In archaic and classical Greece, the art of divination, the art that deals with everything « that is, that will be and that was »,i was considered knowledge par excellence. In Plutarch’s On the E of Delphi,ii Ammonios says that this knowledge belongs to the domain of the gods, and particularly to Apollo, the master of Delphi, the God called ‘philosophos’. The sun, reputed to see and know everything and illuminate whoever it wished, was merely his symbol, and Apollo, son of Zeus, was really the mantic God in essence. However, at Delphi, another son of Zeus, Dionysus, was also involved in the art of mantics, competing with Apollo in this field.iii Dionysus, ever-changing, multi-faceted and ecstatic, was the opposite and complementary type of Apollo, who was the image of the One, equal to himself, serene and immobile.
In Homeric Greece, an augur like Calchas tried to hear divine messages by distinguishing and interpreting signs and clues in the flight of birds or the entrails of sacrificial animals. He sought to discover and interpret what the Gods were willing to reveal about their plans and intentions. But, at Delphi, the divinatory art of Dionysus and Apollo was of a very different nature. It was no longer a question of looking for signs, but of listening to the very words of the God. Superhuman powers, divine or demonic, could reveal the future in the words of the Greek language, in cadenced hexameters. These powers could also act without intermediaries in the souls of certain men with special dispositions, enabling them to articulate the divine will in their own language. These individuals, chosen to be the spokespersons of the Gods, could be diviners, sibyls, the « inspired » (entheoi), but also heroes, illustrious figures, poets, philosophers, kings and military leaders. All these inspired people shared one physiological characteristic, the presence in their organs of a mixture of black bile, melancholikè krasisiv .
In Timaeus, Plato distinguished in the body a « kind of soul » which is « like a wild beast » and which must be « kept tied to its trough » in « the intermediate space between the diaphragm and the border of the navel »v. This « wild » soul, placed as far as possible from the rational, intelligent soul, the one that deliberates and judges free from passions, is covered by the liver. The ‘children of God’, entrusted by God ‘the Father’‘viwith thetask of begetting living mortals,vii had also installed the ‘organ of divination’ in the liver, as a form of compensation for the weakness of human reason. « A sufficient proof that it is indeed to the infirmity of human reason that God has given the gift of divination: no man in his right mind can achieve inspired and truthful divination, but the activity of his judgement must be impeded by sleep or illness, or diverted by some kind of enthusiasm. On the contrary, it is up to the man of sound mind, after recalling them, to gather together in his mind the words uttered in the dream or in the waking hours by the divinatory power that fills with enthusiasm, as well as the visions that it has caused to be seen; to discuss them all by reasoning in order to bring out what they may mean and for whom, in the future, the past or the present, bad or good. As for the person who is in the state of ‘trance’ and who still remains there, it is not his role to judge what has appeared to him or been spoken by him (…). It is for this reason, moreover, that the class of prophets, who are the superior judges of inspired oracles, has been instituted by custom; these people are themselves sometimes called diviners; but this is to completely ignore the fact that, of enigmatic words and visions, they are only interpreters, and in no way diviners, and that ‘prophets of divinatory revelations’ is what would best suit their name. »viii
Human reason may be « infirm », but it is nonetheless capable of receiving divine revelation. Soothsayers, oracles, prophets or visionaries are all in the same boat: they must submit to the divine will, which may give them the grace of a revelation, or deny it to them.
Plutarch refers to the fundamental distinction Homer makes between soothsayers, augurs, priests and other aruspices on the one hand, and on the other, the chosen few who are allowed to speak directly with the gods. « Homer seems to me to have been aware of the difference between men in this respect. Among the soothsayers, he calls some augurs, others priests or aruspices; there are others who, according to him, receive knowledge of the future from the gods themselves. It is in this sense that he says:
« The soothsayer Helenus, inspired by the gods,
Had their wishes before his eyes.
Then Helenus said: ‘Their voice was heard by me’. »
Kings and army generals pass on their orders to strangers by signals of fire, by heralds or by the sound of trumpets; but they communicate them themselves to their friends and to those who have their confidence. In the same way, the divinity himself speaks to only a small number of men, and even then only very rarely; for all the others, he makes his wishes known to them by signs that have given rise to the art of divination. There are very few men whom the gods honour with such a favour, whom they make perfectly happy and truly divine. Souls freed from the bonds of the body and the desires of generation become genies charged, according to Hesiod, with watching over mankind ».ix
How did the divinity reveal itself? There is a detailed description of how Socrates received the revelation. According to Plutarch, Socrates’ demon was not a ‘vision’, but the sensation of a voice, or the understanding of some words that struck him in an extraordinary way; as in sleep, one does not hear a distinct voice, but only believes one hears words that strike only the inner senses. These kinds of perceptions form dreams, because of the tranquillity and calm that sleep gives the body. But during the day, it is very difficult to keep the soul attentive to divine warnings. The tumult of the passions that agitate us, the multiplied needs that we experience, render us deaf or inattentive to the advice that the gods give us. But Socrates, whose soul was pure and free from passions and had little to do with the body except for indispensable needs, easily grasped their signs. They were probably produced, not by a voice or a sound, but by the word of his genius, which, without producing any external sound, struck the intelligent part of his soul by the very thing it was making known to him.x So there was no need for images or voices. It was thought alone that received knowledge directly from God, and fed it into Socrates’ consciousness and will.xi
The encounter between God and the man chosen for revelation takes the form of an immaterial colloquy between divine intelligence and human understanding. Divine thoughts illuminate the human soul, without the need for voice or words. God’s spirit reaches the human spirit as light reflects on an object, and his thoughts shine in the souls of those who catch a glimpse of that light.xii Revelation passes from soul to soul, from spirit to spirit, and in this case, from God to Socrates: it came from within the very heart of Socrates’ consciousness.
iiiMacrobius, Sat. 1, 18, quoted by Ileana Chirassi Colombo, in Le Dionysos oraculaire, Kernos, 4 (1991), p. 205-217.
