What Survives Is Not the Whole Story

What survives from the past is not necessarily a complete representation of what existed. A symbol remains, but the conversation around it is lost. A ceremony continues, while the people participating in it understand its significance differently. We inherit a form and have to ask how much of its history came with it.

I think this possibility has lived in my mind for a long time. When I encounter a tradition, I instinctively wonder what experiences, observations and explanations might have gathered around it before the account I now know.

The question before the search

My curiosity about bar mitzvah is one example. I wondered whether coming-of-age traditions could ever preserve memories of bodily changes more striking than the familiar story of growing older. The question came first. It was already living in my mind before I knew what I might find.

Following that question brought me to 5-alpha-reductase deficiency, a variation in sex development affecting people with XY chromosomes. Reduced production of dihydrotestosterone can affect external genital development before birth. At puberty, increasing testosterone can bring substantial masculinisation, including a deeper voice and changes in the external genitalia.^[1]

I found that extraordinary. Here was a documented biological phenomenon that expanded what I knew was possible in human development. It gave me new questions about how different communities might understand bodies, maturity and change.

It did not give me a history of bar mitzvah. Jewish accounts describe bar mitzvah in terms of religious responsibility and legal status, with the public ceremony developing over time. The status does not depend on holding a celebration. The sources I have consulted provide no basis for connecting its origin to 5-alpha-reductase deficiency.^[2]

Both parts of that experience matter to me: the curiosity was fruitful, and the proposed historical connection was not established. A search can reveal something remarkable without confirming the idea that sent me looking.

A resemblance that opens a door

I recognise a similar movement when I look at ancient winged discs. An Egyptian stela in the British Museum places a winged sun disc above a scene, with pendant cobras. A Neo-Assyrian cylinder seal depicts a winged disc containing a god’s torso. I notice a visual kinship before I have worked through the objects’ different settings and meanings.^[3][4]

My imagination then asks what might have travelled, what might have changed and what might have been independently imagined. Sometimes I have even wondered about a vehicle or about technological interpretations of serpentine forms. That is part of the imaginative life of the question; the objects themselves do not establish such a history.

I want to stay with the resemblance long enough to learn from it. Which features are actually shared? Which am I overlooking? What would make transmission plausible? What would count against my first impression? The details can make the eventual question much better than the first one.

Charles Sanders Peirce’s account of abduction gives me useful language here. In his later work, abduction concerns generating explanatory hypotheses for investigation. Other stages of inquiry derive consequences and test them. Coming up with a possible explanation is a meaningful intellectual act, but it does not complete the inquiry.^[5]

Carlo Ginzburg’s work on clues adds another dimension. Small traces can disclose things that a broad overview misses. His historical method attends to details through which otherwise inaccessible lives and circumstances may become partly recoverable. That makes careful attention to what remains especially valuable.^[6]

Together these ideas help me describe a rhythm I recognise: notice, imagine, investigate, revise. A resemblance draws me in; the evidence gives the inquiry resistance and direction. I do not want to lose either the imagination or the encounter with something beyond it.

What were we trying to describe?

This is also part of what draws me towards chi, orí, the Greek daimon, the Roman genius, jinn, the Egyptian ka and dharma. I am not proposing one category into which all of them neatly fit. I want to ask what questions about personhood, presence, guidance, duty or an individual’s relationship with a larger order each tradition makes possible.

Sometimes the most useful discovery may be a difference. A word I expected to mean ‘destiny’ may concern obligation, relationship or something for which my own vocabulary has no easy equivalent. Understanding grows when I let those differences change the comparison.

Before we named it, what were we trying to describe? That question keeps returning. It reaches towards extraordinary experiences, cultural memory and the ways people make a life understandable. It also reaches inward, towards the language I use for myself.

The identity I can presently describe may be as partial as any surviving account. Writing, making and following a serious question give other parts of my experience a chance to become articulate. Creation can reveal something my familiar self-description had not yet made room for.

I do not know that every ancient fragment conceals a lost truth. I do know that a fragment invites attention. What survives is where the inquiry begins; it need not be where our curiosity ends.

Edlin