« The Absolute hovers eternally around us, but as Fichte put it so well, it is only there when we don’t have it, and as soon as we have it it disappears ».ⁱ

(F.W.J. Schelling)

« An immense river of oblivion drags us into a nameless abyss. O Abyss, you are the only God. The tears of all peoples are true tears; the dreams of all wise men contain a measure of truth. Everything here below is but a symbol and a dream. The gods pass away like men, and it would not be good if they were eternal. Faith should never be a chain. One is even with it when one has carefully rolled it up in the purple shroud where the dead gods sleep. »ⁱⁱ

(Ernest Renan)

The sum total of the mythologies invented by man can be compared to a sort of immense theatre, in which a multitude of cases of consciousness, divine or human, are presented in the face of their gaps, their rises, their falls or their metamorphoses. In their profuse richness and unexpected turns, mythologies bear witness to the ongoing evolution of consciousness, its attempts to represent what it cannot fully and clearly imagine. It doesn’t know what it’s looking for, but it knows it has to keep looking. Once it has started, all it wants to do is go further and further. For consciousness to continue to surpass itself, until it reaches what we might call a ‘completely different consciousness’, it must become aware of this desire, which is in its nature. It must understand what this desire to surpass implies, and what requires this demand for flight. He needs to penetrate the essence of surpassing himself.

Philosophy, both ancient and modern, generally assumes that human consciousness is the only valid, the only conceivable, the only reasonable, that it is the universal reference, and that there is no other. Under these conditions, it seems clear that philosophy is ill-equipped to understand what, in theory or in practice, could go entirely beyond it. It seems obvious that it cannot even imagine the putative nature of some radical overcoming that would transcend the present condition of consciousness, or rather that would go beyond the way in which it is usually conceived.

However, ‘philosophical’ reflection on the birth of ancient mythology, the contemplation of its history and the observation of its decadence can teach us a great deal about what other human consciousnesses were once capable of. By inference, it can point to other paths for the future of a philosophy of consciousness. For mythological discourse to exist, and then to be transmitted, from ancient times onwards, consciousness had to look back on itself, and thereby distance itself from the origins of beliefs and the nature of the aspirations or fears to which they responded. Today’s analysis of mythology allows us to consider not only the reason for the multiplicity of gods, or the thousands of names of the One Divinity, but the way in which they were invented, the motivations of their creators (the Poets or Prophets), and the orientation of their consciousness in their acts of mythological creation.

Hesiod and Homer recounted the genesis of the gods, their battles and their loves, but above all they helped to establish a critical, poetic, literary and even literal distance between their object and their subject.

Never losing sight of the ancient gods, remembered, feared or revered, the poets dared to create new gods; they conceptualised their new essence, highlighting it in contrast to that of the first gods. The creation of mythology by poets belongs to a ‘completely different consciousness’ from philosophy – not to deny it, but to accompany it. The sustained, free invention of a Heraclitus or a Plato went beyond poetry in a sense, but was not completely freed from it. Unlike philosophy, true creation, poetic creation, creates worlds that are truly alive. Through this truly living life, imagination liberates thought, frees it from all hindrance, gives it movement, leaves the field entirely open to invention, and breathes into the mind an essentially demiurgic impulse.

There are several levels or strata of consciousness that are active in a consciousness that creates and, in so doing, questions its nature, either striving to move forward or sinking into its night. When we speak of the Poet’s ‘other consciousness’, what exactly do we mean? Is it a subliminal consciousness, a latent preconsciousness, an underlying subconsciousness – all symptomatic forms of the unconscious’s own life? Is it an intuition of other states of consciousness, which might be defined as ‘non-human’, far removed from the usual condition of human consciousness? Or is it a supra-consciousness, a meta-noesis?

If we needed a classical term to fix ideas, we could call all ‘non-human’ states of consciousness ‘demonic’ (I mean the word ‘demonic’ in the sense of the ‘daimon’, the Demon or the ‘Genius’ of Socrates)ⁱⁱⁱ .

Following in the footsteps of Hesiod and Homer, we could also describe these states as ‘divine’, giving this term the meaning of a projection of everything in the human being that tends towards the supra-human. Mythologies take it for granted that there are other types of consciousness than simply human. They also show that man is not in reality only what he appears to be. In theory at least, he could potentially be ‘something else’. The mythologies suggest that the (provisional) awareness that human consciousness attains of itself and of the world in general is still far from being aware of all the potential that it actually possesses. Human consciousness sets before it and develops the destiny of ‘divine’ entities that serve as models, or rather paradigms. The gods it imagines are avatars of consciousness itself, figures of its potential states. These imagined divine entities project consciousness into a world beyond its grasp, but of which it is, if not the very author (since it is the poet who creates it), at least the fervent spectator – or sometimes, which amounts to almost the same thing, the fierce critic. Mythology and its colourful fictions show the human conscience that it can be entirely other than what it is, that it can continue its journey indefinitely, and that, by mobilising its intelligence and its will, it will be able to go beyond all the places and all the heavens, which are within it in potential, but not yet in deed.

From the very beginning of the history of mythology, and throughout its development, consciousness has been the willing prey of the power that inhabits it in secret, a power that is blind and incomprehensible, but whose potentialities the myths gradually reveal to it.

Mythological awareness, that is to say, man’s awareness of the essence of the mythology he constructs for himself, his awareness of what it can teach him about the deepest nature of human consciousness, his awareness that it can give him a glimpse of the abyss of his origins and make him guess at some unimaginable peaks yet to be reached, is not, as far as the beginnings are concerned, very clear. It is, in fact, intrinsically obscure, even when illuminated by the violent, crude construction of poets like Hesiod or Homer, or under the veil of the thunderous flashes of inspired texts (like the Veda, Genesis or the Prophets).

Mythological consciousness will understand itself better at the end of the mythological era, when the gods appear more as literary or spiritual fictions than as flesh-and-blood realities. It will understand itself better when the blind power that has long inspired it in singular souls, diverse peoples and specific cultures is finally itself surpassed by the awareness of a new era, a new ‘genesis’, more philosophical and more critical than Genesis. When the inevitable death of the myths and the gods that have sustained them occurs, a powerful fire and breath will spring forth. This new fire, this fresh breath, will bring to light in the awareness of all that mythology concealed beneath its lukewarm ashes and the phoenixes that begged to be born.

So human consciousness is never merely in an ‘original’ state. Mythology shows that it never ceases to constitute its own future. The original essence of human consciousness is to appear to be master of itself, master of the self. It seems to possess itself, to reign undivided over the inner self. It reigns over itself. It is both this inner self (noted A) and the consciousness (noted B) that it has of this A. Consciousness is this B which has this A in itself, as a kind of matter of its own, open to all kinds of possibilities, and in particular to the possibilities of being-other, to the perspectives of not ‘being-only-A’, but ‘being-B-considering-A’, or even ‘being-B-considering-that-not-A’, or ‘being-anything-other-than-A-or-not-A’, and which we could call C, or X or Z.

It would be tempting to use the metaphor of gender here, to create an image. Consciousness B of the inner self A could be compared to the detached, controlled, controlling consciousness of the masculine being, whereas the consciousness of ‘being able to be-other’ (C, X or Z) could be compared to that intuition and that specifically feminine power of desiring, conceiving and really carrying within oneself a being-other, for a time, before giving it a life of its own. It is undoubtedly artificial to make a clear distinction between the masculine being of consciousness (consciousness B that says it is and sees itself as conscious of A) and the feminine consciousness of ‘being-other’ (the feminine possibility of conceiving and carrying within itself a being-other). The masculine and feminine are not only separable, they are also united in consciousness, which is fundamentally androgynous in nature, both animus and anima, to use Jung’s terms.^iv

In all mythology, there are inflection points, key moments, caesuras, where meaning opens up and unfolds. For example, the sudden appearance of the character of Persephone forces Zeus himself to come out of his Olympus and forge a compromise between Demeter, the grieving mother, and the captor God, « the miserly Hades ».

From another point of view, not mythological but poetic, Persephone symbolises the light soul, seduced only by the scent of saffron, iris and narcissus, whose sweet perfume makes heaven, earth and sea smile.^v … According to Simone Weil’s frankly metaphysical interpretation of the myth of Persephone, « beauty is the most frequent trap used by God to open the soul to the breath from above. » ^vi

But how can we explain the universal silence that responded to the cries of distress of the raped and kidnapped virgin? Could it be that there are some « falls » from which there is no coming back, for they are the kind that elevate and unite the soul to the « living God » himself, and bind it to him like a bride to her husband: « The fragrance of the narcissus made the whole sky above smile, and the whole earth, and all the swelling of the sea. No sooner had the poor girl stretched out her hand than she was trapped. She had fallen into the hands of the living God. When she came out, she had eaten the pomegranate seed that bound her forever. She was no longer a virgin. She was the bride of God »^vii . For S. Weil, the subterranean world into which Persephone was dragged symbolises suffering, the pain of the soul, its atonement for an incomprehensible sin. The pomegranate seed is the seed of her renewed life and the promise of future metamorphoses, according to some invisible grace. For Schelling, on the other hand, Persephone represents the power of original consciousness. She is pure consciousness, virgin consciousness, but ravished, placed naked in the Divinity, hidden in a safe place. She is the consciousness on which God rests, the consciousness that founds him in the underworld of the Underworld. It embodies the subterranean interior, the innermost depths of divinity, its first hollow, its ancient crypt, above which cathedrals exult and harvests germinate.

It is consciousness sent to the world of the dead. There it withdraws, hides, merges and marries not the ‘living God’ invoked by Weil, but the God of the dead, the God of Hell, Hades, the taciturn brother of Zeus.

With the appearance of the pure virgin Persephone in the Underworld, the great story of mythology suddenly becomes aware of man’s still obscure impulses, his unfulfilled desires, his unacknowledged fears. The poet who sings of the love of the God of Death and the pure Persephone also realises that the mythology he invents can silence terrors and transport spirits. What dominated pre-mythological consciousness before him was the reign of the single, jealous, exclusive God – the God who, in order to remain unique, denied divinity to all the other gods. other « powers ». All these powers, including Wisdom or Intelligence, for example, or other Sefirot (to use a vocabulary that is more cabalistic than Hellenic), are not in themselves the true God, since only the one God is the true God. However, they are not ‘non-divine’ either, since they are admitted into His presence, and since they constitute avatars of that very Presence, the Shekhina, as the Jewish cabal alleges.

He is accompanied not only by his own Presence (Shekhina), as we have just said, but also by his Wisdom (Hokhmah) and his Spirit (Ruaḥ), according to Jewish Tradition, which, as we know, claims to be strictly monotheistic.

We could venture to assign a more abstract, more ‘structural’ role, signified by the conceptual triad of founding, separating and suturing, to the three divine powers just mentioned, which are apparently the most original, the most essential.^viii

The Presence of the divine corresponds to its immanent power, its capacity for foundation, which, after Creation, is embodied in a primordial, original foundation – Matter.

Divine Wisdom, whose primary image is that of the Wind (or also the Breath), can be compared to a power of spiration, aspiration or inspiration, whose structural role is that of Separation, or Tearing (between the Divine and the non-Divine, or between Spirit and Matter, allowing in both cases the advent of the Other).

Finally, the divine Spirit represents the power of the Suture. The age of the Spirit, yet to come, could be conceptualised as that of the great cosmic Repair (Tikkun ‘olam).

These powers, and perhaps others, have undoubtedly inhabited human consciousness for thousands of years. They can be interpreted as avatars or representations of the one God.

What dominates in the consciousness of the One is very different from what dominated in the consciousness of the God Pan, which the Greeks conceived in their time. Pan is the God who excludes nothing, who encompasses everything, and who is All, who is also in essence the true πᾶν, of philosophical and cosmological essence. It could be argued that the consciousness of the one God is in fact conscious only of a partial πᾶν, a πᾶν of circumstances, a divine πᾶν, certainly, but an exclusive πᾶν, a non-inclusive πᾶν, a ‘whole’ that is far from containing within itself everything that is not divine, still less everything that is anti-divine. In the absolute exclusivity of the God of origins, there is not much room for an Other Being, who would have absolute freedom to be other, to live a truly other life, that is, one that would not be woven from the very substance of the origin.

The exclusive situation given to the one God could not last forever, at least if we consider the poles of the Cosmos and the Anthropos, and their proper roles. The God of origins cannot remain unique and alone in origin. Nor can he remain unique and alone in consciousness or in nature. He must abandon himself, and allow himself to be surpassed by the creation of the World that he himself initiated; he must also abandon himself by allowing the consciousnesses that emerge from it to be, whatever their forms.

The question is, what are we really saying when we say that God abandons himself and allows himself to be surpassed?

Before being effectively surpassed, the Almighty God must have allowed himself to be made surpassable by some power, hidden within himself, but only asking to be raised to consciousness. He must have had the power to surpass himself, before being brought into the presence of this surpassing.

What was this power to surpass hidden in God? To answer that question, we would have to invent a myth that could evoke what came before the myths. Here’s a suggestion: the life of mankind before myth, before history, before the Law, was undoubtedly fleeting, wandering, nomadic, ephemeral. Man was always running, from near to far, in search of the open sea, within the limits of the limitless. The absence of any place in his consciousness was his ‘place’. He inhabited this wandering. Nomadism was his sojourn. A stranger to himself, he had no idea where he had come from or where he was going. On the run, he was always a migrant on the earth, moving endlessly and without consciousness, like a shooting star that soon disappeared. When consciousness finally began to make its movement felt in Man, he conceived the existence of a possible relationship between the wandering of his race and the movement of his thought, between his wandering and the race of his consciousness. He saw a link between movement, transport, wandering, and crossing, overcoming, emancipation. In other words, he saw a resemblance between movement on the earth and the movement of the spirit in consciousness. This image never left him. The myths that his consciousness began to invent, for example, were based not on the near, but on the far, the intangible, the Sky. In the immense heavens, whether at night or during the day, movements seem to obey determined laws. For the conscience, agitated by constant mobility and anxiety at all times, the regular movement of the stars contrasted with the irregular wanderings of the planets and the random fall of meteors. For a long time, the conscience pondered this dual mode of movement, one in accordance with the rules, the other without them.

Mythology also appropriated this double movement. The orderly, regular movement of the stars and constellations in a fixed sky was the image of the One God. But the erratic movement of the planets and meteors also revealed another, hidden power of which the One God was seemingly unaware.

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iF.W.J. Schelling. Essays. Philosophy and Religion (1804). Translated by S. Jankélévitch, Aubier, 1946, p.180

iiE. Renan. « Prayer on the Acropolis ». Souvenirs of Childhood and Youth. Calmann-Lévy, 1883, p.72

iiiCf. Plutarch. « On the Demon of Socrates », Moral Works. Translation from the Greek by Ricard. Tome III , Paris, 1844, p.73

iv « Consciousness is a kind of androgynous nature, » says Schelling, who, more than a century before C.-G. Jung, prefigured the dual nature of consciousness as animus and anima. Cf. F.-W. Schelling. Philosophy of Mythology. Translated from the German by Alain Pernet. Ed. Jérôme Millon. Grenoble. 2018, Lesson IX, p.104.

vThe Homeric Hymn to Demeter gives this image:

« First I’ll sing of Demeter with her beautiful hair, venerable goddess, and of her light-footed daughter, once taken by Hades. Zeus, king of lightning, granted her this when, far from her mother with the golden sword, goddess of yellow harvests, playing with the maidens of the ocean, dressed in flowing tunics, she was looking for flowers in a soft meadow and picking the rose, the saffron, the sweet violets, the iris, the hyacinth and the narcissus. By the advice of Zeus, to seduce this lovable virgin, the earth, favourable to the avaricious Hades, gave birth to the narcissus, that charming plant admired equally by men and immortals: from its root rise a hundred flowers; the vast sky, the fertile earth and the waves of the sea smile at its sweet perfumes. The enchanted Goddess snatches this precious ornament from her two hands; immediately the earth opens up in the Nysian field, and the son of Cronos, King Hades, rides forth on his immortal horses. Despite her groans, the god seizes the young virgin and carries her away in a chariot glittering with gold. But she cried out loudly to her father, Zeus, the first and most powerful of the gods: no immortal, no man, none of her companions could hear her voice ».

viSimone Weil, Attente de Dieu, Fayard, 1977, p. 152-153.

viiSimone Weil, Attente de Dieu, Fayard, 1977, p. 152-153.

viiiThis triad is reminiscent of the Indo-European tripartite functions famously suggested by G. Dumézil, and can be found in the organisation of medieval society, which distinguished between oratores, bellatores and laboratores, those who prayed, those who fought and those who worked.