Palaeolithic Writing.

Mythology tells us that the Gods from several different culture have a divinity said to have given writing to mankind, such as Sumeria (Mesopotamia), Egypt, China, India, Greece, Germany and Scandinavia, and Ireland (with their respective Gods: Nisabu, Thoth, Fuxi, Sarasvati, Hermes, Odin and Ogma). It is significant that most of these gods are archetypal divinities known as culture heroes or culture bearers whose contributions to humankind have brought other important benefits to society. For example, in ancient Egypt, the invention of writing is attributed to the god Thoth, who was not only the scribe and historian of the gods but also kept the calendar and invented art and science. In some Egyptian myths, Thoth is also portrayed as the creator of speech and possessing the power to transform speech into material objects. This ties in closely with the Egyptian belief that in order for a person to achieve immortality his or her name must be spoken or inscribed somewhere forever. (1)

Extract: 'The value of writing represented by these gods may be understood within the context of other values they embody. As Eliade points out, in archaic cultures each of these acts derives its value from its association with a divine originator of the act. Thus, the act of writing itself becomes a form of participation in the sacred, a ritual act mimicking an originating original act. If what is associated with the divine has special value in a culture, writing must have had a special value and if the cultural value precedes the projection upon a god, then the god it is projected upon must bear some characteristics that the culture associates with writing.

In several cultures, gods of writing were also gods of wisdom and knowledge. On one level, the connection between writing and wisdom is obvious, writing being the means by which the wisdom of a culture was stored and transmitted., However, there is more to the link between writing and wisdom than this obvious reason. Perhaps the most dramatic story of the possession of wisdom among these gods is Odin�s, who in the R�natal, a famous passage in the H�vam�l, narrates the story himself. In his desire for wisdom, he hung upside down for nine nights on the World Tree, known as Yggdrasil (Ygg an epithet for Odin and drasil horse: Odin�s horse), above the Well of Mirmir located in the roots of the three. For nine nights he hung there with no food or water, dying from a wound he inflicted on himself with his spear. At last, �I peered downward / I grasped the runes, / screeching I grasped them; / I fell back from there.� He then �learned nine mighty songs� and was brought back to life with renewed health and fertility (Turville-Petre 49-50). The R�natal ends with the poet referring to Odin�s having written his own story.

This interpretation of the relationship between writing and wisdom appears to find support in the story of how Fuxi created the eight trigrams. Fuxi is described as observing �images in the skies,� �patterns on the ground,� and �markings of birds and beasts and the favorable lie of the land,� all this in addition to himself, his own body. �And so it was,� the story goes, �that he created the Eight Trigrams in order to communicate with the virtue of divine intelligence and to classify the phenomena of all living things�. The trigrams were not images of the things themselves but signs that provided a connection to the divine source of knowledge of things. The trigrams provided a source of communication with the divine that became the basis for Chinese divination as well as mathematics and medicine (�Fuxi,� About). Because writing is said to be derived from these trigrams, it also seems to participate in this link to divine wisdom'. (5)

Writing and Divination: