na; when the genus loci (the indwelling spirit or voice of things and places) was alive and well.
In early Sanskrit, Greek and Teutonic, words for “sky” were used also to mean “God.” This suggests that at one time the human mind could not conceive of these two phenomena as being separate. The twilight-torn horizon was not a metaphor for the heavenly realm, but was it. There was something in the felt presence of natural forces that inspired early humans to experience them as divine entities.
Somewhere along the way, the quality of sky became divorced from its divine ancestry, and the two entities became separate in the human mind with different names to mark their divergence. A similar fate haunted the classical gods and goddesses, which “faded so slowly into the thin air of abstract thought that the process was hardly perceived.” Chance was once a Roman deity (Sors) which developed into a purely abstract idea. The Roman goddesses called Fata (Fates) turned eventually into our idea of destiny.
Process words developed in a parallel fashion to describe internal states. The word “delirious” is derived from a Latin verb that originally meant “to go out of the furrow” or “to plow in crooked lines.” In modern English we instead move askew inwardly in what is now defined as “an acutely disturbed state of mind.” Words such as this (and there are nearly infinite examples) are evidence that “all knowledge which has been conveyed by means of speech to the reason has traveled in metaphors taken from man’s own activities and from the solid things which he handles.”
As those processes which birthed a need for words to define them transformed into different technologies (from hunting and gathering, to agriculture, to industry, to advanced technology, etc.) the words once rooted in the soil of direct physical experience came to describe less concrete phenomena: states of mind, philosophies, concepts and emotions. It is as if the ground beneath us is disintegrating. The entire English language comes to acquire a weightlessness. And yet words carry the gravity of human history. Barfield maintains that language reveals the evolution of consciousness.
Entire cultures of thought can be traced along the lines of language, which, like consciousness “arises from an interpenetration of thinking and perceiving.” It can be seen from the transformations in language that as time progresses from the earliest evidence of language to our present day vocabulary, intellectual thought (what Alan Watts calls “chatter in the skull”) begins to eclipse direct perception. And thus begins our modern neurosis.
Every modern language, with its thousands of abstract terms and its nuances of meaning association, is apparently, from beginning to end, but an unconscionable tissue of dead, or petrified, metaphors.
For a culture with amnesia such as our own (having forgotten the practices that once anchored us to a rich relationship with the earth) words may be a branch we can follow back toward its root and the beginnings of human consciousness. We might learn something there, at the animate origins of our modern mind. There might be hints of how we arrived at this place of profound disillusionment.
We can see, for example, from the things that were named and not named in different civilizations that Romans were interested in outward achievement, while Greek’s fascination lay in the interior realm of human feeling. Both civilizations used the familiar aspects of life to tread into the territory of the unknown. The Romans knew well agriculture and war. In order to express a new idea, they balanced on these foundations as they attempted to reach into the vaporous realm of abstract thought. The word “spoil,” for example, is a Latin term which at one time meant only to “strip a conquered foe of his arms.” As the Roman consciousness grew and changed, the singular definition grew to accommodate minds which had enough distance in their relationship to the land to extrapolate the purely physical into the mental, emotional and even metaphysical. This is how humans began “realizi