Moral Evolution of Coscivian Spiritual Civilisation
 | |
| Author | D.B. Aktagardin |
|---|---|
| Country |  Kiravian Union |
| Language | Kiravic Coscivian |
| Subject | Prehistoric Kiravian religion |
| Genre | Dark philology |
Publication date | 1939 |
| Pages | 420 |
[The] Moral Evolution of Coscivian Spiritual Civilisation (Kiravic: Intærix Setraréstor Koskix Xistuakansektarsk) is a book on the topic of prehistoric Kiravian religion, published in 1939 AD by Kiravian dark philologist D.B. Aktagardin, a fellow at the Shrouded Orb University in Aısenśinar, Hiterna. The book presents a comprehensive theory of the dark-historical and deep-historical origins of major elements of Coscivian morality, religious life, and broader culture, arranged in a linear, progressive historical narrative and contextualised by archæology and natural history.
After several rounds of revisions to satisfy political censors, Moral Evolution of Coscivian Spiritual Civilisation became an overnight blockbuster by the standards of academic publishing, and was widely circulated among scholars in both Kiravias and the Coscivian diaspora. Aktagardin's became - and remains - the most widely understood and most widely taught theory of prehistoric Kiravian religion, less on account of its factual validity than on account of being the first theory of its kind on the scene, its satisfying logical propositions, a dearth of rival theories, and the quality of Aktagardin's writing.
Background
Moral Evolution of Coscivian Spiritual Civilisation was researched[1] during the closing years of the Kiravian Civil War and written and edited during the first five years of the Kiravian Union. This was an era when competing visions of Coscivian modernism clashed not just in the cafés and lecture halls, but also on the battlefield, and when the strengthening cultural hegemony of the Occident and raised new interest in the codifying the defining themes of Coscivian culture and legitimising them through narratives more in the vein of ascendant Occidental science than neoclassical Coscivian thought and the liquid longue durée. Its author, D.B. Aktagardin, had by accident of space and time been educated with little exposure to the Marxian theoretical frameworks proliferating through Kiravian academia.
General Outline
The moral evolution of Coscivian spiritual civilisation is periodised thus:
Uroternalôstum ("Primordial Soup") - A term of Aktagardin's own coinage, this encompasses those cognitive and basal spiritual experiences presumed to be shared by all human populations at the inception of behavioural modernity with the Murdla Culture, on to those that the ancestors of the first Kiravians would have held in common with other Archæo-Cronan and Archæo-North Levantine peoples such as the Packers. In Aktagardin's estimation, ancestor worship is the most important surviving feature of Coscivian religiosity dating from this period.
Seleno-Oceanolatrous Age - Abandonment of supplicatory Archæo-Cronite sacrificial nature worship (precursors to M’acunism and Arzalism) and/or Archæo-Levantine supplicatory polytheism (or whatever preceded these) in favour of unconditional Moon-reverence and equally unconditional Ocean-fearing.
Lunar Monotheistic Age - Selenolatrous and Oceanolatrous traditions fissure due to some unknowable diluvian catastrophe and/or mass psychic trauma, precipitating a matter-antimatter-like zero-sum violent collision of opposing worldviews. Selenolatry emerges as the "winner" of this struggle, so to speak, and goes on to evolve into archæic Sarostivism, whereas oceanolatry is minoritised and gradually marginalised, devolving into what is now called Paopatra.
Moral Foundations Age - The era of the first Emperors and the Four Rites and Four Precepts, which begin the coalescence of Coscivian civilisation proper and establish its basic moral norms, such as the enforcement of monogamy and the abandonment of previously widespread practices such as ritual warfare, infanticide, and uxoricide.
Shaftonic Age - The remarkably rapid emergence of Shaftonism as the dominant philosophical framework in Coscivian society, introducing advanced notions of virtue, and abstract deontology.
