They Were Magicians

From "Raven's Appearance: The Language of Prophecy" by Peter Kingsely


"There are many, many things that I learn and have learned from these Greeks who lived two and a half thousand years ago. But the key, the one most important thing, that I have learned from them is that there are two ways of talking—just as there are two different ways of perceiving. There is the profane way of talking, which is to talk about things. And if you care to notice, you will see that in the modern Western world we always talk about something. There is the word; then there is the point of reference for the word, which is always separate from the word itself. And this, of course, is the basis for nearly all modern linguistics.

But according to people such as Parmenides there is another way of talking. This other way is that instead of talking about, you talk from. If you sense oneness you talk from oneness; and that oneness is communicated through the magic of the word in a way that our minds may find incomprehensible but that, even so, fascinates and endlessly obsesses them. For these people were magicians. The founders of logic and science in the West were sorcerers. They knew what they were doing even if, now, no one knows what they did."

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