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_THE AGENDA OF THE MILESIAN SCHOOL:
THE POST-CATASTROPHIC PARADIGM SHIFT IN ANCIENT GREECE_

_William Mullen_

_Bard College, Annandal-onHudson, New York 12505, USA_
_e-mail: mullen at bard.edu_

Topics held in common by the first three pre-Socratic philosophers
from Miletos in the Sixth Century B.C.E., Thales, Anaximander, and
Anaximenes, and by Xenophanes from neighbouring Colophon, taken
together may be viewed as constituting the agenda of a "Milesian
School". The agenda included a survey of the known _kosmos _(the
orderly arrangement of the inhabited world surrounded by regularly
moving heavenly bodies); redefinitions of divinity; and theories of
the natural processes, constantly in operation, by which both _kosmos
_and divinity are to be understood. It also included explanations of
phenomena most men deemed terrifying: thunder, lightning, earthquakes,
eclipses, and periodic destruction of the _kosmos _itself. It set
about to explain these phenomena in terms of the same elemental
processes (transformations of water, rarefaction and condensation of
air, separating out of fire, air,_ _water and earth, periodic
reabsorption of these elements into a state of dynamic equilibrium) as
it invoked to explain the orderly arrangement of the earth and the
heavenly bodies. In so doing, it implied the baselessness of the
traditional Olympian religion which attributed lightning and
earthquakes to whims of Zeus and Poseidon and world-destructions to
battles of the sky-gods. The ultimate Milesian agenda may therefore
have been to liberate people from paralysing fear of the immediate
recurrence of celestial disturbances in the recent past. By insisting
that world-destructions occurred only in vast cycles of time (such as
a "great year" whose winter solstice was Deluge and summer solstice
Conflagration) the Milesian School was schematically distorting
memories of recent disturbances, and its activity may be seen as part
of a general pattern of oblivion and psychological distancing common
to all cultures after the end of the Bronze Age catastrophes. But by
insisting that these world-destructions occurred only as the result of
unalterable elemental processes, it was also erecting a
proto-scientific bulwark against apocalyptic thinking and behavior.
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WILLIAM MULLEN is Professor of Classical Studies at Bard College, and
is the author of _Choreia: Pindar and Dance_. In the 1970's he was an
editor of _Pensee_ and published several catastrophist papers there,
including "A Reading of the Pyramid Texts" and "The Mesoamerican
Record". In 1995 he presented "Worlds in Collision after Heinsohn" at
the New York Velikovsky Centennial. He is now writing a book on
_Catastrophism and the 'Axial Age'_ (simultaneous breakthroughs in
cultures from Greece to China).
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Presented at the SIS Conference: [1]Natural Catastrophes during Bronze
Age Civilisations.

References

1. file://localhost/www/sat/cambconf.htm