Denominational Age - Now more commonly known as the “Dozen Schools of Thought Era", which saw the consolidation of formal, institutionalised religio-philosophical “schools” and traditions. Palæo-Sarostivism turns into Sarostivism proper and its sibling religions, such as Komarism. The Proto-Transkiravians' Wàzist understanding of the Divine throuples with Shaftonist moral philosophy and the practices of Lunar spirituality to become Iduanism, and so forth. Aktagardin also advances a theory about the roots of Rotarionism in the universist worldview of the Proto-Intheric river-basin horticulturalists that most dark philologists now find unconvincing.
Christian Age - Also the Abrahamic Age in later editions to account for the similar processes involved in the spread of Islam. Gradual exit from moral parochialism and moral compartmentalism towards universalism and moral absolutism. Christian egalitarianism also enters the equation, with lasting effects on Coscivian social organisation and political development.
Stages of Moral-Spiritual Development
Aktagardin lays out a stagewise model of the evolution of Coscivian religion. Comparisons between the text of the original 1930s-1940s print runs and later editions based on the author's unpublished manuscripts and working material show that in the originally published versions Aktagardin had revised his staging system to tie the stages more closely to archæological modes of production and bring his theory more into line with the orthodoxy of Marxist anthropology being enforced at the time.
Moon & Ocean Age
Tenatively dated to the Middle Palæolithic, Aktagardin posits that a "Moon-Ocean Faith" ( Saro-yu-páskalirsa ) was either carried to Kirav by the founder populations or developed among them soon after their arrival. He asserts that the preöccupation with these two cosmic forces was probably rooted in the ice-bridge peoples' lifestyle as marine mammal hunters, living precariously atop the ocean and using the Moon and stars for timekeeping and navigation.
The quintessential and distinguishing feature of the Moon-Ocean Faith Unconditional moon-worship/ocean-fear instead of transactional/totemic nature-worship or polytheism. The Ice Age Kiravian does not presume to bargain with the Moon or the Ocean, nor to communicate with them or gain their favour. The foundation of their worldview is the absoluteness of the of the chaötic, all-consuming ocean that will inevitably reclaim them, and of the orderly, cyclical rhythms of the Moon and Cosmos that will inevitably continue long after them. A "death and taxes" outlook on life, but for cavemen. Perchance.
Embracing Moon-worship instead of Sun-worship is held to be the “original act of Coscivian contrarianism” that set these prehistoric hunters and their descendants down a civilisational path of doing weird shit just to be different.
Lunar Monotheïstic Age
Aktagardin locates the transition from the Moon-Ocean Faith to Exclusive Moon-Worship between the Last Glacial Retreat at the earliest or as the Mesolithic at the latest, and argues that the Lunar Monotheism developing therefrom would represent the most advanced expression of spiritual civilisation through the Neolithic Revolution.
For reasons unknown and in all likelihood unknowable, the Moon-and-Ocean dyad broke down at some point after the Ice Age, and Kiravians became either Moon-worshippers or Ocean-fearers. Aktagardin notes that while vestigial influences of Ocean spirituality survive into modern times - most recognisably in paopatra but more subtly elsewhere - it is the legacy of Moon spirituality that pervades and predominates Coscivian culture as far back as conventional history and deep history can see. Therefore, he argues, that these once complementary spiritual paths did not merely diverge but became mutually exclusive and mutually intolerant, unable to coëxist even in the autarkic, low-density band society of the time. Although he does not propose a definitive mechanism by which Moon Worship displaced Ocean-Fearing, he identifies eliminationist violent confrontation between the two proto-religions as by far the most likely, given that Kiravites living before the Lawful Commonwealth are known to have had a very limited repertoire of conflict-resolution strategies not involving blunt-force trauma.
Aktagardin speculates that different interpretations of the retreat of the Central Kiravian Glacier - the most significant natural occurrence of this time period - may have played a role. Ocean-fearers had long contrasted the life-giving ocean with the life-negating Glacier and credited the ocean with keeping the Glacier at bay, observing that glacial melt flows into the ocean. Moon-worshippers had long credited the Moon with bringing their ancestors over the pack ice and trusted that the Moon would once again protect them from the malign gelid force of the Glacier if they migrated inland. Perchance. A more strictly Marxian hypothesis attributing the divergence to the adoption of rudimentary horticulture without identifying a clear causal connexion was added when the book was resubmitted to the censorship board, and has been explored by later authors.
Regardless of how or why the Moon-Ocean schism happened, it resulted in a divergence of worldviews between the monistic, fatalistic ocean death-cult and the more fideistic and transcendental lunar religion, which will eventually come to resemble other world monotheïstic faiths in key respects. Ocean spirituality is described as emphasising the precarity of life in an environment of unpredictable and catastrophic change, and explores the contradiction between the irrepressible human will to survive and the inevitability of being swallowed back up by the all-consuming Ocean. The Ocean creates and nurtures all life and also destroys and devours all life. This fosters an attitude of ecstatic resignation and high-octane enthusiasm toward change, death, and suffering, and places a high spiritual value on passion, especially in its spontaneous extremes of euphoria, terror, abandon, and what very serious real psychoanalysts call "LFG energy". Moon spirituality, in contrast, emphasises a pervasive cosmic order and a body of truths hidden above and beyond immediate human perception but partially discoverable through a reverent and contemplative experience of reality. This engenders an attitude toward change comparable to what is found in Taoism or Stoïcism, and accordingly Saropatra values calm, moderation, peace, and neutrality. Ocean spirituality has more in common with shamanistic and oracular traditions, whereas Moon spirituality has more in common with monastic, ascetic, and mystical traditions. Ocean-fearers paid great attention to doomsayers, hysterics, and persons plagued by nightmares, and their chief form of communal religious experience came in the form of group ecstacies triggered by losses of life to storms and floods. Moon-worshippers, on the other hand found deeper meaning in different forms of trance states, meditation, vision quests, and cryptic symbolism in their dreams. Lunar group religious experience was more likely to centre on moonlit nocturnal sessions of rhythmic chanting and perhaps the sharing of herbalistic concoctions to induce depersonalisation and derealisation.
The question of "How does this relate to the endemic and ritualistic interband violence that characterised pre-Emperor Kirav?" was mentioned as question to be explored in a companion volume. The companion volume in question was not published during Aktagardin's lifetime and was presumed lost until 1988 AD, when fragmentary drafts of the author's monograph were uncovered in the library of the Coscivian Culture University.
Age of Blood and Moral Degeneration
Sacrifice was reïntroduced to Kiravian society during the Age of Blood, likely in connexion with the heightened frequency of tribal warfare and a concomitant re-centring of ancestor worship. Sacrifices of captured warriors, of sterile women, and of a tribe's own children, and the associated distribution of sanguine libations derived from this activity were believed to physically strengthen the tribe and spiritually strengthen the Ancestors, who would then be able to provide their living descendants with greater courage and acuity in combat and providential interventions, such as omens warning of oncoming attacks by the enemy. Infanticide and uxoricide for other reasons also became extremely frequent.
Blood sacrifice and the associated vampirism were banned by the Emperors under the Four Precepts. Utilitarian analyses posit that this prohibition was made firstly to maintain peace within the Lawful Commonwealth by discouraging the Lawful tribes from kidnapping victims from neighbouring Lawful tribes, and secondly to stem strain on the Commonwealth's defencive obligation by tempering the Lawful tribes' appetite for opportunistic offencive warfare against Lawless tribes in search of captives for sacrifice. Orthodox deep historians are satisfied with the explanation that Emperor Ĥ thought vampirism was nasty. To Aktagardin, this prohibition and related ones imposed by the Emperors marked a reversal from the moral degeneration of the Age of Blood, and allowed Coscivian civilisation to emerge during the consequent Moral Foundations Age.
Moral Foundations Age
The next stage of moral evolution took place in early agricultural Kirav, where the mode of production was characterised by shifting cultivation of potato and other such crops by small, autarkic tribal segments.
Warfare in the sense of sustained (rather than episodic) intergroup violence and infectious disease become major facts of life. As is known from the Great Law Chant and other ancient sources, tribal warfare eventually became constant, endemic, and increasingly deadly, until the Emperors arrived to lay down the Law.
The idea of lives (Coscivian lives, at least) having intrinsic value (rather than having value only in relation to kith and kin) coalesces during this era, as do well-defined notions of law, honour, respect, and property. Social control is still exclusively shame-based, and moral-legal systems are still exclusively about maintaining social peace and mitigating inter-group conflict.