ivRobert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, Oxford, 1621 (Original title: The Anatomy of Melancholy, What it is: With all the Kinds, Causes, Symptoms, Prognostickes, and Several Cures of it. In Three Maine Partitions with their several Sections, Members, and Subsections. Philosophically, Medicinally, Historically, Opened and Cut Up)
xi« But the divine understanding directs a well-born soul, reaching it by thought alone, without needing an external voice to strike it. The soul yields to this impression, whether God restrains or excites its will; and far from feeling constrained by the resistance of the passions, it shows itself supple and manageable, like a rein in the hands of a squire. » Plutarch. « On the Demon of Socrates », Moral Works. Translation from the Greek by Ricard. Tome III , Paris, 1844, p.105
xii« This movement by which the soul becomes tense, animated, and, through the impulse of desires, draws the body towards the objects that have struck the intelligence, is not difficult to understand: the thought conceived by the understanding makes it act easily, without needing an external sound to strike it. In the same way it is easy, it seems to me, for a superior and divine intelligence to direct our understanding, and to strike it with an external voice, in the same way that one mind can reach another, in much the same way as light is reflected on objects. We communicate our thoughts to each other by means of speech, as if groping in the dark. But the thoughts of demons, which are naturally luminous, shine on the souls of those who are capable of perceiving their light, without the use of sound or words ». Ibid, p.106
There were no ‘prophets’ in archaic and classical Greece, at least if we take this term in the sense of the nebîîm of Israel. On the other hand, there was a profusion of soothsayers, magicians, bacchae, pythias, sibyls and, more generally, a multitude of enthusiasts and initiates into the Mysteriesi … Auguste Bouché-Leclercq, author of a Histoire de la divination dans l’antiquité, emphasises the underlying unity of the sensibilities expressed through these various names: « The mystical effervescence which, with elements borrowed from the cult of the Nymphs, the religion of Dionysus and that of Apollo, had created prophetic enthusiasm, spread in all directions: it gave rise, wherever the cults generating divinatory intuition met, to the desire to inscribe in local traditions, as far back in time as possible and sheltered from any control, memories similar to those adorned by the oracle of Pytho. We can therefore consider these three instruments of the revealed word – pythias, chresmologists and sibyls – as having been created at the same time and as stemming from the same religious movement ».ii
However, it is important to appreciate the significant differences between these « three instruments of the revealed word ». For example, unlike the Pythia of Delphi, the sibyls were not linked to a particular sanctuary or a specific population. They were wanderers, individualists, free women. The character that best defined the sibyl, in comparison with the regular, appointed priestesses, was her « sombre, melancholy temperament, for she was dispossessed of her human and feminine nature, while possessed by the God ».iii The state of divine possession seemed to be a constant part of her nature, whereas the Pythia was visited only occasionally by inspiration.
Heraclitus was the first classical author to mention the Sibyl and the Bacchanalia. He left behind a few fragments that were clearly hostile to Dionysian orgies. He condemns the exaltation and exultation of excess because, as a philosopher of the balance of opposites, he knows that they multiply the deleterious effects and ultimately lead to destruction and death. However, two of his fragments exude a curious ambiguity, a kind of hidden, latent sympathy for the figure of the Sibyl. « The Sibyl, neither smiling, nor adorned, nor perfumed, with her delirious mouth, making herself heard, crossed a thousand years with her voice, thanks to the God ».iv The Sibyl does not smile because she is constantly in the grip of the God. This « possession » is an unbearable burden for her. Her innermost consciousness is crushed by the divine presence. A totally passive instrument of the God who controls and dominates her, she has neither the desire nor even the strength to wear make-up or perfume. In contrast, the priestesses of the temples and official sanctuaries, fully aware of their role and social rank, were obliged to make an effort to represent themselves and put on a show.
The Sibyl belongs entirely to God, even if she denies it. She is surrendered to him, in a trance, body and soul. She has broken all ties with the world, except that of publicly delivering the divine word. It is because she has surrendered herself entirely to the divine spirit that it can command her voice, her language, and make her utter the unheard of, say the unforeseeable, explore the depths of the distant future. In the time of an oracle, the Sibyl can cross a thousand years in spirit, by the grace of God. All the divine power, present or future, is revealed in her. We know, or we sense, that her words will prove far wiser in their ‘madness’ than all human wisdom, though perhaps only in the distant future.
The Pythia of Delphi was devoted to Apollo. But the Sibyl, in her fierce independence, had no exclusive divine allegiance. She might be in contact with other gods, Dionysus, Hades or Zeus himself. According to Pausaniasv , the Sibyl, Herophilia, prophesied to the Delphians to reveal to them the « mind of Zeus », without worrying about Apollo, the tutelary god of Delphi, towards whom she harboured an old grudge.
In fact, we already knew that these different names for the God covered the same mystery. Dionysus, Hades or Zeus are « the same », because everything divine is « the same ». « If it wasn’t for Dionysus that they were doing the procession and sing the hymn to the shameful parts, they would do the most shameless things. But he is the same as Hades and Dionysus, the one for whom they rave and lead the bacchanal. »vi
Heraclitus knows and affirms that Hades and Dionysus are « the same » God, because in their profound convergence, and despite their apparent opposition (Hades, god of death / Dionysus, god of life), their intrinsic unity and common essence emerge, and their true transcendence reveals itself. Those who live only in Dionysian enthusiasm, in bloody bacchanals, are inevitably doomed to death. On the other hand, those who know how to dominate and ride ecstasy can go far beyond the loss of self-consciousness. They can surpass even the initiated consciousness of the mystics, reach a transcendent level of revelation, and finally surpass the Mystery as such.
The Dionysian bacchanals, enthusiastic and ecstatic, ended wit the death of the victims, who were torn apart, butchered and devoured. Heraclitus recognises In ‘Dionysus/Hades’, a dual essence, two ‘opposites’ that are also ‘the same’, enabling us to transcend death through a genuine ecstasy that is not corporeal or sensual, but intuitive and spiritual. Heraclitus rejects the excesses of Dionysian ecstasy and the death that puts an end to them. He is fascinated by the Sibyl, for she alone, and singularly alone, stands alive and ecstatic at the crossroads of life and death. While she is awake, the Sibyl sees death still at work: « Death is all we see, awake… ».vii Made a Sibyl by the God, and possessed by him against her will, she is, in a way, dead to herself and her femininity. She allows herself to be passively « taken » by God, she abandons herself, to allow the life of God to live in her. Living in God by dying to herself, she also dies of this divine life, by giving life to his words. Heraclitus seems to have drawn inspiration from the Sibyl in this fragment: « Immortals, mortals, mortals, immortals; living from those death, dying from those life ».viii Given its unique position as an intermediary between the living and the dead, between the divine and the human, it has been said that the Sibylline type was « one of the most original and noble creations of religious sentiment in Greece ».ix In ancient Greece, the Sibyl certainly represented a new state of consciousness, which it is important to highlight.
Isidore of Seville reports that, according to the best-informed authors, there were historically ten sibyls. The first appeared in Persia, or Chaldeax , the second in Libya, the third in Delphi, the fourth was Cimmerian from Italy. The fifth, « the noblest and most honoured of them all », was Eritrean and called Herophilia, and is thought to be of Babylonian origin. The sixth lived on the island of Samos, the seventh in the city of Cumae in Campania. The eighth came from the plains of Troy and radiated out over the Hellespont, the ninth was Phrygian and the tenth Tiburtine [i.e. operating in Tivoli, the ancient name of Tibur, in the province of Rome].xi Isidore also points out that, in the Aeolian dialect, God was said to be Σιός (Sios) and the word βουλή meant ‘spirit’. From this he deduced that sibyl, in Greek Σιϐυλλα, would be the Greek name for a function, not a proper name, and would be equivalent to Διὸς βουλή or θεοϐουλή (‘the spirit of God’). This etymology was also adopted by several Ancients (Varron, Lactantius,…). But this was not the opinion of everyone. Pausanias, noting that the prophetess Herophilia, cited by Plutarchxii and, as we have just seen, by Isidore, was called ‘Sibyl’ by the Libyansxiii , suggests that Σιϐυλλα, Sibyl, would be the metathesis or anagram of Λίϐυσσα, Libyssa, ‘the Libyan’, which would be an indication of the Libyan origin of the word sibyl. This name was later altered to Elyssa, which became the proper name of the Libyan sibylxiv . There have been many other etymologies in the past, more or less far-fetched or contrived, which preferred to turn to Semitic, Hebrew or Arabic roots, without winning conviction. In short, the problem of the etymology of sibyl is « for the moment a hopeless problem »xv . The history of the sibyl’s name, and the variety of places where it has been used around the Mediterranean and in the Middle East, bear witness to its influence on people’s minds, and to the strength of its personality.
But who was she really?
The Sibyl was first and foremost a woman’s voice in a trance, a voice that seemed to emanate from an abstract, invisible being of divine origin. Witnesses on the lookout wrote down everything that came out of this ‘delirious mouth’. Collections of Sibylline oracles were produced, free from any priestly intervention or established political or religious interests, at least at the origin of the Sibylline phenomenon. Much later, because of its centuries-long success, it was used to serve specific or apologetic interests.xvi In essence, the Sibyl manifested a pure prophetic spirit, contrasting with the conventional, regulated techniques of divination emanating from priestly guilds duly supervised by the powers of the day. It highlighted the structural antagonism between free inspiration, expressing the words of God himself without mediation or pretense, and the deductive divinatory practices of clerical oracles, taking advantage of the privileges of the priests attached to the Temples. Sibylline manticism could also be interpreted as a reaction against the monopoly of the Apollonian clergy, the lucrative privileges of professional diviners and competition from other ‘chresmologists’, whether Dionysian or Orphic.
The latent hostility between the Sibyl and Apollo can be explained by the constant efforts of the Sibyl to take away from the Apollonian priests the monopoly of intuitive and ceremonial divination and replace it with the testimony of direct revelation.
But there is another, more fundamental, and more psychological reading. The Sibyl is a nymph enslaved, submissive to the God. Her intelligence is literally « possessed » by Apollo, she is « furious » about it, but her heart is not takenxvii . In her trance, the Sibyl is dominated by what I would call her « unhappy consciousness ». We know that Hegel defines unhappy consciousness as consciousness that is at once « unique, undivided » and « double »xviii .
The Sibyl is ‘unhappy’ because she is aware that a consciousness other than her own is present within her, in this case that of God. What’s worse, it’s a God she doesn’t love, and who has taken complete possession of her consciousness. And her consciousness is as aware as she is ofthese two consciousnesses atonce.
If you feel that referring to Hegel is too anachronistic, you can turn to authors from the 3rd century BC: Arctinos of Miletus, Lesches of Lesbos, Stasinos, or Hegesinos of Cyprusxix who portrayed Cassandra as the type of unhappy, sad, abandoned sibyl who was thought to be mad. Cassandra became the archetypal model of the sibyl, both messenger and victim of Apollo. According to the myth, Cassandra (or ‘Alexandra’, a name which means « she who drives men away or repels them »xx ) was given the gift of divination and foreknowledge by the grace of Apollo, who fell in love with her and wished to possess her. However, having accepted this gift, Cassandra was unwilling to give him her virginity in return, and « repulsed » him. Dejected by this refusal, he spat in her mouth, condemning her to an inability to express herself intelligibly and never to be believed. Lycophron, in his poem Alexandra, describes Cassandra as « the Sibyl’s interpreter », speaking in « confused, muddled, unintelligible words »xxi . The expression « the Sibyl’s interpreter » found in several translations is itself an interpretation… In Lycophron’s original text, we read: ἢ Μελαγκραίρας κόπις, literally « the sacrificial knife (κόπις) of Melankraira (Μελαγκραίρα) ». The sacrificial knife, as an instrument of divination, can be interpreted metonymically as ‘interpretation’ of the divine message, or as ‘the interpreter’ herself. Melankraira is one of the Sibyl’s nicknames. It literally means « black head ». This nickname is no doubt explained by the obscurity of her oracles or the unintelligibility of her words. A. Bouché-Leclercq hypothesises that Lycophron, in using this nickname, had been reminded of Aristotle’s doctrine associating the prophetic faculty with « melancholy », i.e. the « black bile », the melancholikè krasis xxii, whose role in visionaries, prophets and other « enthusiasts » has already beenmentioned.
We could perhaps also see here, more than two millennia ahead of time, a sort of anticipation of the idea of the unconscious, as the « black head » could be associated by metonymy with the idea of « black » thought, i.e. « obscure » thought, and thus with the psychology of the depths.
In any case, Cassandra’s confusion of expression and her inability to make herself understood were a consequence of Apollo’s vengeance, as was her condemnation to being able to predict the future only in terms of misfortune, death and ruin.xxiii
Cassandra, the « knife » of the Melankraira, sung by Lycophron (320 BC – 280 BC) had then become the poetic reincarnation of a much older archetype. When the religious current of Orphism, which emerged in the 6th century BC, began to gain momentum in the 5th century BC, authors opposed to the Orphics were already saying that the Sibyl was « older than Orpheus » to refute the latter’s claims. It was even possible to trace the Sibyl back to before the birth of Zeus himself, and therefore before all the Olympian gods… The Sibyl was identified with Amalthea, a nymph who, according to Cretan and Pelasgian traditions, had been Zeus’ nurse. The choice of Amalthea was very fortunate, because it gave the Sibyl an age that exceeded that of the Olympian gods themselves. Secondly, it did not prevent us from recognising the Ionian origin of the Sibyl, Amalthea being linked indirectly, through the Cretan Ida, to the Trojan « Ida », where Rhea, the mother of Zeus, also dwelled. In other words, Amalthea was linked to the Phrygian Kybele or the Hellenised Great Mother.xxiv I think it is essential to emphasise that this ascent to the origins of the gods reveals that gods as lofty as Apollo and even Zeus also had a ‘mother’ and a ‘nurse’. Their mothers or nurses were, therefore, before them, because they gave them lifexxv .
The awareness of a pre-existing anteriority to the divine (in its mythical aspect) can also be interpreted as a radical advance in consciousness : i.e. as the symptom of a surpassing of mythological thought by itself, – as a surpassing by human consciousness of any prior representation on what constitutes the essence of the Gods.
This surpassing highlights an essential characteristic of consciousness, that of being an obscure power, or a power emanating from the Obscure, as the Sibyl’s name Melankraira explicitly indicates. Sibyl’s consciousness discovers that she must confront at once both the pervasive, dominant presence of the God, and her own, obscure, abyssmal depth. She discovers that she can free herself from the former, and that she can also surpass herself, and all her own profound darkness.
____________
iHeraclitus, Fragment 14: « Wanderers in the night: magi, bacchants, bacchantes, initiates. In things considered by men as Mysteries, they are initiated into impiety. »
iiA. Bouché-Leclercq, Histoire de la divination dans l’antiquité, Tome II, Ed. Ernest Leroux, Paris, 1880, p.142
iiiMarcel Conche, in Heraclitus, Fragments, PUF, 1987, p. 154, note 1
ixA. Bouché-Leclercq, Histoire de la divination dans l’antiquité, Tome II, Ed. Ernest Leroux, Paris, 1880, p.133
xIt should be noted that three centuries after Isidore of Seville (~565-636), the Encyclopaedia Souda (10th century), while repeating the rest of the information provided by Isidore, nevertheless states that the first Sibyl was among the Hebrews and that she bore the name Sambethe, according to certain sources: « She is called Hebrew by some, also Persian, and she is called by the proper name Sambethe from the race of the most blessed Noah; she prophesied about those things said with regard to Alexander [sc. the Great] of Macedon; Nikanor, who wrote a Life of Alexander, mentions her;[1] she also prophesied countless things about the lord Christ and his advent. But the other [Sibyls] agree with her, except that there are 24 books of hers, covering every race and region. As for the fact that her verses are unfinished and unmetrical, the fault is not that of the prophetess but of the shorthand-writers, unable to keep up with the rush of her speech or else uneducated and illiterate; for her remembrance of what she had said faded along with the inspiration. And on account of this the verses appear incomplete and the train of thought clumsy — even if this happened by divine management, so that her oracles would not be understood by the unworthy masses. [Note] that there were Sibyls in different places and times and they numbered ten.[2] First then was the Chaldaean Sibyl, also [known as] Persian, who was called Sambethe by name. Second was the Libyan. Third was the Delphian, the one born in Delphi. Fourth was the Italian, born in Italian Kimmeria. Fifth was the Erythraian, who prophesied about the Trojan war. Sixth was the Samian, whose proper name was Phyto; Eratosthenes wrote about her.[3] Seventh was the Cumaean, also [called] Amalthia and also Hierophile. Eighth was the Hellespontian, born in the village of Marmissos near the town of Gergition — which were once in the territory of the Troad — in the time of Solon and Cyrus. Ninth was the Phrygian. Tenth was the Tiburtine, Abounaia by name. They say that the Cumaean brought nine books of her own oracles to Tarquinus Priscus, then the king of the Romans; and when he did not approve, she burned two books. [Note] that Sibylla is a Roman word, interpreted as « prophetess », or rather « seer »; hence female seers were called by this one name. Sibyls, therefore, as many have written, were born in different times and places and numbered ten. »
xiIsidore of Seville. The Etymologies. VIII,viii. Cambridge University Press, 2006, p. 181
xiiPlutarch. « Why the Pythia no longer renders her oracles in verse ». Moral works. Translation from the Greek by Ricard. Tome II , Paris, 1844, p.268
xvA. Bouché-Leclercq, Histoire de la divination dans l’antiquité, Tome II, Publisher Ernest Leroux, Paris, 1880, p.139, Note 1.
xviThe article « sibyl » in the Thesaurus of the Encyclopaedia Universalis (Paris, 1985) states, for example, on page 2048: « The Jewish sibyl corresponds to the literature of the Sibylline Oracles. The Hellenistic Jews, like the Christians, reworked the existing Sibylline Books, and then composed their own. As early as the 2nd century, the Jews of Alexandria used the sibylline genre as a means of propaganda. Twelve books of these collections of oracles are in our possession (…) The third book of the Sibylline Oracles is the most important of the collection, from which it is the source and model; it is also the most typically Jewish. A pure Homeric pastiche, it reflects Greek traditions, beliefs and ideas (Hesiod’s myth of the races) and Eastern ones (the ancient Babylonian doctrine of the cosmic year). Despite this cultural gap, it remains a Jewish work of apocalypse. It is similar to the Ethiopian Book of Enoch and the Book of Jubilees. Israel’s monotheistic credo runs throughout.
xviiPausanias, X,12,2-3 : « [ the sibyl] Herophilus flourished before the siege of Troy, for she announced in her oracles that Helen would be born and brought up in Sparta to the misfortune of Asia and Europe, and that Troy would be taken by the Greeks because of her. The Delians recall a hymn by this woman about Apollo; in her verses she calls herself not only Herophilus but also Diana; in one place she claims to be Apollo’s lawful wife, in another her sister and then her daughter; she says all this as if she were furious and possessed by the god. In another part of her oracles, she claims that she was born of an immortal mother, one of the nymphs of Mount Ida, and of a mortal father. Here are her expressions: I was born of a race half mortal, half divine; my mother is immortal, my father lived on coarse food. Through my mother I come from Mount Ida; my homeland is the red Marpesse, consecrated to the mother of the gods and watered by the river Aïdonéus« .
xviiiThe unhappy consciousness remains « as an undivided, unique consciousness, and it is at the same time a doubled consciousness; itself is the act of one self-consciousness looking into another, and itself is both; and the unity of the two is also its own essence; but for itself it is not yet this very essence, it is not yet the unity of the two self-consciousnesses… ». G.W.F. Hegel. The Phenomenology of Spirit. Translated by Jean Hyppolite. Aubier. 1941, p.177
xixQuoted in A. Bouché-Leclercq, Histoire de la divination dans l’antiquité, Tome II, Éditeur Ernest Leroux, Paris, 1880, p.148.
xxThe name Alexandra (Alex-andra) can be interpreted as meaning « she who repels or pushes aside men » from the verb άλεξω, to push aside, to repel, and from ἀνήρ, man (as opposed to woman). Cf. Pa ul Wathelet, Les Troyens de l’Iliade. Mythe et Histoire, Paris, les Belles lettres, 1989.
xxi« From the interior of her prison there still escaped a last Siren song which, from her groaning heart, like a maenad of Claros, like the interpreter of the Sibyl, daughter of Neso, like another Sphinx, she exhaled in confused, muddled, unintelligible words. And I have come, O my king, to repeat to you the words of the young prophetess ». Lycophron. Alexandra. Translation by F.D. Dehèque. Ed. A. Durand and F. Klincksieck. Paris, 1853
xxiiRobert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, Oxford, 1621 (Original title: The Anatomy of Melancholy, What it is: With all the Kinds, Causes, Symptoms, Prognostickes, and Several Cures of it. In Three Maine Partitions with their several Sections, Members, and Subsections. Philosophically, Medicinally, Historically, Opened and Cut Up)
xxiii« In Cassandra, the prototype of the sibyls, mantic inspiration, while deriving from Apollo, bears the mark of a fierce and unequal struggle between the god and his interpreter. What’s more, not only was Cassandra pursued by Apollo’s vengeance, but she could only foretell misfortune. All she could see in the future was the ruin of her homeland, the bloody demise of her people and, at the end of her horizon, the tragic conclusion of her own destiny. Hence the sombre character and harshness of the Sibylline prophecies, which hardly foretold anything but calamities, and which undoubtedly owed to this pessimistic spirit the faith with which Heraclitus honoured them ». A. Bouché-Leclercq, Histoire de la divination dans l’antiquité, Tome II, Éditeur Ernest Leroux, Paris, 1880, p.149
xxivA. Bouché-Leclercq, Histoire de la divination dans l’antiquité, Tome II, Éditeur Ernest Leroux, Paris, 1880, p.160
xxvZeus is begotten by his mother and nourished by the milk of his nurse, which can be represented by this diagram: (Cybèle) = Rhéa → Zeus ← Sibylle = (Almathéa)
Consciousness, obviously, is capable of grasping abstract, immaterial ideas – for example, the principle of non-contradiction or the concept of universal attraction. Can we deduce from this that consciousness is itself immaterial in nature? Materialists deny it. Consciousness is not immaterial, they say; it is only ever the material emanation of the material substance of material bodies. But then, how can we explain the fact that purely ‘material’ entities are capable of conceiving pure abstractions that are essentially unconnected with the material world? How could a consciousness that is only ‘material’ link up and interact adequately with all the beings of unknown essences that make up the world, with the various natures that surround or subsume it? What could be the stuff of the links between a ‘material’ consciousness with beings a priori totally unrelated to its own ‘matter’? In particular, how can a ‘material’ consciousness, confined in a ‘material’ body, interact effectively with other consciousnesses, themselves confined in other bodies? How can we imagine that a consciousness could link up (materially) with other beings existing in act, or in potential, throughout the world, and that it could penetrate (materially) their essence?
All these difficult questions were dealt with by Kant in his lively little work, Dreams of a Man Who Sees Spiritsi. But Kant does not adopt a materialist point of view. Quite the contrary. In this book, he asserts that consciousness (which he calls the ‘soul’) is immaterial, just as what he calls the ‘intelligible world’ (mundus intelligibilis, the world of ideas and thoughts), – immaterial. This ‘intelligible world’ is the proper ‘place’ of the thinking self, because the latter can go there at will, detaching itself from the material, sensible world. Kant also asserts that human consciousness, although immaterial, can be linked to a body, the body of the self, from which it receives material impressions and sensations from the organs of which it is composed. Consciousness therefore participates in two worlds, the material and sensible world and the immaterial and intelligible world, – the world of the visible and that of the invisible.
The representation that consciousness has of itself as being a ‘spirit’ (Geist), when it considers itself in its relations with other consciousnesses, is quite different from the representation it has when it sees itself as being attached to a body. In both cases, it is undoubtedly the same subject who belongs at the same time to the sensible world and to the intelligible world; but it is not the same person, because the representations of the sensible world have nothing in common with the representations of the intelligible world, says Kant. What I think of myself as a living, feeling, carnal being is not on the same level, and has nothing to do with my representation as (pure) consciousness.
Conversely, the representations that I may hold of the intelligible world, however clear and intuitive they may be, are not sufficient to give me a representation of my consciousness as a human being. The representation of oneself as (pure) consciousness can be acquired to a certain extent by reasoning or induction, but it is not naturally an intuitive notion, and it is not obtained through experience.ii
Consciousness does indeed belong to a single subject, who participates in both the « sensible world » and the « intelligible world », but consciousness is also twofold. It is not « the same person » when it represents itself as « pure consciousness » and when it represents itself as « attached to a (human) body ». The fact that it is not « the same » in these two cases implies an inherent, profound duality – consciousness is a dual being. Here, for the first time, Kant explicitly introduces the expression « duality of the person » (or « duality of the soul in relation to the body »iii). This duality can be inferred from the following observation. Some philosophers believe they can refer to the state of deep sleep when they want to prove the reality of ‘obscure representations’. We can only observe that they are no longer clearly present in us when we wake up, but not that they were really ‘dark’ when we were asleep.
For example, we might well think that they were actually clearer and more extensive than the clearest representations we have in the waking state. This is indeed what we might expect of consciousness when it is perfectly at rest, and separated from the external senses, Kant concludes.
Hannah Arendt found this particular idea ‘bizarre’iv, without further explaining or justifying her trenchant judgment. Perhaps it seems indeed ‘bizarre’ to assert that consciousness thinks more clearly and more extensively in deep sleep, and that it is then more ‘active’ than in the waking state? Or does it seem ‘bizarre’ to present consciousness not as ‘one’ but as ‘two’, this duality implying a contradiction with the unified idea that consciousness might a priori have of its own nature? Consciousness feels the intrinsic unity it possesses as a ‘subject’, and it also feels, as a ‘person’, endowed with a double perspective, one sensible and the other intelligible. It may therefore seem ‘strange’ that the soul should think of itself as both one and two, – ‘one’ (as subject) and ‘two’ (as person).
This intrinsic duality creates a distance between consciousness and itself, an inner gap within itself. It reflects a gap between the ‘waking’ state (where the feeling of duality is revealed) and the ‘deep sleep’ state, where the feeling of duality evaporates, revealing the true nature of consciousness.v
To ward off this ‘oddity’, Hannah Arendt proposed an explanation, or rather a paraphrase of Kant’s note: « Kant compares the state of the thinking self to a deep sleep in which the senses are at complete rest. It seems to him that, during sleep, the ideas ‘may have been clearer and more extensive than the clearer ideas of the waking state’, precisely because ‘the sensation of man’s body was not included in it’. And when we wake up, none of these ideas remain ».vi What seems ‘bizarre’ to Hannah Arendt, we then understand, is that after consciousness has been exposed to ‘clear and extensive’ ideas, none of this remains when it wakes up. Awakening erases all traces of the activity of consciousness (or of the ‘soul’) in the deep sleep of the body. Even if there is nothing left, there is at least the memory of an immaterial activity, which, unlike activities in the material world, does not encounter any resistance or inertia. There also remains the obscure memory of what was then clear and intense… There remains the (confused) memory of having experienced a feeling of total freedom of thought, freed from all contingencies. All these memories cannot be forgotten, even if the ideas conceived at the time seem to escape us. It is possible to conjecture that the accumulation of these kinds of memories, these kinds of experiences, will end up reinforcing the idea of the existence of a consciousness that is independent (of the body). By extension, and by analogy, these memories and experiences of deep sleep constitute in themselves an experience of ‘spirituality’, and reinforce the idea of a spirit world, an ‘intelligible’ world, separate from the material world. The consciousness (or spirit) that becomes aware of its power to think ‘clearly’ (during the body’s deep sleep) also begins to think of itself as being able to distance itself from the world around it, and from the matter that constitutes it. But its power to think ‘clearly’ does not allow it to leave this world, nor to transcend it (since waking up always happens – and with it forgetting the ‘clear’ thoughts of deep sleep).
What does this sense of distance from the world bring to consciousness?
Consciousness can see that reality is woven from appearances (and illusions). In spite of the very profusion of these appearances (and illusions), reality paradoxically remains stable, it continues unceasingly, it lasts in any case long enough for us to be led to recognise it not as a total illusion, but as an object, and even the object par excellence, offered to our gaze as conscious subjects.
If we do not feel able to consider reality as an object, we may at least be inclined to consider it as a state, durable, imposing its obviousness, unlike the other world, the ‘intelligible world’, whose very existence is always shrouded in doubt, of improbability (since his kingdom can only be reached in the abyss of deep sleep).
As subjects, we demand real objects in front of us, not chimeras or conjectures – hence the insignificant advantage given to the sensible world. Phenomenology teaches that the existence of a subject necessarily implies that of an object. The object is what embodies the subject’s intention, will and consciousness. The two are linked. The object (of intention) nourishes consciousness, more than consciousness can nourish itself – the object ultimately constitutes the very subjectivity of the subject, presenting itself to her attention, and even instituting itself as her conscious intention. Without consciousness, there can be neither project nor object. Without an object, there can be no consciousness. Every subject (every consciousness) carries intentions that are fixed on objects; in the same way, the objects (or ‘phenomena’) that appear in the world reveal the existence of subjects endowed with intentionalities, through and for whom the objects take on meaning.
This has a profound and unexpected consequence.
We are subjects, and we ‘appear’, from the very beginning of our lives, in a world of phenomena. Some of these phenomena also happen to be subjects. We then gradually learn to distinguish between phenomena that are merely phenomena (requiring subjects in order to appear), and phenomena that eventually reveal themselves to us as being not just phenomena, of which we would be the spectators, but as other subjects, and even subjects who are intrinsically ‘other‘, subjects whose consciousness can be conjectured as radically ‘other‘. The reality of the world of phenomena is thus linked to the subjectivity of multiple subjects, and innumerable forms of consciousness, which are both phenomena and subjects. The world represents a ‘total phenomenon’, whose very existence requires at least one Subject, or Consciousness, that is not merely a ‘phenomenon’.
In other words, if a thought experiment were to presuppose the absence of any consciousness, the non-existence of any subject, in the original states of the world, would we necessarily have to conclude that the ‘phenomenal’ world did not exist in this time of ‘genesis’? Undoubtedly. The ‘phenomenal’ world would not then exist, insofar as phenomenon, since no subject, no consciousness, would be able to observe it.
But another conjecture is still possible. Perhaps, in this time of ‘genesis’, there are subjects (or consciousnesses) that are part of another world, a non-‘phenomenal’ world, a ‘noumenal’ world, the ‘intelligible world’ evoked by Kant?
Since there can be no doubt that the world and reality began to exist long before any human subject appeared, we must conclude that other kinds of consciousness, other kinds of ‘subjects’ already existed then, for whom the world in the state of phenomenon, total and inchoate, constituted an ‘object’ and embodied an ‘intention’. In this case, the world has always been an object of subjectivity, of ‘intentionality’, of ‘desire’, right from its genesis.
It remains to try and imagine for which subjects, for which consciousnesses, the emerging world could then reveal itself as an object and as a phenomenon. We can hypothesise that this primal subjectivity, endowed with an ‘intentionality’, a ‘desire’, pre-existed the appearance of the world of phenomena, in the form of an original power to will, to desire, and to think. Man retains a ‘mysterious’ trace of this ancient, primal power, insofar as he is ‘thought made flesh’. « For the philosopher, speaking from the experience of the thinking self, man is, quite naturally, not only the Word, but Thought made Flesh; the always mysterious incarnation, never fully elucidated, of the ability to think ».vii Why is this incarnation ‘mysterious’? Because no one knows where thinking consciousness comes from, and even fewer can guess at the multiplicity of forms it has taken in the universe since the beginning, and may yet take in the future.
Since our only guide in this search is consciousness itself, we must return to it again and again. Every consciousness is unique because it recreates (in its own way) the conditions of the spirit’s original freedom. This freedom was not only that of the first man, but also of all that preceded him, of all that was before him and without him – of all that was non-human.
All consciousness is singular, and the solitary thinker recreates in his own way the absolute solitude of the first Man, the first Thinker. « While a man lets himself go and simply thinks, about anything for that matter, he lives totally in the singular, that is to say in complete solitude, as if the Earth were populated by one Man and not by men ».viii
Who was the first man, the first thinker to be « alone »? The one the Bible calls Adam? The one the Veda calls Puruṣa? Or some primal, original Spirit, creating in the thinker the living object of his living thought, and thereby creating the conditions for the engendering of a living multitude of other ideas (and other minds)?
We owe it to Parmenides and Plato, thinkers of the first depths, to have celebrated a few primordial spirits, among the most ancient of whom the world has preserved a memory. They admiringly quoted those sages who had lived long before them in ‘the life of intelligence and wisdom’, that life of Noûs and Sophia, which not all men know, but which all may wish to know. Intelligence and wisdom indeed « live », in the literal sense, for they live by the life of the Spirit. From the beginning, Socrates asserts, the Spirit, the Noûs, has been the « King of heaven and earth »: νοῦς ἐστι βασιλεὺς ἡμῖν οὐρανοῦ τε καὶ γῆς.ix
In this the Sirach agrees with Socrates, and goes back even further: « Wisdom was created before all things, and the light of understanding from eternity ».x
Paradoxically, this very ancient idea (that the Ancient Greeks and the Ancient Hebrews shared) now seems to have once again become one of those « secrets still buried in the dark depths of the earth ».xi
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iKant. Dreams of a Man who sees spirits, – explained by Dreams of Metaphysics (1766). Translated by J. Tissot. Ed. Ladrange, Paris, 1863
iiiIn a note appended to Dreams of a Man who sees Spirits, – explained by Dreams of Metaphysics.
ivH. Arendt. The Life of the Mind. Thought. The will. Translated by Lucienne Lotringer. PUF, 1981, p.68-69
vOne finds similar observations on the duality of the transient “ego” and the eternal “Self”, made by Indian thinkers and “rishis” such as Ramakrishna, Swami Vivekananda or Ramana Maharshi.
Conceptions of the ‘I’, the ‘ego’, the ‘person’, the ‘subject’, the ‘individual’ or the ‘self’ have become increasingly important in Western philosophy since Descartes and his cogito. By asserting « I think », and even more so « I doubt », Descartes placed the singular existence of the « I » and the pre-eminence of the « ego » at the centre of his philosophy. Before him, no doubt, other philosophers had an idea of the ‘self’, but they did not have the idea of basing this idea on the assurance of a doubt about it.
Take Montaigne, for example. Pascal described, with a kind of light-hearted irony, the nature of the doubt that assailed the author of the Essays, a doubt so doubtful that it made him doubt even his own doubt: « Montaigne places all things in such universal and general doubt that this doubt carries itself away, that is to say, if he doubts, and doubting even this last proposition, his uncertainty rolls over itself in a perpetual circle without rest; opposing equally those who assure that everything is uncertain and those who assure that everything is not, because he does not want to assure anything. The essence of his opinion, which he has not been able to express by any positive term, is to be found in this self-doubting and self-ignoring ignorance, which he calls his master form. For if he says he doubts, he betrays himself, by at least assuring that he doubts; which being formally against his intention, he could only explain by interrogation; so that, not wanting to say ‘I don’t know’ he says ‘What do I know?’ of which he makes his motto. »i
After Descartes, the so-called ‘modern’ philosophical systems that followed, and especially the German idealist philosophies, amplified interest in the figures of ‘I’, ‘ego’ and ‘self’. These personal pronouns, in their deceptive simplicity, embodied various attempts, literally semantic and grammatical, to denote what human beings ‘are’, or rather appear to be, and thus more conveniently designate, at least in appearance, ‘what makes each of us what we are’ii .
But there is nothing less timeless than ‘modernity’. Modern philosophies, as the latest arrivals in the history of thought, are predictably doomed to have to pass the baton in their turn at some point in the future. In their passing glitter, their assertive arrogance, their piecemeal questioning, their contrived theses, they can never make us forget that the conceptions on which they are based are not in themselves universal or absolutely necessary. Other thinkers, of whom we have no idea, will perhaps, in the centuries to come, come up with other points of view. There is no doubt that, on a subject as obscure, profound and abysmal as that of the subject or consciousness, alternative views will flourish and bear new fruit.
If we look briefly at the past, neither the Hebrews nor the ancient Greeks, to take these two examples, attached to the personal pronouns in use in the grammars of their languages, Semitic and Indo-European respectively, an ontological weight comparable to that which they took on in modern philosophies of the ‘subject’, such as those of Descartes, Kant, Fichte or Hegel. But in the absence of ontological weight, their pronouns possessed other qualities, more evanescent, intangible or implicit, perhaps, but nonetheless highly significant, allusive and challenging.
As far as the ancient Hebrews are concerned, several grammatical treatises would not exhaust the subject of ‘subject’. To give an idea of the resources of Hebrew grammatical forms, I will limit myself here to the example of the three personal pronouns juxtaposed one after the other, אֲנִי אֲנִי הוּא , ani, ani, hu’, (« me, me, him »), when God (YHVH) used them to name himself in Deuteronomy, 32,39. This Trinitarian and strange combination of two ‘me’ and one ‘him’ seems designed to reveal a kind of latent, abysmal power in these pronouns intended to define the essence of God.
