期刊名称:Eye of the Heart : A Journal of Traditional Wisdom
印刷版ISSN:1835-4416
出版年度:2009
卷号:2009
期号:3
出版社:La Trobe University
摘要:In certain Neoplatonic philosophers, such as Proclus, Damascius, and
Olympiodorus, we find a mode of mythological interpretation we may
term “theological.” This article attempts a “theological” interpretation
of the Egyptian Book of the Celestial Cow, a text inscribed in five royal
tombs of the New Kingdom. Although the concept of the “theological”
hermeneutic comes from Neoplatonic thought, the point of this reading
is not to impose Greek philosophical concepts upon the text, but to
borrow Neoplatonic textual strategies the aim of which is to deploy the
concepts immanent to a particular body of myth to illuminate myth’s
specifically theological dimension, that is, the contribution its iconic
content and formal narrative structure make to that culture’s picture of
the dispositions of the Gods in a pantheon and the divine activities
constitutive of the cosmos. The key issues arising in this reading concern
the distance between Re and humanity; the relationship between Re
and Nūn as that between the demiurgic principle and the preconditions
of its emergence; the “Eye of Re” as an hypostatized site of divine
agency occupied successively by Hathor and Sekhmet in the myth; and
the meaning of the death or destruction of mortals in the myth.