The Vocabulary of Myth, Part XXXVII

Empedocles’ On Nature…

His “Four Roots”…

Their Immutability and the Influence of Parmenides…

Love and Strife…

And Anaximander’s Vortex…

 

In his other great poem, On Nature, Empedocles begins his cosmogony where all of his predecessors, going back to Anaximander and Hesiod, also began:

Hear first the four roots of all things:  shining Zeus, life-bearing Hera, Aidoneus, and Nestis, who with her tears waters the mortal spring.

Empedocles’ “four roots” are the elements (fire, air, earth, and water), conventionally allegorized under the names of the gods or numens of nature.  But the things that arise from these “roots” only appear to “come into being”:

When these [the elements] have been mingled in the form of a man, or some kind of wild animal or plant or bird, men call this “coming into being”; and when they separate men call it “evil destiny”…

Fools!  They have no far-reaching thoughts who can imagine that what was not before can come into being, or that anything can perish and be utterly destroyed.

…there is no real coming into being of any mortal creature, nor any end in wretched death, but only mingling and separation of what has been mingled, and “coming into being” is merely a name given to them by men.

Here, of course, the influence of Parmenides is obvious.  As Parmenides had demonstrated, generation, movement, and change are sensory illusions, which reason recognizes are impossibilities, or at best, the constructs of language.  The only things that truly exist (i.e., immutably and indestructibly) are the elements:

These alone are; but running through one another they become men and the tribes of other animals—at one time coming together in a single order through Love, at another time each being borne apart through the hostility of Strife…Thus insofar as they have learned to grow into one from many and, when one grows apart, to become many again, to this extent they come into being and have no lasting life; but insofar as they never cease changing places continually, they remain inviolate throughout the cycle.

 

Love and Strife, then, are the primordial forces by which the mixture and separation of the elements engender, and eventually dissolve, the mortal phenomena of the world-process.  Unlike the elements, which are corporeal, Love and Strife are quasi-divine spirits, universally and invisibly suffused throughout existent things:

…evenly balanced in every direction…equal in length and breadth.  Observe [Love] with your mind; do not sit with dazed eyes.  She it is who is known as inborn in mortal limbs…, [men] calling her Joy and Aphrodite.  No mortal man has perceived her as she circles among them…

Love is the cosmic principle of cohesion that invisibly unites the disparate elements, as the human soul is invisibly diffused throughout and unites the disparate members of the body.  She is akin, then, to what Plato later called the “World-Soul”.  Strife is the equally invisible and suffusive force that disrupts and disunites, separating what Love has conjoined and dispatching each element to its like, earth to earth, fire to fire.  In his denial of sense and generation, Parmenides had imagined the unifying principle as wholly malevolent:  “the beginner of all hateful birth and begetting, sending the female to mix with the male and the male in turn with the female”.  But unlike both Parmenides and Anaximander (in whose to apeiron the attraction between the elemental opposites is conceived as a kind of mutual aggression or war), Empedocles, as we’ll see, conceives Love as a wholly benignant, indeed, harmonious force.

 

Like the elements, Love and Strife are eternal:

For as they were before, so also will they be; nor ever shall endless time be emptied of these two.

The world-process is in fact an eternally alternating cycle—whose paradigm, not surprisingly, is the cycle of human life and death–in which first one, and then the other force, achieves mastery:

This is manifest in the mass of mortal limbs.  At one time all the limbs that are the body’s lot come together into one through Love, in the prime of flourishing life; at another, sundered by cruel Strife, each wanders apart…

 

In most of the other fragments that survive, Empedocles describes the alternating reigns of Love and Strife  by analogy to the flow of liquids in a vortex, recalling Anaximander once again:

When Strife had reached the lowest depth of the vortex, and Love was in the midst of the eddy, then all things came together in it to be one…from this side and that.  And as they came together, Strife began to move to the furthest limit.

As Love flows in to the centre of the vortex, She banishes Strife to the outside, and gradually gains ascendancy.  The unmixed elements, still under the dominion of Strife, are drawn under Love’s influence into the still centre of the eddy, where they begin to cohere, until Love has occupied the whole.  But then the process reverses itself.  Strife flows back into the vortex, penetrating to the centre, and expelling Love to the periphery; under its disruptive energies, the elements unbind themselves, and the forms of mortal creatures dissolve back into their primordial components.  Under the supremacy of Strife, as Empedocles describes it in luridly anthropomorphic terms,

Single limbs wandered alone.

Many heads sprung up without necks, arms wandered unattached, without shoulders; and eyes wandered alone, bereft of foreheads.

 

At this extreme of the world process, everything in the cosmos is resolved back into its constituent elements, and the visible world-order passes away.  The same is true, however, at the opposite pole, when under the mastery of Love, there is a complete mingling of those elements which Strife had separated—a process which ends in their homogenous fusion into a single undifferentiated mass:

There is no discord or unseemly strife in its limbs.

Therein are distinguished neither the swift limbs of the sun, nor the shaggy might of earth, nor the sea; thus does it stand fast in the close covering of Harmony, a rounded sphere, rejoicing in its circular rest.

…a sphere, equal in every direction to itself.

Empedocles’ resting sphere of Love here corresponds to the motionless and invisible “One” of Parmenides, “equal in every direction to itself”, “a well-rounded sphere, evenly balanced in every direction from the middle”.   But it also recalls Anaximander’s to apeiron, the undifferentiated mass out of which, through the rotation of the vortex, the elements were subsequently separated out and the world-order was first generated.

 

For Empedocles, then, the world-order becomes manifest only at some intermediate stage in the process of combination and separation, when neither Love nor Strife are completely dominant.  Motion begins in the undifferentiated mass, and as it spins, the elements begin to separate out from the mixture, each gravitating to its own kind:

For when the whole is separated into the elements by Strife, fire is aggregated into one, and so with each of the other elements.

Earth increases its own bulk; ether increases ether.

And so the world-order with which we are familiar begins to coalesce:

…I will tell you first of the beginning—of all the things which now we see, and how they came to be manifest:  earth and billowy sea, damp air and the Titan ether, binding his circle around everything.

As in the vortex of Anaximander and his followers, the rotation of Empedocles’ mass disposes the elements concentrically by weight, the earth, being the densest, remaining in the centre, the lighter elements flying off to the periphery, and all of the individual things of sense coming into existence in their idiosyncratic combinations.