Omphalic
Navel-gazer believers
I just noticed this is my two hundredth post.1 I wish I had time to write something special instead of an extended footnote to my last post:
In it, I used
geocentric in an idiosyncratic way to describe belief systems which regard a certain location as central. Maybe there’s a better preexisting term that scholars of religion already use. Or maybe someone can come up with a better neologism.
Last night I was reading about ὀμφαλοί omphaloi:
An omphalos is a religious stone artefact. In Ancient Greek, the word ὀμφᾰλός (omphalós) means "navel". Among the Ancient Greeks, it was a widespread belief that Delphi was the center of the world. […] The Latin term is umbilicus mundi, 'navel of the world'.
It occurred to me that what I had been calling geocentric could be called omphalic:
Omphalic or umbilical belief systems associate centrality to a certain spot:
the ‘Holy Land’ in Abrahamic religions
Israel in Zionism
the Jiba in the Japanese religion Tenrikyo (see my last two posts)
In “The Jewel and the Anchor”, I compared Zionist ties to Israel to
a string - a 줄 jul in Korean. Which [by coincidence] sounds sort of like jewel.
[…T]he J-string is unbreakable like a diamond - a kind of … jewel.
[…]
The J-string is more like a thick rope - and Korean jul can also refer to a rope.
The J-rope is firmly anchored in הארץ ha-aretz - the land.
That string or rope is like an umbilical cord linking Jews to the land where the “creation of the world began” according to Eliezer Schweid.
Believers in Tenrikyo would disagree with Schweid. They would say that the world instead began at the Jiba, a spot that happened to be in the yard of their religion’s founder. Every single human being has an umbilical cord2 leading to the Jiba under this roof:
The founder’s yard became the epicenter of Tenrikyo Church Headquarters, and a vast complex of buildings around it has been under construction since 1954.
I like the omphalic/umbilical terminology because it reminds me of English navel-gazing, a calque (loan translation) of Greek ὀμφαλοσκοπία omphaloskopía3:
(derogatory) Excessive focus on oneself; self-indulgent introspection.
Omphalic/umbilical believers can be navel-gazers.4
Jerusalem-born Schweid believed that his land
“faces the entrance of the spiritual world”
“is superior to other lands”
has “residents” with “superior qualities” (presumably not referring to Palestinians!)
Schweid was no crank. I’m not quoting some obscure website. Those words of his were in an English translation of his book The Land of Israel: National Home or Land of Destiny published by Associated University Presses.
He was a professor of Jewish philosophy at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He had … authority. And chutzpah.
Just like Nakayama Miki a century before him.
The founder of Tenrikyo declared a spot in her yard to be the birthplace of our species.
People take them seriously.
If I declared Hawaii - which just so happens to be where I live - to be the center of the universe, who would take me seriously?
According to my dashboard, which counts this placeholder as post number one.
I am applying my metaphor to Tenrikyo’s creation story. As far as I know, the term umbilical cord is not used in Tenrikyo, though it would fit the religion’s parental terminology.
Greek omphalo- corresponds to navel, and -skopía corresponds to gazing. s has the same Indo-European √sk-p/sp-k root for seeing as scope, skeptic (< Greek ‘thoughtful’ < ‘to view’), and introspection. This root is the root of the Sanskrit present tense verb for seeing, paś (from an earlier spaś and an even earlier speḱ-; ḱ- became k in Greek and c in Latin but ś in Sanskrit).
Incidentally navel is cognate not only to Greek omphalo- but also to Sanskrit nābhi- ‘navel’: all three are from an Indo-European root √ʔʷn-bh for ‘navel’. Sanskrit and English both have the same basic Indo-European vocabulary despite the vast gap in space and time between them.
I originally intended to write that omphalic/umbilical believers are navel-gazers, but that is not true, because many believers look to others’ navels. For instance, Christian Zionists regard Israel as the navel of the world even though they themselves are not Jewish.
How does one convince people that something that is not theirs is more important than something that is theirs?
How do navel-gazers convince others to gaze at their oh-so-special navels?
I see scams as perpetual - possibly even built into language itself. So at this point I just want to know how scams work. I know I have a zero probability of ever ending scams. Suckers like being lied to. I can’t change that.