523); this method of teaching was going on at the height of innovation in Buddhist
philosophy.
- Gibbon, with characteristic eloquence and bias, puts it: “A cloud of critics, of
compilers, of commentators, darkened the face of learning, and the decline of
genius was soon followed by the corruption of taste” (The Decline and Fall of the
Roman Empire; Gibbon, [1776] 1956: 52).
- The arithmetic formulated in the early Roman Empire, at the same time as
numerology, and indeed connected with the concerns for occult divination in a
universe of numerological correspondences, also made substantive advances in
number theory. This shows that there was a combination of two processes; their
overlap in the case of Nicomachus led to some mathematical discovery, whereas
in other parts of the Greek Cabalistic world and in the correlative cosmologies of
China, the result was primarily occultist classification.
- There are processes of conceptual development within mythology which I will
make no attempt to deal with here. Lévi-Strauss’s structuralism emphasizes inter-
actions across the border between humans and animals. These themes are char-
acteristic of relatively unstratified, kinship-structured tribal and band societies,
in which totemic animals are emblems of group membership. The mythologies of
high gods, as in the Vedic and Greek pantheons, are typical of politically organized
societies with ruling kings. Here the fragmentary and episodic narratives of tribal
myth give way to longer coherent narratives stressing the psychological motiva-
tions of their characters, implying the working of professionalized entertainers,
whose minds are made sophisticated by the frontstage Goffmanian settings on
which they perform (Schneider, 1993: 83–113). Thus a degree of abstraction
and reflexivity emerges already within the sequence of mythologies, although we
know little about what kinds of networks among mythology specialists were re-
sponsible.
- The notorious burning of the books which took place just before the founding of
the Han dynasty is an extreme example of external political forces intruding to
deny the autonomy of the intellectual attention space. It is no surprise that Han
intellectuals responded by moving in a particularistic direction.
- As I noted in Chapter 10, note 5, the use of the modern term “science” is
anachronistic. But all abstract terms which we use for analyzing history are to
some degree anachronistic. The point is to be clear on what we are talking about.
The present discussion makes the relevant distinctions.
- That is not so say that developments in scientific theories never change the level
of abstraction. Most Kuhnian paradigm shifts (Ptolemaic to Copernican astron-
omy, phlogiston to oxygen chemistry) stay at the same level of abstraction; but
some new theories shift to higher abstract levels and occasionally introduce re-
flexivity (Maxwell’s non-representational electromagnetic equations, Einsteinian
relativity, Heisenberg quantum mechanics). This kind of shift occurs primarily
when scientific theories are based on higher mathematics, a field which has its own
abstraction-reflexivity sequence.
- This is one of the characteristics of occultism: once formulated, it remains fixed at
Notes to Pages 796–807^ •^1027
