Sunday, July 13, 2008

The Physiognomy of Dream by Bogus Jorge

We wanted to introduce this Blog by submitting a review of Jorge's 2003 publication The Physiognomy of Dream by Clementina Lanzillotta which appeared in Gnosis vol 279 September 2003.

The review follows:


Some of our most fascinating speculations concerning the true origin of those , Mesopotamian manuscripts known collectively as the Book of Nanr or The Book of All Books –recently discovered at Aarrwaaza d’Ishtar in Al Hillah – have come to us from a young Argentine metacosmogonist Bogus Jorge. Metacosmogony, a new branch of metaphysics that in Jorge’s words “was thrust upon us by revelations in The Book of Nanr,” studies the humanly perceivable world as an independent subset of the natural universe. In Jorge’s words Metacosmogony is “…simply the science of inner space.”

In his ground breaking publication The Physiognomy of Dream, (Grove Press, Inc. New York, 2003) Jorge weaves an enticing historical model where these Mesopotamian manuscripts are argued to be the original and authentic first book of the Pentateuch. Jorge points to the unlikelihood that the Sumerian proto-literate culture from whose western branches the tribe of Israel descends would wait some 1500 years for Moses before committing their sacred knowledge to script. In fact, according to Jorge, much of the Sumerian creation myth comes from the Assyrian versions found in Assurbanipal's library at Nineveh, which predate Moses considerably.

It has not uncommon to find consensus among scholars to the fact that Moses is most likely not the author of all five books of the Pentateuch. Jorge goes a step further by suggesting that Moses actually replaced the original manuscript with a more suitable version.

It follows then that Moses is in fact the true author of Genesis. However, according to Jorge it is Genesis that is not the authentic first book of the Pentateuch. In an eloquent defence of his hypothesis he concludes that the original first book of the Pentateuch, whose winding passages the Assyrians call The History of Mind was in fact The Book of Nanr, The Book of All Books.

Jorge considers these Mesopotamian manuscripts to be the only surviving testimony of a time before humankind's digression into its current mental stupor which, borrowing from Percy Shelly he describes as “ the veil that those who live call life”. In The Physiognomy of Dream Jorge relates the experience of his own awareness lifting up from the pages of the scriptures to see the world anew. He writes:

I became aware of the great dream and my role in its projection. This is why Moses, in transcribing the world's earthly laws was bound absolutely to destroy the Book of Nanr. Moses returned his people to the dream. In the dream one is immediately convinced of the ephemeral mutually dependant nature of existence. Each dreamer willingly subjecting himself, as we subject ourselves today, to an authoritarian order whose unnatural laws describe and maintain the complex architecture of our delusion. So thoroughly attractive is this illusionary system that any one of the entrapped minds will obediently dream its own cage and sit in it. Even if that troubled existence should no longer provide amusement or has itself become painful, the mind will not awaken. Tricked by the seductive image of materiality and mutual substantiation, the dreamer- rather than simply opting out of the conspiracy and returning to his native logos as isolated infinity-, will make application through appropriate interceding officiates to ask others, courteously and with great respect for protocol, to stop dreaming him.

The Physiognomy of Dream leads us backwards through the history of mind in search of the intersection that split it from the world. We begin in the smouldering forges of the Iron Age where we find the human imagination imprisoned in dark caves and immobilized by chain and shackle before the wall of shadows. We are then ushered to the fire and shown the low wall and the men who carry the articles done in stone and wood used to cast the shadows. It is here where Jorge’s history of mind ends. Now captivated by the crafting of lenses and the enthrallment of light, the mind abandons its venture along the elevated roadway and remains forever in this Cartesian refuge, frozen before its own reflection.

From here we venture backwards to the dawn of civilisation, which Jorge considers to be the very threshold of our slumber. The lands of Sumer and Akkad sat on the rich delta between the Tigris and the Euphrates butted one against the other in a fierce dualism that went back to their very beginnings. The Akkadians were barbaric and violent, the Sumerians peaceful and imaginative. As the Sumerians emerged from the Neolithic stage of culture their advancement seems to have accelerated to a point of rare excellence in all matters of art and science. The Akkadians on the other hand grew only in might and envy. Prophecy had foreseen the total destruction of Sumer at the hands of the Akkadians in a massacre of unprecedented proportions. On the morning of that terrible campaign, when iron tyrants advanced as rolling thunder, the entire land of Sumer, its forked towers and layered courtyards, its immense walkways and grazing pastures, the endless corridors of its subterranean libraries, its markets and spherical domiciles were all found vacant. The Sumerians had awakened.

In its conclusion The Physiognomy of Dream translates direct passages from Nanr, in which a plan is given for the construction of a Camera Obscura, within whose boundaries minds can be dampened and absorbed. The light-tight box captured and restrained the vital energies of all who would freely venture through its tiny portal. This chamber of feigned death was a prison game designed to amuse its creators, sated with omnipotence and eternity. Sumerians created it and were the first to travel to its confined and windless space but Jorge does not believe that we are their descendants. We then, are the descendants of the Akkadians, or of a single Akkadian, whose mind, slowed by the vinegars of deceit and envy, drunk in the sumptuous gas, inhaled the poisonous vapours of mercury and rose as sticky dew adhering instantly and forever to the shiny copper plate.

Jorge does not believe we were meant to find Nanr but having done so we possess a map of the exit, an escape ladder leading us from sleep. Some 2,500 years after Plato wrote his Republic, we may at long last continue up the elevated roadway beyond the low table and shower in the light of day.

Clementina Lanzillotta is assistant professor in epistemological relativism at L'università di Taranto in Ontario.

No comments: