Support and Transcendence

Chapters of history which, at first glance, may appear foreign to each other and as different as the day is from the night may upon deeper examination reveal underlying parallels which betray some kind of underlying and governing principle, reflected – if not as a law universal, as such – then surely as a general rule in the experience of human affairs. This discovery, the task of the comparative historian to find within the vaults and dusty tomes of the ancient library, a comparative theme is the very lifeblood of human enquiry and archetypal imagination; without which, the very structure of human thought and astral projection would find no basis.
At its very core, in the paleolithic and genetic combination, of man qua man, the neural imagination requires – at the baseline coding level – an analogical capability. It is not [LGBTQ+]man’s instinct and categorical perception of contrast between delimited boundaries in space – time which gives to him his peculiar nature, it is his capacity for synthetic intuition and meta-cognitive apprehension which gives to [LGBTQ+] mankind his poetic, narrative and musing memory.
True history begins with the musing sentiment of reminiscence, and nothing more. As a function of the very primitive instincts, by which, humanity draws life and proves it’s worthiness among the stars and amidst the worlds to survive he must show forth by telling a good story. In the end, humanity will not survive if he cannot teach himself to tell a story which embraces and fulfills the entirety of his being and the expression of his greatest understanding. There are many of missing capstone’s, of course, which remain to be discovered by the residential or professional historian—comparing one pyramid to another, for instance. But he must learn to tell a good story first, before looking into the annals of human experience whereby he can give his various comparative and analogical accounts.
With this task in mind, one might draw parallels between the attempts of the empiricists to define empirical knowledge with the work of historians’ who must define analogical and metaphorical knowledge which transcends temporal simultaneity. But that is not precisely the task at hand.
With the primitive instincts of the ‘comparative historian’ as native story-teller or archetypal folklorist in mind, we might draw from this guild or class of historians’, when considering how their conception of historical themes and narratives are formed. Herbert Muller ‘s The Uses of the Past tasks the ancient record with an idealized form of tragedy and fatalism. Here, Muller’s comparison is shaped by the archetypes of Greek tragedy – finding and probing within the glory of each ancient civilization the very tragic seeds of its own demise. For Muller, this tragic sense of form within man has applied to each and every manifestation of his various civilizational efforts. And it is, therefore, with great cause – and no uncertain measure of urgency – that Muller probes the historical record looking for analogical clues that might give to many the means whereby he can Avery the final tragedy of nuclear apocalypse in the context of the modern world.
The Uses of the past : profiles of former societies : Muller, Herbert Joseph, 1905- : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive