Tag: vocabulary-of-myth

The Orphics…

The Evidence…

Their Sacred Logoi…

Roughly contemporary with Pythagoreanism, Orphism is the name given to a religious movement that arose in Greece in the sixth century B.C., and whose teachings continued to flourish in Western thought for over two millennia. (As late as the fifteenth century, the great Florentine Christian Neoplatonists Marsilio Ficino and Pico della Mirandola still regarded their own philosophical and religious systems as versions of “the Orphic theology”.)

The Orphics were preachers who possessed a body of sacred texts, few of which, unfortunately, have survived (except in fragmentary citations by other authors). We have, most importantly, certain gold plates dating from the third century B.C., discovered in the nineteenth century in graves in Crete and Southern Italy. The plates are inscribed with ritual verses and hymns (probably originating in the sixth century) that outline aspects of the Orphic eschatology, or doctrine of the afterlife, and which were thus obviously intended to help the deceased in their passage into the other world.

Beyond these, we possess a certain body of doctrine, also largely eschatological, recorded or promulgated in various writings of the sixth to the fourth centuries B.C., of which the following are the most significant examples: first, the writings of the Pre-Socratic philosophers Empedocles (see below) and Pythagoras, whose cosmological and eschatological doctrines show probable Orphic influence; more important, some of the great myths of Plato (specifically, those that record the experiences of the soul in the afterlife in the Phaedo, the Phaedrus, the Gorgias, and the allegory of Er in the Republic). Also in the classical period, there are certain “Orphic” passages from the poet Pindar, as well as from the tragedians Aeschylus and Euripides and the comic playwright Aristophanes.

From Hellenistic times, we have evidence from Aristotle and from the third-century follower of Aristotle, Eudemos. We have a brief reference to the Orphic cosmogony in the third-century Argonautica (the epic recounting the story of Jason and the Golden Fleece) by Apollonius of Rhodes.

Finally, in the new era, we have the generally antagonistic evidence of the Christian Apologists of the second century A.D., particularly Athenagoras and Clement of Alexandria. And then we have an abundance of references to the Orphics by the Neoplatonists who found Orphic doctrines so congenial to their own: especially the third century A.D. Porphyry and Iamblichus, Macrobius (writing in Latin, c. 400), and the late-fourth or early-fifth-century Proclus.

The broad agreement amongst these writers suggests strongly that there was some common source of Orphic doctrine upon which they all relied, but what it was, and what precisely it contained, we don’t know. It can hardly be denied, in any case, that a body of writings under the name of Orpheus was already well known to the classical authors. Aristotle, for instance, refers to the “Orphic verses”, Euripides knows him as the author of certain teletai, or theological tracts, and Plato speaks of a mass of books attributed to Orpheus and his legendary disciple Musaios, which encapsulate, as he calls it, a hieros logos, a “sacred word” or “revelation”.

 

In all such references to the Orphic hieros logos, the same complex of doctrines and beliefs is always assumed: the idea of the pre-existence of souls in a pure, disembodied state in the celestial aether; the doctrine succinctly expressed by the Greek formula soma sema (body tomb)–that is, the idea of birth in the world and the body as a fall, death, burial or imprisonment of the soul; the necessity therefore of the soul to purify itself of the contaminating taints of the body and the senses both in this world and the next if it is to be saved; its expectation of a retributive afterlife in which the just will be rewarded with bliss and the unjust punished; the belief in transmigration of souls, metempsychosis, according to which the soul must undergo a series of incarnations in this world and purgations in the next before it may finally escape the weary wheel of births and deaths and fly back into the aether whence it came.

We’ll have to return later to discuss these doctrines in somewhat more detail, but to the Orphics, in any case, the “sacred logoi” of which Plato and others speak must have been a Bible of sorts. Their great epic hymn of creation, known as the “Orphic Rhapsodies”, was finally fixed at twenty-four books, a number meant obviously to coincide with that of Homer’s epics whose unique authority they were meant to relativize. In this regard, the Orphic writings represented yet another novelty in Greek civilization. For, while it is true that the two great epics of Homer were often referred to as the “Greek Bible”, Homer’s epics were not expressly written as sacred literature. They were grand mythic narratives, and like all myths, they explained to their Greek audience much about themselves as a people, including the origins of their gods and religion; but they were not didactic, and claimed no divine authority, which the Orphic writings assuredly were and did.

The Mathematical Principles of Music…

 Of Everything…

 The Pythagorean Foundation of Modern Science…

The (Macrocosmic) Harmony of the Spheres…

The (Microcosmic) Harmony of the Soul…

     Even more momentous for Western thought was Pythagoras’ discovery of the mathematical basis of musical intervals.

It was made, as Diogenes Laertius explains, by the experimental use of the “monochord”–an instrument, as its name implies, in which a single string is stretched across a soundboard which supports a movable bridge.  By stopping the string at a certain point along its span, Pythagoras realized that the pitch that it produced was directly related to the length of the vibrating portion of the string.

Stop it at the exact centre, pluck the string, and it produces a note precisely an octave above.  Stop it so that the ratio of the vibrating to the non-vibrating portion is 3:2, and you produce a major fifth.  Stop it so the ratio of the vibrating to non-vibrating lengths of string is 4:3, and the result is a major fourth.

What Pythagoras realized, then, was that the octave, fourth, and fifth–the “major consonances” of Greek music—were produced as a function of certain fixed numerical proportions, and that the sciences of acoustics in particular, and music in general, have an invisible mathematical structure.

 

It was but a small step for Pythagoras to infer that the physical laws of not only sound but of the entire natural world were informed by hidden mathematical proportions and principles.  As Aristotle relates,

The Pythagoreans…thought that the principles of mathematics were the principles of all things….Seeing that the properties and ratios of the musical consonances were expressible in numbers, and that indeed all other things seemed to be wholly modeled in their nature upon numbers, they took numbers to be the whole of reality, the elements of numbers to be the elements of all existing things, and the whole heaven to be a musical scale and a number.

Rather than seeking a unifying and unchanging physis or nature of the cosmos in the material elements—water, air, fire, or “the infinite”, as the Ionian philosophers had done—Pythagoras maintained that the elements themselves, material or quasi-material as they were, were secondary phenomena, necessarily reducible to the primordially elemental, immaterial concepts of mathematics.

 

One can hardly overestimate the significance of Pythagoras’ insistence upon mathematics as the foundational principle of cosmic order for later science.  Within two hundred years it gave rise, in the work of Archimedes, to the science of mechanics.  Even Galileo, at the dawn of the modern age, took it as the starting point of his own investigations:

Philosophy is written in the great book which is ever before our eyes—I mean the universe–; but we cannot understand it if we do not first learn the language and grasp the symbols in which it is written.  This book is written in the mathematical language, and the symbols are triangles, circles, and other geometrical figures, without whose help it is impossible to comprehend a single word of it.

Upon this Pythagorean foundation the whole structure of classical physics was erected.

 

From his conception of “the whole heaven as a musical scale and a number” arises, finally, another of Pythagoras’ celebrated doctrines–and another ongoing topos of Western thought–, that of the so-called “harmony of the spheres”.  As Aristotle explains, Pythagoras reasoned that the heavenly bodies, being of immense size and moving at correspondingly vast speeds, must produce sounds in their peregrinations, indeed, much louder sounds, necessarily, than those of the relatively smaller and slower-moving objects we can hear on earth.  If the revolutions of the heavens are inaudible to us, it is only because their music has filled our ears since birth, so that we are unable to distinguish it from silence.

The pitch of these celestial sounds, moreover, must be directly proportionate to their velocity, which in turn is a function of their distance from the earth–that is, the radius of their orbit.  The fixed stars, on the periphery of the heavens, and revolving at the fastest speed, make the highest sound; the moon, closest to the earth, with the shortest orbit, and moving at the slowest speed, makes the lowest.  What’s more, since these distances are in the ratios of the musical consonances, the sounds produced by the planets and stars blend together in a vast cosmic “harmony”.

The grandeur of this conception ensured, as I say, that it would become a perennial theme in Western poetry, theology, and philosophy.  It explains, amongst other things, why music was from Plato to Castiglione so central a discipline in the moral education of the philosopher-prince.  As Shakespeare’s Lorenzo puts it, two thousand years after Pythagoras, in the Merchant of Venice:

How sweet the moonlight sleeps upon this bank!
Here we will sit and let the sounds of music
Creep in our ears:  soft stillness and the night
Become the touches of sweet harmony.
Sit, Jessica: look, how the floor of heaven
Is thick inlaid with patines of bright gold:
There’s not the smallest orb which thou beholds’t
But in his motion like an angel sings,
Still quiring to the young-eyed cherubins;
Such harmony is in immortal souls;
But whilst this muddy vesture of decay
Doth grossly close it in, we cannot hear it…

The man that hath no music in himself,
Nor is not moved with concord of sweet sounds,
Is fit for treasons, strategems, and spoils;
The motions of his spirit are dull as night,
And his affections dark as Erebus.

For Shakespeare, Plato, and all latter-day Pythagoreans, the harmony of the spheres is in immortal souls because it was the soul’s birth-song, which it heard when it still lived in the celestial aether, before its unfortunate fall into the body and the world.  If ordinary men can’t hear it, it’s not for the reason Aristotle imagines, but because the noise of the world—the distractive din that floods in through the body’s physical organs of sensation—drowns it out.  Such men are deaf to the harmony of the spheres, because, as Plutarch explains, “The ears of most souls are blocked and stopped up, not with wax, but with carnal obstructions and passions.”

To hear that harmony requires, on the contrary, that the soul stop up her outer ears; that she mortify the senses by turning her attention away from external earthly and material objects and desires, and cultivating instead the inner incorporeal senses of reason and intelligence through which we alone apprehend reality and truth—truths that like those of mathematics are invariably “immaterial and conceptual”.

By pursuing a life of contemplation and introversion, and through the ascetical regimes already mentioned, the Pythagorean wise man creates the stillness that allows him to hear the celestial music resonating faintly in the interior depths of the soul; hearing it, he is reminded of his celestial birth and reawakened to his own divinity.

With the Pythagorean teaching in the background, later writers and thinkers referred to the wise or virtuous soul as “musical”, “harmonious”, or tonos, attuned. In the musical soul, the discordant and cacophonous carnal appetites and passions have been composed by reason in order and harmony,  and so composed, the microcosmic psyche imitates and participates in the greater order and harmony of the macrocosm.

Pythagoras the Teacher of a Way of Life…

His Doctrine of Transmigration of Souls…

 “Philosophy” as a Methods for the Salvation of the Soul…

  Pythagoras and Mathematics…

Deductive Geometry and the Ascent of the Soul to the Divine…

     As Plato reports, Pythagoras taught “a way of life”, and it becomes apparent what that was:  a life “in accordance with what is highest in us”, in accordance, that is, with the soul whose divine origin and nature must be remembered and fully realized, and in detachment from the body and world in which it is a prisoner and exile.

One of the methods by which the Pythagoreans nurtured the soul at the expense of the body was a kind of purgatorial regime, including an abstention from meat. This was clearly enough connected with Pythagoras’ doctrine of the transmigration of souls.  As his contemporary Xenophanes records,

They say that once when a puppy was being whipped, Pythagoras, who was passing by, took pity on it, saying, “Stop!  Do not beat it!  It is the soul of a friend; I recognize his voice!”

The doctrine of transmigration of souls may have been borrowed by Pythagoras from the Orphic cult, which also flourished in southern Italy in the sixth century; or it may have been imported by Pythagoras directly from the East, if the tradition according to which he traveled eastward as far as Babylonia, before returning to Croton, is true.  Whatever its origins, Pythagoras’ belief that the soul undergoes a series of incarnations throughout the various ranks of the animal kingdom meant, amongst other things, that the killing of animals for food was a sin akin to murder.

But the Pythagorean taboo against eating meat seems to be part of a broader ascetical regime.  As Diogenes Laertius reports, Pythagoras restricted himself to the most meager diet of honey, bread, and vegetables, rarely drank wine, and never enjoyed carnal relations with a woman.  These abstinences were clearly meant to detoxify the soul, the highest and divine element of the human person, of the body’s contaminating influence.

Such ideas, as we’ll see, became salients of Platonism, as did Pythagoras’ conception of philosophical inquiry itself as a method for the purification and salvation of the soul.  Thus Diogenes Laertius says that Pythagoras was the first to use the word “philosophy”, and to call himself a philosopher, that is, a lover of wisdom:  “For no one, he said, is wise except god.”  For Pythagoras, then, as for Plato after him, the life of philosophy was essentially a religious vocation, whose purpose was the salvation and deification of the soul, or rather, the restoration or repristination of its original nature, which was divine.

Above all, philosophical inquiry for Pythagoras meant the investigation of the first principles of mathematics.  Pythagoras’ many and seminal geometrical, algebraic, and arithmetical discoveries include far more than merely the famous triangle theorem named for him, but we don’t have the space (nor do I have the expertise) to consider them here.

The major point to be noted about Pythagorean mathematics is the way it accorded with Pythagoreanism as a soteriological method, by emancipating the rational intellect from its reliance on the world of matter and the senses.  As the fifth-century A.D. Neoplatonist Proclus explains in his commentary on Euclid, geometry was first discovered by the Egyptians, who used it to measure the areas of farmers’ fields whose boundaries were annually obliterated by the flooding of the Nile.  Geometry was, as such, an entirely practical “art”, and as applied by the Egyptians to the land, it remained purely inductive and empirical.  But “Pythagoras transformed this study into a form of liberal education, examining its principles from the beginning and tracking down the theorems immaterially and conceptually”.  In this way, continues Proclus, geometry “elevates the soul and does not allow it to descend to objects of sense in order to satisfy the common needs of mortals, and so neglect the turning of the soul to things above”.

By liberating geometry from the practical necessity of measuring the land through a kind of inductive trial and error, and discovering the universal conceptual principles upon which any area could be ascertained in theory, Pythagorean mathematics becomes a deductive method (where “deductive” retains its primary sense of “leading out of”) by means of which the soul abstracts itself from its dependence upon the entire material order.  The fact, that is, that the square of the hypotenuse equals the sum of the squares of the other two sides is not determined by what happens when any three sticks are laid in a closed figure on the ground by surveyors, but by a rational inference from first principles.  Mathematics proceeds, then, not from the uncertain testimony of the senses, but, as Proclus writes, “immaterially and conceptually”.  In this way, as Socrates would later put it in the Phaedo, the soul withdraws from the body and the world into itself, and lives as if by itself and alone.  Unencumbered by the material order and the sensory organs by which it is perceived, it rises, through the contemplation of mathematical concepts, to the invisible spiritual world in which such concepts, in communion with the Divine, eternally reside.

Pythagoras…

The Immortality and Divinity of the Soul…

 The Controlling Images of Pythagoras’ Myth…

 Birth in the Body as Death, Imprisonment, Exile…

 Immortal Thoughts for Mortal Men…

     Pythagoras is probably the most important, and certainly the most influential of the Pre-Socratics, if only because Plato’s thought depends so heavily upon his, and Western thought depends so heavily upon Plato’s.

Pythagoras was born on the island of Samos, just off the Ionian coast and slightly north of Miletus.  Tradition has it that he left Samos because of his disgust with the tyranny of Polycrates, and like Xenophanes before him, fled westward.  C. 530 B.C., when he was forty years old, Pythagoras settled at Croton, a Greek settlement on the east coast of southern Italy, where there soon gathered around him a large number of devoted disciples.  The community at Croton was less a philosophical school, in fact, than a religious cult, and indeed, as in the other mystery religions of Greece and the Ancient Near East, the Pythagorean initiates were bound by oath not to divulge the doctrines taught them by their master.

Fortunately, many of Pythagoras’ later disciples broke their oaths, including Philolaus, an important Pythagorean thinker who lived in the 5^th century B.C., and who enumerates some of the basic teachings of the founder as follows:

First, he said that the soul is immortal; second, that it migrates into other kinds of animals; third, that the same events are repeated in cycles, nothing being new in the strict sense; and finally, that all things with souls should be regarded as akin.

 

That the human soul is immortal, indeed, an inhaled portion of the divine “breath” that suffuses and animates the entire universe, had already been taught by Anaximenes.  But Pythagoras was the first Greek thinker to address the fundamental ontological, anthropological, and moral problems that inevitably follow from such a conception.

First, if the soul is immortal, how is it related to the human body, and to all material things in the universe, which are so obviously subject to decay, disintegration, and death?  Pythagoras’ answer was momentous for later Western thought.  Soul and body, he maintained, are ontologically opposite, belonging to entirely different orders of existence.

As Philolaus reports, Pythagoras taught that the soul is “buried in the body as if in a tomb”.  Birth in the body spells a kind of death for the soul, whose real life is in the other world, where it was born and pre-existed in a disembodied state before its incarnation, a condition which it naturally hopes to resume after the body dies.

This explains those other conventional Pythagorean metaphors, according to which the material body is the soul’s prison, that life in it on earth is a kind of “slavery”, “captivity”, or “exile” from the soul’s native realm and true home.  That home, where the soul was originally born, to which it belongs by right and nature, and whence it fell by a kind of sin, is the celestial world, the abode of the Divine. Thus nascent already in Pythagoreanism is that distinction that Aristotle was later to make famous, between the translunary order, made of a kind of super-rarefied fire called aether–absolutely pure, immutable, imperishable, eternal, and divine–, and the sublunary, where everything is grossly material, and thus subject to corruption and decay.

For Pythagoras, the human soul was, as Diogenes Laertius reports, “a detached portion of that celestial ether”, which is to say a deracinated particle of the Divine, as Anaximenes had also conceived it.  Thus, as Diogenes goes on to say, Pythagoras insisted that “soul is distinct from life and immortal”.  It is not affected by the corruption which overtakes the body, but stands apart from it even in life, preserving its affinity with the Godhead throughout its exile in the world.  At the same time, of course, the soul is oppressed by a palpable sense of alienation, yearning to be released from its carnal prison-house, and to return to that upper region whence it came, reunited forevermore with the Divine.

 

The effect of Pythagoras’ emphasis on the innate and essential divinity of the soul was to fatally undermine the traditional Greek view of the place of man in the world-order.  We’ve already encountered a number of expressions of the idea of the unbridgeable gulf between mortal and immortal, between a life subject to misfortune and vicissitude, and one lived in eternal and unchanging bliss.  Here are three more, from the fifth-century poet Pindar:

No man can win to happiness complete….
In brief space the joy of mortals waxes;
In brief space it falls to the ground,
Stricken by an adverse fate.
We are but creatures of a day.
What is a man?
Man is a dream of shadows…

If a man having wealth surpass all others in beauty,
Displaying his strength by victory in the games,
Let him remember the limbs he arrays are mortal,
And that he will come to the end that all men come to,
Clothing himself with earth…

Mortal thoughts befit mortal men.

But Pythagoreanism completely overturns this view; as Aristotle describes the moral imperatives of Pythagoras’ followers:

We are not to obey those who tell us that a man should think a man’s thoughts, and a mortal the thoughts of a mortal.  On the contrary, we should endeavour as far as possible to become immortal, and to do all that we can to live in accordance with what is highest in us.

Xenophanes…

 His Critique of the Mythic Gods of Homer…

Of Religious Anthropomorphism…

Of the Immorality of the Gods of Myth…

 Of Regional Religious Forms as Cultural Projections…

His (and Greek) Monotheism…

Xenophanes as the Source of the Tradition of the Allegorical Interpretation of Myth…

Of Pagan Religious Universalism…

Of “Negative Theology”…

     The brilliant Pre-Socratic philosopher and poet Xenophanes was born c. 561 B.C. in Colophon, a city some forty miles north of Miletus; but when Colophon, along with many other Greek cities along the Ionian seaboard, fell to the Persians, Xenophanes fled westward, making his way eventually to Sicily.

The great innovation and importance of Xenophanes’ thought is not in cosmology or physics, but rather in theology, the understanding of the nature of the Divine.  But then the immediate relevance of theology to cosmology need hardly be stated, since for the Greeks, the essential problem was the relation between the Divine and the material world.

Xenophanes was in fact the first in a long line of reforming critics and expositors of traditional Greek religious and mythological idioms.  Here are two of his most famous dicta on this theme:

Mortals believe that the gods are begotten, and that they wear clothing like our own, and have a voice and a body.

The Ethiopians make their gods snub-nosed and black; the Thracians make theirs gray-eyed and red-haired.  And if oxen and horses and lions had  hands, and could draw…, horses would draw the gods in the shape of horses, and oxen in the shape of oxen, each giving the gods bodies similar to their own.

Xenophanes here states explicitly for the first time what intelligent Greeks must long have understood:  that the mythological gods, as described by poets such as Homer, are created in the image of their human worshipers; that they look and behave like men only because their worshipers have projected upon them their own form and habits; and that the incidental differences one observes amongst the various national and ethnic gods and their cults is the result of similar projections, each the consequence of the inability of men to conceive of the Divine except through images derived from their own immediate human and culturally specific experience.  Rather, as Xenophanes affirms, there is only

One god, …in no way similar to mortals either in body or mind.

 

The transcendent supremacy of Zeus, acknowledged from the beginning in Homer and Hesiod, suggests that the strict monotheism of Xenophanes is the development of a tendency in Greek thought already long underway:  a tendency, in fact, to define the Divine as a kind of Being that utterly negates and transcends all categories of human experience, understanding, and expression.

God, as Xenophanes insists, has no body or organs of sense, though by means of some super-sensual and super-intelligent mode of cognition, he “sees all, thinks all, and hears all”.  Having neither arms nor legs, he is motionless; yet he sets all in motion merely “by the thought of his own mind”.

Unlike men, in fact, the being of God is “totally of mind and thought”, and is eternal.  By contrast, above all, to the “innumerable world-orders”, which successively come into being and pass away, God is without beginning or end.

Spatially conceived, his being is “spherical”, but only in the sense in which it is co-extensive with the world-order, able to act everywhere in it without moving, because he suffuses it throughout as the active and living principle of order.

This cosmic order, or justice as Anaximander had called it, means that the world-order is once again a moral order, and that justice, therefore, must be of the nature of the Divine.  But if this is true, the stories told by the poets must be lies, since, as Xenophanes laments,

Homer and Hesiod have attributed to the gods all things which in men are a matter for reproach and censure:  stealing, adultery, and mutual deception.

This is the most scandalous effect of the primitive propensity to project human traits upon the gods, whose moral behavior must surely be better than that of at least the worst of mankind, if the term “Divine” is to mean anything.

Xenophanes thus lays the foundation for a long tradition of moral criticism of artists and poets in general, and Homer in particular, in which, at one extreme, they are accused of being professional “liars” and blasphemers who should be banished forever from decent society (as Plato purports to banish them from his Republic).  Such a view was to fecundate throughout history periodic outbreaks of puritanism and iconoclasm.  Fortunately, however, it did not prevail; for the Greeks (as indeed for the Christians of Middle Ages and the Renaissance), the poets were to be defended as the writers of mythological allegories that were never intended to be read literally.

If their mythic narratives are “fictions”, it is because approximative images and provisional analogies are the only means by which the sensual and finite human imagination can approach the ineffable Divine; understood figuratively, however, the fictions of the poets conceal beneath their literal surface profound philosophical and theological truths.

 

Xenophanes was in any case the first Greek thinker to recognize the inherent problem of coming to know and represent a Godhead that is by definition beyond all human categories of apprehension and language.  The gods, he says, have hidden the knowledge of the Divine from mortals, who must apply themselves to discover it through assiduous study and effort.  Even so, no one man or sect will ever discover or reveal the final and exhaustive truths of religion, but at best a semblance of them.  As Plato (in the Timaeus) was to formulate this foundational principle of what was later to be called “negative theology”, “The Father and Maker of this universe is beyond knowing or expressing”.  For this reason, too, the various local myths and cults tended to be relativized in Greek thought, as merely partial and imperfect revelations of the Divine, just as their differences were understood as secondary regional inflections of a universal religion of the One Unknown God.

Anaximenes’ Air…

 Air, Wind, and Breath as Soul-substances and God-images…

 The World as a Divine Animal…

 Macrocosm and Microcosm, again…

The Divinity of Man…

     Cosmogony and cosmology continued to be the preoccupations of Anaximander’s pupil and fellow Milesian, Anaximenes (born c. 584 B.C.).  Like his master, Anaximenes is reported to have taught that the source and underlying nature of all things is one and infinite; but unlike Anaximander, for whom the infinite was none of the four elements (while encompassing them all), Anaximenes identified it with air.

Anaximenes’ air remained nonetheless an indeterminate substance–not unlike to apeiron—insofar as it was capable of being transformed into all the other elements in turn.  This occurred by a process that Anaximenes called “dilation and compression”.

When air is compressed it becomes colder, denser, and heavier, and so takes on the properties first of water and then of earth; when it is dilated, it becomes hotter, rarer, and lighter, and takes on those of fire.  In Anaximenes’ scheme, Anaximander’s opposites are thus engendered through the mechanism of thickening and thinning.

Once again, however, we may readily detect the afflatus of pre-rational, religious ideas and modes of thought in Anaximenes’ apparently mechanical explanation of things.  According to one doxographer, “Anaximenes says that air is a god”, while another fragment runs, “Just as our soul (being air) controls us, so breath and air encompass the whole world-order”.

 

Air, breath, and wind are primordial and ubiquitous God-images, since they were commonly held to constitute the essential substance of the Divine.  In ancient Hebrew, for instance, Yahweh is ruach, that is, “breath or wind”.  In Genesis, his Spirit is said to brood over the face of the waters at the beginning.  As we’ve already seen, this is a sexual image:  God fecundates those waters with the seed of his Spirit as the male inseminates the woman’s watery womb. 

But he does more than that, of course.  The English word “spirit” comes from the Latin verb spiro, spirare (to breathe), and indeed God creates the world in Genesis, as he creates Adam, by breathing his own enlivening soul into their otherwise inert and inanimate material bodies.

Throughout Greek thought, analogously, there persists the idea that the world itself is, as Plato called it, a Divine Animal, whose outer body is composed of those corporeal members that are discernible to the senses, and whose inner soul, which regulates the orderly movements and processes of the universe, is the invisible Soul of God.  God inspirits and governs the cosmos, as the human soul inspirits and governs the human body; and this becomes the function of Anaximenes’ supposedly de-mythologized and impersonal “air”.

As Anaximenes was well aware, whether in God or man, the soul had been universally and immemorially conceived as being made of an airy substance, identified with the breath.  Primitive peoples almost all believe that when a person dies, his soul escapes–is exhaled–in his final breath, and from this belief we get our expression, “he breathed his last”.

Homer accepted this assumption too, as we may infer from his description in the Iliad of Sarpedon, who is wounded, almost fatally, on the battlefield before Troy:

His soul left him, and mist covered his eyes.
But he recovered his breath, and the blast of the north wind,
Blowing, gave him life, though he was sorely spent in spirit.

It is the air, wind, or breath in us, then, which is soul.  And the airy breath in us animates our bodies, just as the air, according to Anaximenes, animates the body of the world.

 

Like the soul in man and God, Anaximenes naturally attributes to his archetypal air the quality of “intelligence”.  As the airy soul rationally directs and regulates the movements and processes of living creatures, so Anaximenes’ air regulates the life of the world-order, preserving within it that state of harmony and justice of which Anaximander had written.

The whole argument–indeed, the whole argument of so much theology and philosophy–, is based on the analogy between the little world of man—the microcosm—and the greater world of the cosmos—the macrocosm.  And from Anaximenes himself we have one of the earliest statements of this perennial Western theme:

The living creature, he says, is a world in miniature.

I’ve already alluded to Greek medical theory, which is rooted in this analogy:  just as the elements earth, water, air, and fire, comprised of the opposites hot and cold, moist and dry, must observe their limits if the health of the cosmos is to be preserved, so the elements of the body—the four humours, which are comprised of the same four opposites—must coexist in balance lest the body succumb to disease.

But the most important, and characteristically Greek, deduction from the correspondence between macrocosm and microcosm is what it implies about the essential divinity of the human soul.  This is already the planted axiom in the following statements by one of Anaximenes’ later disciples, Diogenes of Apollonia:

It seems to me that that which has intelligence is what men call air, and that all men are steered by this, and that it has power over all things.  For this very thing seems to be a god and to reach everywhere and to dispose all things and to be in everything.  For it would not be possible, without intelligence, to be divided up so as to dispense measure in all things—winter and summer, night and day, rain and wind and fair weather.

Thus the Divine Intelligence that suffuses and is immanent in all things, that regulates and orders the seasons and the cosmos “in measure”, is also immanent in man, regulating and ordering in measure his life as it regulates and orders the life of the World-Animal

Man’s soul, then (as the later Platonists and Stoics would call it) is already conceived as a “seed” or “particle” of the Divine Reason, and so participating in the Divine, man is in essence a god.

But we’ll come back to these ideas later.

Anaximander and Moira…

     Even the gods are bound by the primordial law of justice which Anaximander projects upon the material world.  Homer himself acknowledges that its authority is older and its power greater than that of Zeus.

For though the gods are ageless and deathless, they are not eternal–they are in fact younger than the world, as the poets affirm–, nor are they omnipotent.  What limits their power above all is the prior and organizing principle of the cosmos, which Homer calls Moira.

     Homer’s conception of Moira (Destiny) is better known in later Greek myth as personified by  the Three Fates (another of those pre-Christian trinities):  Clotho, the Spinner, who spins the thread of Life; Lachesis, the Disposer of Lots, who assigns to each man his personal fate; and Atropos, She Who Would Not Be Denied, who carries the dreaded shears and cuts the thread at death.  But Moira, as an impersonal force or numen, is much older.

We encounter this cosmological Moira in the fifteenth Iliad, when Zeus awakens to find his Trojans hard pressed by the Achaeans, because they have been incited by Poseidon.  Zeus at once dispatches the messenger goddess Iris (she of the rainbow) to present Poseidon with the ultimatum to desist from any further involvement in the War, and retire contentedly to his kingdom in the sea.

To this Poseidon angrily replies:

No, no; good though he be, he spoke insolently,
If he would restrain me by force against my will,
When I am his peer in honor.  For we three are brothers,
Sons of Cronos whom Rhea bore:
Zeus and I, and Hades, lord of the world below.
All was divided in three; each received his share [moira] of honor.
I had the gray sea as my dwelling when we cast lots;
Hades, the shadowy world; Zeus the broad heavens
Among the upper air and clouds.  The earth
Is shared by all of us, along with high Olympus.
Wherefore I will not live by Zeus’ will;
Strong though he be, let him rest content with his share [moira].

Each of the three brothers, then, Zeus, Poseidon, and Hades, enjoys his own equal share in the government of the universe, his own sphere of influence and department of nature (sky, sea, or earth) beyond which he must not go.  In Homer, this “ordinance” is fixed by the agreement of the gods, whereas, in Anaximander, the gods as individual personalities have nominally disappeared:  the opposites (in the form of the concrete and de-mythologized “elements” air, water, and earth (which the Olympian triad formerly personified) have now taken their place.

 

But in Anaximander’s cosmos no less than in Homer’s, the elements and contraries are bound within their provinces by a moral law.  And this is of enormous significance for the whole Hellenic temperament, as we have seen.  The fact that the existential boundaries (moirai) of the elemental contraries are also moral boundaries means that what is “beyond destiny” is at the same time “beyond right”, and any attempt by either man or god to go “beyond what is ordained” is immediately answered by the god Nemesis, or Retribution, the personified abstraction who swiftly restores the due and proper harmony and balance.

It is Moira, then, that is ultimately behind the rudimentary Greek notion that there is an enormous gulf between the human and the divine, and that unless mortals are content “to think mortal thoughts”, as we have seen, their illicit ambition will be visited by the gods with punishment.

But whatever its precise origins, Anaximander’s concept of natural justice as the maintenance of balance and harmony amongst the opposites–as a state of “order” and boundedness in which the elements remain within their proper provinces–, became, as we will see, a commonplace in later classical cosmogony and cosmology, and indeed, in the entire Western philosophical tradition.

Anaximander’s Law of Compensation…

 And the Greek Medical Theory of the Humours…

 Compensation in the Health of the Body and the Succession of the Seasons…

Anaximander’s Natural Justice as a Projection of Human Morality…

Cosmic Injustice and Hybris… 

     But the world order, unlike to apeiron, is transitory and passes away, and how and why this happens is addressed by Anaximander in the single sentence from his book that has come down to us, as preserved by Simplicius:  a sentence that is certainly of profound significance for later Greek thought:

“Into those things from which existing things have their coming into being, their passing away, too, takes place, according to what must be; for they make reparation to one another for their injustice according to the ordinance of time”, as he puts it in somewhat poetical language.

It isn’t immediately obvious what “those things” are from which existing things arise.  The “Infinite Thing” as such can hardly be meant; the plural makes that plain enough.  On the other hand, Anaximander has already said that existing things arise not from the Infinite as such, but from those elements that are contained in it and separated out from it in the formation of the world.

These are the opposites, “the hot, the cold, the moist, the dry, and rest”.  It is the opposites, then, that “make reparation to one another for their injustice”; and the conception is one which is so ubiquitous in Greek thought as to be fundamental.

 

We encounter it, for instance, in Alcmaeon of Croton, who laid the foundations of Greek medical theory early in the 5^th century B.C.:

Alcmaeon says [as recorded by Aetius, the 2^nd century doxographer] that the essence of health lies in the “equality” of the powers—moist, dry, cold, hot, bitter, sweet, and the rest—whereas the cause of sickness is the “supremacy of one” among these.  For the rule of any one of them is a cause of destruction…while health is the proportionate mixture of the qualities.

Hippocrates in turn compares this balance or harmony of the opposites, which preserves the health of the body, to the orderly succession of the opposites in the seasonal year:

All of them [the opposites] are present in the body, but as the seasons revolve they become now greater now less, in turn…The year too has a share of all things—the hot, the cold, the dry, and the wet—for no one of the things which exist in the world-order would last for any length of time were it not for the balance preserved amongst them.

The opposites of which the body is composed—in later medical theory, the so-called four humours, which correspond to the four elements—are at enmity with each other, each attempting to drive out the other and establish sole supremacy.  The health of the body, on the other hand, consists in the maintenance of a balance of one opposite by the other.  It can be preserved, therefore, only if for every transgression, compensation or reparation is rendered, so that the balance is restored.

The same dynamic operates in the succession of the seasons.  In each season, one of each pair of opposites dominates:  spring is warm and moist; summer, warm and dry; autumn, cold and wet; winter, cold and dry.  Because the succession of the seasons is an orderly one, however, each of the opposites eventually makes reparation for the wrong it has done “according to the ordinance of time”.

 

Clearly, Anaximander’s “law of compensation”, his “poetic” description of nature in terms of “injustice and reparation”, is a projection of human morality on a supposedly inanimate and de-divinized world.  But then, the primordial data of religion inevitably survive and continue to influence the doctrines of the Greek philosophers, in spite of the assumption that they have moved beyond “irrational” mythological or theological categories of thought and supernatural explanations of things.  If Anaximander’s followers called his to apeiron “divine”, as Aristotle affirms, it was because the Greeks had from time immemorial ascribed to the Divine the same qualities of boundlessness, agelessness, eternity, and indestructibility.  In calling it by the impersonal term to apeiron, Anaximander has merely given the Godhead a new philosophical name.  Like the Godhead, the Infinite, he says, is the source and governor of the cosmos, which it “encompasses”, and whose operations it “steers” and regulates in justice and harmony.

Anaximander’s law of compensation is similarly rooted in a primitive ethos that survives from the psychological infancy of the species.  Even today, when we have a mild autumn, we expect instinctively that it will have to be paid for by a severe winter; we imagine, that is, that just as happiness is paid for by misfortune, so fine weather will be paid for by bad.

In this way, the laws of nature, to the mythic imagination, inevitably reflect those that operate in human affairs.  And Anaximander’s law of natural compensation seems to be just such a projection upon the inanimate elements of the cosmos of those moral laws that prevents human action from transgressing its proper bounds.

When a man exalts himself above his fellows, he is, like Herodotus’ Croesus, quickly brought low.  For the inquiring mind of the Greeks, there must, of course, be a reason for these inevitable reversals of fortune.  One commonly posited explanation was the jealousy of the gods.  Thus, in Herodotus once again, on the eve of his master’s ill-fated invasion of Greece, Xerxes’ adviser admonishes him:

You see, my lord, how god strikes with his thunderbolts those living creatures who are exalted above their fellows, and does not suffer them to vaunt themselves.  The small ones do not provoke his anger; it is always the highest buildings and the tallest trees on which his bolts fall.  For god delights in putting down all those who are exalted.

 

We can see how the idea of the jealousy of the gods is articulated with Anaximander’s theory according to which the aggrandizement of one of the opposites at the expense of the others demands reparation.  The gods alone enjoy perfect and indestructible power, ease, and happiness, and when a mortal aspires to such bliss, he is usurping divine prerogatives.  He is guilty, in Greek terms, of the sin of hybris:  of failing to “think only mortal thoughts”; of aspiring to rise above his proper station in the cosmic hierarchy.  And for this injustice he must inevitably be cast down, if the order and harmony of both human society and the cosmos itself are to be restored.

The Pre-Socratics…

Their Inspiration by Pre-Rational, Mythical Categories of Thought…

 Physis as a God-Image…

 The One and the Many…

Anaximander…

The Contraries and the Elements…

  Their Separation from To Apeiron…

     After Hesiod (c. 700), the principal preoccupation of the next several generations of Greek mythographers continued to be cosmogony and cosmology.  I refer, of course, to the Pre-Socratics (6th to 5th centuries B.C.), as they are called by the historians of Greek thought, who were the earliest “philosophers” in the Western tradition.

We must be careful, however, not to project our own modern definition of that hallowed term upon these seminal Greek thinkers.  For us, the word “philosopher” connotes someone who inquires dispassionately into the laws of the universe, obedient only to the dictates of reason and empirical truth, unharnessed from the ancestral burden of theological dogma or mythic fantasy.  Needless, to say, no such contemporary ideals troubled the Pre-Socratics (or any other pre-modern philosophers for that matter). Rather, the same pre-rational, mythological idioms and categories of thought as they had inherited from the poets and theologians of earlier generations inevitably recurred as the organizing archetypes of their investigations.

The earliest of the Pre-Socratics were called “physicists” by Aristotle, inviting us to identify them with modern scientists of the same name, and so adding to the confusion.  But Aristotle’s designation merely refers to the fact that they were dedicated to the discovery of the one primary substance or substrate—the Greek word is physis—out of which the observable multiplicity of the cosmos supposedly first arose and continues to inhere.

The conventional English translation of physis is “nature”, but for the Pre-Socratics the word meant something rather less abstract and (paradoxically) more exalted.  In its primary signification, the physis of the Pre-Socratics has about it the connotation of a living and growing thing; it is what Francis Cornford called a “Soul-Substance”:  the Soul Substance that animates the entire world.  That is to say that physis was little more than a non-theological or impersonal substitute for the word God, and thus hardly the descriptor of the de-deified and dis-inspirited machine that is the object of study for modern science.  The original and ongoing philosophical problem for the Pre-Socratics was that of the “One and the Many”, as it was called:  how the One Physis invisibly and immutably suffused—ensouled is really the right word here, since physis is merely another God-image–the multiplicity of individual mutable things, whence all existence is secretly and essentially unitary and unchanging; and how the Many–looking at the universal dynamic from the other side–expressed the hidden Unity out of which the One originally emanated or unfolded into diversity.  Unity and multiplicity are, as one would expect from a stage of consciousness as yet untroubled by the paradoxes of myth, both opposite and complementary modes or aspects of reality.

But again, we can hardly exhaust the meaning and implication of this archetype here, which informs any number of fundamental structures and recurrent themes in philosophy and religion, from polytheism itself, in which the many gods express the essential unity of the Supreme God (To Theion [The Divine], as the Greeks called it); to the mystery of the Trinity (One God in Three Persons), to the ubiquitous doctrine of transmigration of souls, in which the one soul undergoes a series of incarnations, and so on.

 

Aristotle says that the founder of Greek philosophy was Thales, (born c. 636 B.C.), a citizen of Miletus, one of the Ionian Greek city states on the Asia Minor coast.  Thales, he reports, asserted that the unitary physis or primary stuff of the cosmos was water, which was then transmuted into the solids, liquids, and gases (that is, everything that exists in the visible world) by a process of evaporation, condensation, freezing, melting, and so on.  But this is the sum of what we know of Thales and his teachings, a legacy so meager, or in some cases, so obviously the stuff of legend, that the title of Greece’s first philosopher probably belongs, more properly, to Thales’ younger Milesian contemporary Anaximander.

Anaximander was born c. 612 B.C., and though, unlike Thales, he committed his thoughts to writing in a book, nothing of it, unfortunately, has survived.  From the 6^th century A.D. doxographer Simplicius, we learn that Anaximander asserted that the source of all existing things is what he called to apeiron, i.e., the “boundless” or “infinite” or “limitless” thing, which is neither water nor any of the other elements, but something prior to and encompassing them all, and out of which the entire world-order came into being and into which it will return.

This “boundless” or “infinite” or “limitless” thing is, moreover, “eternal”or “ageless”.  It has “no beginning”, as Aristotle explains, “for if there were a beginning it would be limited”; and by the same token, it has no end:  it is “deathless and imperishable”.  Possessing these qualities, to apeiron was called “divine” by Anaximander’s disciples.

We infer, then, that by contrast to “the limitless”, the life of the world-order is limited at both ends:  it comes into existence and passes away.  But that out of which it arises and into which it passes away is without limit:  “ageless” and “imperishable”.  We may further infer from these adjectives that when Anaximander speaks of the source of existing things as “limitless”, he is thinking pre-eminently in temporal rather than spatial terms.

 

How, then, does the world-order come into being?  As reported by Aristotle, “The opposites, which are present in to apeiron, are separated out from it, Anaximander says”.  And from Simplicius we learn that “The opposites are the hot, the cold, the dry, the moist, and the rest”.

It is apparent, then, that Anaximander’s to apeiron corresponds in some way to that original state which Hesiod alludes to in the Theogony, in which Father Sky and Mother Earth were first bound up together in an indistinct unity, before they were separated by Chaos, and reunited to engender the world.  For Anaximander, the opposites are however no longer personified—no longer represented in the language of mythological poetry–, but are conceived as the inanimate and impersonal qualities of the hot and cold, wet and dry.

But since the Greeks as yet made no distinction between a thing and the qualities of a thing, Anaximander’s opposites are effectively indistinguishable from what later came to called the “elements”, i.e., earth, water, air, and fire, each of which was composed of a pair of the four contraries:  earth, cold and dry; water, cold and wet; air, hot and wet; fire, hot and dry.

Aristotle speaks of the contraries as “separated” out from the infinite, and in a sense this is true, but what is critical for the formation of the world-order is the separation of the elements from one another.  Earth, water, air, and fire emerge from a state of homogenous unity in to apeiron as distinct entities, much as in the Theogony the male and female contraries, Sky and Earth, emerge as distinct entities with the opening up of a “gap” (chaos) between them.

The world comes into being, then, when the elements are separated out of this primordial amorphous mass, and from each other, taking their proper place.  As Aristotle explains, Anaximander attributed this separating out to a mechanical process similar to that of a vortex or centrifuge within liquids, in which “like goes to like”, with the heaviest and densest components falling to the center of the vortex, while the lightest and rarest are flung to the outside.

Not coincidentally, this was how the elements were arranged in the existing world-order as the ancient Greeks conceived it:  that is, earth lay at the centre, water enveloping earth in a concentric sphere, air outside water, and outermost of all, the fiery circuit of the heavens.

Hesiod, continued…

The Offspring of Father Sky and Mother Earth…

 The Hundred-Handed Ones; Cyclopes; Titans; and Giants…

The Emasculation of Uranos…

Cronos and Rhea…

The Birth of the Cretan Zeus…

The War between the Titans and Olympians…

The Revolt of the Giants:  Ossa upon Pelion…

     After listing as the descendants of Chaos such antithetical abstractions as Night and Day, Tartarus (the realm of death) and Love (the agency of life), Hesiod returns to Gaea and Uranos, Mother Earth and Father Sky, the first recognizably human couple.  And from that moment on, things begin to go awry.

Amongst their first generation of offspring were monsters, strange gigantic creatures with the raw potency of hurricanes, earthquake, and volcano.  These brats not only played their music too loud, but three of them, Cottus, Briareos, and Gyes (“presumptuous children”, as Hesiod describes them), had a hundred arms and fifty heads.  A different species of giants, the Cyclopes, towered upwards like craggy mountains, and had only a single, enormous eye in the middle of their foreheads.

After giving birth to such a litter, Gaea might have excused herself from the marriage bed; instead, she and Uranos blithely continued to procreate.  Their next brood of monsters were the Titans, just as overgrown as the previous generation.  Of course, the Titans were something of an improvement; not all of them were merely destructive, and several, in fact, became minor benefactors who slightly advanced the cause of civilization.  But they too, in the end, turned out to be troublemakers.

Like a typical Mother, Gaea loved her children unstintingly, warts and all.  But Father Uranos soon repined; he positively despised and refused to accept paternity of the hundred-handed, fifty-headed creatures, and as each issued from Mother Earth’s various crevices and orifices, he simply pushed it back in.  The Cyclopes and Titans he left at large, and Gaea, indignant at Uranos’ maltreatment of their other children, enlisted them against him.

 

The boldest of them, the Titan Cronos, lay in wait for his father and ambushed him while “he spread himself full upon the Earth”, as Hesiod delicately puts it, wounding him grievously with a jagged sickle in the “thigh”.  From the blood that issued from Cronos’ “thigh wound”, as it euphemistically referred to, sprang another brood of monsters, the Giants.  From the same fecund blood came the Erinyes (the Furies), those fetching femmes fatales with writhing snakes for hair, and eyes that wept tears of blood, whose mission in life was to punish sinners and make others mad with yearning for revenge or mayhem.  And finally, from the foam created by Uranos’ member where it fell into the sea, issued Aphrodite, the foam-born goddess.

Having emasculated and then dethroned his Father Uranos, Cronos thereafter reigned for the next epoch as universal King, with his sister-queen, Rhea.  But as it turned out, he was no more devoted a father than his own.

Learning from Uranos and Gaea that one of his own children was destined some day to overthrow him, Cronos decided that the prudent thing was to swallow each immediately after its birth.  But when Rhea was pregnant with Zeus, her sixth child, she sought counsel with her parents as to how to save the baby from her husband’s infanticidal hunger, and in the process, to avenge her Father Uranos for the indignity that Cronos had inflicted upon him.

Rhea was advised to repair secretly to the island of Crete, where in a remote cave she might safely deliver and nurture the future lord of the world.  Having done so, she handed Cronos a great stone wrapped in swaddling clothes, which he supposed was the divine child, and promptly swallowed down.  Much later, when Zeus was fully grown, he forced his father, with the help of his grandmother Gaea, to disgorge the stone, along with his five older siblings.  The stone was eventually set up as a monument at Delphi, and thereafter venerated by generations of supplicants to the oracle;  it was called the “omphalos”, and said to be located at the very centre of the globe.

 

There followed a tumultuous war between Cronos (leader of his brother Titans) and Zeus (aided by his five brothers and sisters)–a war that shook the cosmos to its very foundations.  The Titans were eventually conquered, in part because Zeus released from their prison the hundred-handed monsters who came to his aid with their weapons of thunder, lightning, and earthquake; and partly because one of the sons of the Titan Iapetus, whose name was Prometheus–and who was incomparably wise–, went over to the Olympian cause.

Once he defeated them, Zeus was careful to make an example of his rebellious enemies.  He hurled them down into the depths of Tartarus, a full eighteen days’ journey from heaven, as Hesiod famously describes it–nine days as the bronze anvil falls from Olympus to earth, and another nine days from earth to the pit of Hell–, and bound them there in adamantine chains.  Prometheus’ brother, the Titan Atlas, suffered an even more grievous fate, having been made to bear upon his shoulders the Atlas Mountains along with the whole crushing weight of the earth and sky.

But even after his victory over the Titans, the peace was not completely secured.  Mother Earth gave birth again, this time to her most terrifying offspring, a creature named Typhon.

Typhon sported a hundred heads, from the eyes of each of which flashed fire, and the jaw of each dripped death.  Zeus dispatched him with his most powerful thunderbolt, leaving Typhon a smouldering pool beneath Mt. Aetna, whence periodically there burst forth rivers of molten lava, whenever Typhon’s anger boils over.

Still later, one more attempt was made to usurp the usurper Zeus.  The Giants, late-born sons of Gaea, rebelled, piling Mt. Ossa upon Mt. Pelion in their assault upon Olympus; but their overreaching ambition too was punished, and they were hurled down to Tartarus to join their fellow insurrectionists.

So ends the Theogony of Hesiod, a Byzantine and often bizarre roll-call of divine names and events which, nonetheless, follow a predictable (if notorious) cycle of infanticides, parricides, rebellions, and usurpations from generation to generation.

We can of course look upon these repetitions from any number of viewpoints.  As the Greeks themselves understood from the beginning, the immoral behaviour of the gods of myth was merely human behaviour projected into transcendence.  (For such anthropomorphisms, the mythic poets were either condemned as “liars” or excused as inspired allegorists, who took refuge in such symbolic fictions as were necessary to describe the ineffable Divine.)

But the more important explanation for the repetition of these motives is religious and psychological.  The overthrow of the first generation of the gods, the earth-born Titans, by the Olympians–the Titanomachy–looks back dimly to a period in Greek pre-history when the principal deity throughout the Mediterranean world was the Magna Mater, the Great Goddess of the Earth, upon whom Bronze-age agricultural peoples necessarily depended for their survival.  The masculine sky-religion of Zeus and his fellow Olympians only arrived with the migration from the north of the Hellenic tribes into the Greek mainland at the beginning of the third millennium B.C., and the transition from the older, chthonian (or earth-centred) religions to the later ouranian religion of storm and weather is undoubtedly what Hesiod’s Titanomachy mythological recalls.

More generally, however, the them of the Father-King’s being warned that a son will arise to overthrow him, and the son’s inevitable fulfillment of his father’s fears, is an age-old and universal archetype, made famous in modern times by Freud’s so-called “Oedipus complex” (to which we shall have to return).  But it is so fundamental to the cyclical rhythms of life and death, power and impotence, that it is hard to identify its origins or ultimate meaning.

It may well be based on the ancient tribal rite of the Killing of the King (or Priest King), whose term was fixed because it was believed that his powers were subject to exhaustion, and so, at the end of it, he was “slain” in a kind of mimetic drama by the heir apparent, thus ensuring the uninterrupted vitality of the tribe and its land.

But I doubt that this exhausts the significance of the archetype, which, as I have just said, expresses the universal alternation between death and life, darkness and life, which is an essential datum of our existence, and certainly the most powerful one in which the human psyche experiences it.  When we eventually turn to the myth of the hero, we will encounter innumerable examples of this motive.