These ideas were likely encoded in the Rock Emperor religion of the megalithic, which coexisted and and was combined with lunar monotheism.
Shaftonic Age
Shafto introduces virtue, introspection, and a generalised concept of duty. Guilt enters the equation of social control. Notions of “higher good”, “greater good”, and (in political thought) “public good” crystallise. Along with hierarchies of goods, relational and role-based sets of duties become more formally defined as people encounter more complex moral dilemmas in an increasingly sophisticated society.
The point is, to whomever yet listens, that guilt - for lack of a better word - is good.
Guilt is right.
Guilt works.
Guilt clarifies, cuts through, and captures the essence of Man's error and weakness, and guilt, better than any other emotion, edifies Man's spirit.
Guilt, in all of its forms -- guilt for crime, for dishonour, for [redacted], for vice -- has marked the upward surge of mankind.
And guilt - mark my words - will not only save the Thinking Man from himself, but also save this Empire from the barbarism that dwells in even the highest and most noble lineages.— Shafto, Analects of Shafto the Wise
Although moral compartmentalism is not itself a part of Shaftonist thought, the role-based and relational conception of moral duties in Shaftonism nonetheless opens the door for it.
Denominational Age
Now more commonly called the “Dozen Schools of Thought” stage, this involved the consolidation of formal, institutionalised religio-philosophical “schools” and traditions. Palæo-Sarostivism, for example, turned into Sarostivism proper and its wee siblings. Wàzist understanding of the divine + Shaftonist moral philosophy + Moon spirituality become Iduanism. Universism becomes Ruricanism, I think.
Quoth the fella, Shaftonism provides the theoretical framework for this ecosystem to be possible by establishing a common set of values and moral-spiritual ends towards which different schools can be interpreted as different but well-intentioned *means. Shafto tells the People what Right is, the denominations help them get to it. Development of organised religion in the sense of religiō ( “binding back”) and religions as ways and disciplines of living. At the same time, weakening imperial authority and re-localisation of the economy encourage the conflation and consolidation of various dispersed and intermixed religious traditions into codified, ritualised denominations shared among a social group.
Moral compartmentalism and cultural relativism peaked during this time. Denominational Age moral relativism wasn’t the live-and-let-live moral relativism of the modern Occident, but rather a stratified and ethnocentric relativism that held other peoples and adherents of other schools to lower standards on the basis of collective ignorance, degradation, or just endemic poor character racism.
Christian Age
Noawadays often called the Abrahamic Age to include the similar dynamics involved in the spread of Islam among Coscivian peoples. This stage involved a gradual, still incomplete exit from moral parochialism and moral compartmentalism towards universalism and absolutism. Christian egalitarianism also enters the equation, with important political consequences.
Reception and Evaluation
Occidental scholars regard the claims made in the book as "intriguing but unfalsifiable".
Moral Evolution of Coscivian Spiritual Civilisation is notable for being the first significant dark philological work written in Kiravic rather than in High Coscivian, and indeed the only such work until the 21st century AD.
Derivative Works
The entire discipline of Dark Philology was banned in 1944 as unscientific and counterrevolutionary. After the Swimming Pool Coup and consequent Purge ousted the orthodox Marxist-Devinist faction of the Socialist Party and brought the Kirosocialists to power, the discipline remained formally suppressed, but those dark philologists who were still employed on the Mainland now had more flexibility to ply their craft without running afoul of the state ideology. Party theorists and propagandists took interest in Moral Evolution of Coscivian Spiritual Civilisation and commissioned a Moral Evolution of Coscivian Spiritual Civilisation - Revised Edition which featured an additional and final stage, the Socialist Stage, presenting the Kirosocialist order as the culmination of thousands of years of Kiravian social progress. Although presented as co-authored by Aktagardin and Party apparatchik M.K. Vanillin, the Revised Edition was almost certainly produced without any input from Aktagardin, who was by then painfully debilitated by poliomyelitis.
Notes
- ↑ If one can call it that.