacy they persuaded Zarathustrian leadership to resurrect to traditional gods, Mithra and Anahita. Mithra was a boy god of law and order, solar alignment, bulls, bull slaughtering and warriors. Anahita was a girl god, she represented the river of fertility that dropped down from the heavens, her name translated into : "The damp, strong and immaculate one." Like the Sumerian goddess of sexual love, while Anahita wasn't a full blown Goddess of War, she did have a lot to do driving chariots and crushing demons.

The Triad introduced by this Shamanistic clan, otherwise known to the western mind as the Magi, to this later stage of Zarathustrianism was a relationship between the wise Ahura Mazda, Mithra tough boy with a good boyish heart and Anahita who like all chariot riding goddesses who were interested in love was basically a femme fatale.

Was Pindar a Kiss-Ass

A Short Hercules

 Ivan Ivanovitch, of the left Iliac is on form today, he feels ignored. But at least we all agree that the word orogeny, from the Greek word for mountain and the Greek word for creation, should mean a hell of a lot more than "mountains formed by the movement of tectonic plates."

 But such is the lowly status of geology as a field of study, it's not "top-tier" as they say, words like orogenic mountain range, drumlin, morraines of all kinds, cwms, do little for the poet. Erogeny and offspring, on the other hand, from the Greek for sexual desire and the Greek for born of, is up there with adult stuff that pretty much dominates at least ninety percent of entertainment and a good fifty percent of most thinking.

So let's forget France's contributions to psychoanalytic theory for a bit, talk about Pindar and ask why the subjects of his poetry, his style and manner, dominated a cultural elite for in excess of two hundred years, and then in the middle of the 1800's when the Olympic games was resurrected Pindar again influenced the tone and flavor of the Olympic Games Poem.

Most of Pindar's themes were Eros related. He was big into god's abducting maidens, the results of the Union being a demi-god usually of mixed virtue who could lift weights or do things to javelins. It was a violence softened by pleasure, and for the victim, the financial security of a dubious marriage or a stipend.

The Olympic Games did rather bring out the homo-eroticism of a slave owning society that regarded most Greek women as chattels to be traded. Pindar was no exception. He was prone to being in love and expressing his passion for beautiful, athletic, male boys, what these days we might call pederasty resulting in pedophilia, was in Pindar's day a legitimate source of inspiration.

Back then, a poetry reading included music and dance, and I guess there was an element of interpretation from the performers. They had lyres and the kithara. They had wind instruments, the double-reed auloi  and Pan pipes or the  syrinx. They had the tympanon, it was like a drum. They had the kymbala or cymbals. It was a big performance, very popular as entertainment, tickets highly sought.

Like Taliesin, Wales' own Shining Brow of bards, Pindar knew how to butter his bread. He invested well in flattery, he composed a line or two about what a wonderful human being one of Alexander the Great's uncles or cousins or something was, then when Thebes, in Greece, was leveled for having a problem with Macedonian expansion Alexander killed thousands, enslaved many more thousands but he spared Pindar's house and sanctuary in Thebes.

In another poem Pindar impressed a patron with a description of Hercules, who was considered the supreme example of heroic physique, by claiming Hercules was in fact a very short man indeed but it didn't stop him from being Hercules.

And why did Pindar do that, because his wealthy patron was, shall we say, diminutive. 

Lacan, The Real, Reality, The Other and James Joyce

Sigmund Freud's Couch.

Huffstutter 2004

 I know Baxter wants to get away from Jacques Lacan. Myself I'd like to shore up an understanding of what Lacan means by Real.

In the course of a person's lifetime, meanings gather moss as they gain shades and layers. A mind  can easily hold fast to a spot on the symbolic order, think it rather cute and pour stuff into it, imagine our world without retard, puerile and cretin, which you just can't do with sums. The thing is, in Lacan's way of looking at it, there's a distinction to be made between Reality and The Real. Far from there being two distinct words to mark the difference in a manageable way, real is all bundled into real.

In short, for Lacan, "Reality" is the world we have built using symbols and images. "The Real" is everything else. Sounds far too easy and a little pointless until you adjust the meanings a little by suggesting: "The story of reality can be changed, The Real can't." Then you might be persuaded to ask: "Does The Real care about me?" The answer to that is: "No sirree! But Reality does its best to try."

Indeed, lo and behold, all of reality has been built on the idea of making you and I happy, and if not happy, then at least constructively motivated.

Being an ambitions male with a lifestyle to maintain, Our Man Jacques Lacan quickly concluded that Freud was absolutely right, when it comes to hardcore mental imbalance, morbid unhappiness, intermittent explosive disorder or whatever you wanted to call it, there were certainly reputations to be made but there was no actual cure for the fundamental Human Condition.

But he had noticed that in the wider society we people spent an inordinate amount of time in a pursuit which because he grew up proper he might have phrased this way: "Colluding to adapt to social norms." This collusion, he ventured to observe, had its casualties, but without the moral support of other gossiping idolaters we would all become casualties of The Real and under those circumstances where would reliable help come from.

There might be no cure for those whom the Symbolic World, Reality, had failed to embrace with the sort of love and appreciation that fills the void and makes it possible to dramatically reduce contact with The Real. But in terms of symbol making, an "I" that sat alone on a bench staring at the Liffey River and listening to the ducks, might find solace in dreaming of his dressing room, hunting around for the material out of which to make symbols that better suited him.

For Lacan that would require a person to accept "The Real" as real and "Reality" as an order of symbols, some of which made no sense whatsoever. For James Joyce it was developing a writing style that was "famously experimental and complex" that would challenge the professors of the English Literature, or it was "pretentious, overly difficult, deliberately obscure and fragmented" that rescued him from losing his mind to the isolation of preferring the company of park benches to the company of people.