As for the ancient Greeks, the role of the ‘self’ is nothing less than simple or elusive in Hesiod, Homer, the pre-Socratic philosophers and Plato. But it is not ‘modern’. Frédérique Ildefonse, in her book Le multiple dans l’âme. Sur l’intériorité comme problème, makes a point of expressing her reluctance in principle to use the very word ‘self’ in the context of Greek mythology or philosophy. She considers that the philosophical use of the word ‘I’ is inadvisable, because it is tantamount to « reproducing grammatical categories in the order of the concept, in this case transforming a personal pronoun into a concept »iv . In her view, the ‘I’ has the character of a ‘false end’. It fixes or freezes reflection prematurely. « Rather, the concept of the self artificially blocks the analysis, when it could be developed further ».v
She refers to Lacan, who does not believe in the ‘I’ either. Lacan refers to it in a curiously Anglo-Latin phrase, ‘autonomous ego’, and believes that belief in its existence is ‘a rather common folly’…
« What inner necessity does it serve to say that somewhere there must be an autonomous ego? This conviction goes beyond the individual naivety of the subject who believes in himself, who believes that he is himself – a fairly common folly, and not a complete folly, because it is part of the order of beliefs. Obviously we all tend to believe that we are us. But we’re not as sure as that, if you look closely enough. In many very specific circumstances, we doubt it, without undergoing any depersonalisation ».vi
The Latin word ego comes from the Greek ἐγώ whose Indo-European root is *aghamvii , which gave rise to several other derivatives in various Indo-European languages, including the Gothic ik, the German ich and, most originally, the Sanskrit अहम्, aham. The latter form is also, it should be noted, the origin of the pronouns moi in French and me in English. Notwithstanding the existence of the word ἐγώ, ‘me’, it remains a matter of debate how the ancient Greeks conceptualised the nature of what it covered. For example, the Athenian states in Plato’s Laws, according to the translation by Auguste Diès: ‘The soul is entirely superior to the body, and, in this very life, what constitutes our self is nothing other than the soul: the body is, for each of us, only the concomitant image; thus we are quite right to say that the lifeless body is only the image of the dead, and that the real self of each of us, what we call the immortal soul, goes to give account before other gods, as our ancestral law declares. »viii In this translation, we see that the word ‘me’ appears twice, although the Greek word ἐγώ is in fact completely absent from the Greek original… On this ground, F. Ildefonse criticises the classical translations of Platoix , which render the expression ‘τὸ παρεχόμενον ἡμῶν ἕκαστον τοῦτ’εἶναι’ (to parekhomenon hèmôn hékaston toût’eïnai) by: « the real self of each of us », or by: « what constitutes our self ». She recommends sticking to a more literal version, and suggests translating ‘τὸ παρεχόμενον ἡμῶν ἕκαστον τοῦτ’εἶναι μηδὲν ἀλλ’ᾒ τὴν ψυχήν’ by « what makes each of us what we are, it is nothing other than our soul ». In doing so, she is moreover in full agreement with Léon Robin’s translation, published in 1950 in the Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, and which is almost identical: « ce qui fait de chacun de nous ce qu’il est, n’est rien d’autre que son âme ».x F. Ildefonse also quotes Michel Narcyxi who also questions the translation of ἡμῶν ἕκαστον (hèmôn hékaston) as « self ». In fact, there is nothing in the original Greek text to suggest that for Plato ‘the true self is the soul’. Without using the word ἐγώ, ‘I, self’, Plato invites us to explore other avenues, such as that of the ‘immortal principle of the soul’ (arkhen psukhès athanaton) or that of the inner ‘demon’ (daimon) supposed to inhabit the soul.
By way of comparison with these resolutely non-modern Platonic ideas, Michel Narcy refers to the definition of the self as given by Adolphe Franck’s Dictionnaire des sciences philosophiques: « The self is the name by which modern philosophers are accustomed to designate the soul insofar as it is aware of itself and conceives of its own operations, or that it is both the subject and the object of its thought ».xii This definition establishes a link between the concept of self and that of consciousness, a link notoriously absent in Plato. Adolphe Franck’s article reinforces the idea of an identity equation between the self, the soul and consciousness. In Kantian philosophy, this identity takes on a more abstract meaning, that of the pure self or self-reflective consciousness. For Fichte, the abstract self will even identify with the idea of the absolute, insofar as it thinks itself. For Schelling and Hegel, it embodies the particular form or manifestation of the absolute insofar as this form reveals it to itself. « When Descartes defined himself as something that thinks, res cogitans, or enunciated the famous proposition: I think, therefore I am, he was really putting the self in the place of the soul; and this substitution or, to put it more accurately, this equation, he did not content himself with establishing it in the substance of things, he also made it pass into language. Because, ‘on the one hand’, he says (Sixth Meditation, § 8), ‘I have a clear and distinct idea of myself in so far as I am only a thing that thinks and is not extended, and because, on the other hand, I have a distinct idea of the body in so far as it is only an extended thing and does not think, it is certain that this self, that is to say my soul, through which I am what I am, is entirely and truly distinct from my body, and that it can be or exist without it. »xiii However, we do not see that this expression ever took on the rigorous and absolute meaning that was later attached to it, either by him or by any of his disciples. He does intentionally say ‘I’ instead of ‘my soul’, but he does not use theword ‘I’ to designate the soul or the spirit in general. It is only in the German school of thought that we come across this expression for the first time, and it is also there that it reaches a degree of abstraction that the psychological or experimental method, brought in by Descartes, cannot authorise. The self, in Kant’s system, is not the soul or the human person, but consciousness only, thought insofar as it reflects itself, i.e. its own acts, and the phenomena on which it is exercised. Hence, for the founder of critical philosophy, two kinds of self: the pure self (das reine ich) and the empirical self. The first, as we have just said, is the consciousness that thought has of itself and of the functions that are entirely its own; the second is the consciousness applied to the phenomena of sensibility and experience. Fichte makes the ego the absolute being itself, thought substituted for the creative power and drawing everything from its own bosom, mind and matter, soul and body, humanity and nature, after it has made itself, or posited its own existence. Finally, in the doctrine of Schelling and Hegel, the self isneither the human soul, nor human consciousness, nor thought taken in its absolute unity and placed in the place of God; it is only one of the forms or manifestations of the absolute, that which reveals it to itself, when, after having spread out as it were in nature, it returns to itself or collects itself in humanity. » xiv
If we were to undertake a general history of the word « I » and of the conceptions attached to it, we could undoubtedly determine that the « I » has never been considered to be perfectly identical with what is called the soul or consciousness. The self can certainly represent the soul, but only when it has reached a state of development where it is truly aware of itself and its various ways of being. But the « I » doesnot embody the very essence of the soul, nor the whole range of its manifestations. It does not show it to us in all its possible states and in all the putative forms of its existence. There are certainly states in which the soul does not yet know itself. Thus the soul in infancy, and before that during the uterine life that precedes birth. There are also states in which it ceases to know itself, as in the time of dreams, deep sleep, and the various states of unconsciousness that can affect life, without the soul necessarily being aware of being a self. If we wish to affirm that the notion of self is formally linked to that of consciousness, what then becomes of the identity of the human person in cases where this consciousness is not complete, or is more or less obscured? Is not the soul then distinct from the self, when it is immersed in the obscure sensations of a relative or absolute unconsciousness, or when it is dominated by instinctive faculties, in which consciousness plays no assured role?
The modern preeminence of the ego over the notion of the soul, – downgraded to the status of a Platonic essence, and as such discredited –, is now apparently predominant. But for how much longer? Neuroscience research has not found the slightest trace of soul in synaptic microtubules. Is this the end of the story? It’s doubtful.
It is certain, on the other hand, that the dominance of the ego leads moderns to dismiss any role for the soul in thought, and to postulate that thought is in some way identical to the ego. The ego becomes the ultimate symbol of the human person who has reached the full development of her ‘consciousness’. This eminent role of ‘consciousness’ was also undoubtedly one of the main reasons for the emergence of the ego, the reason why the human person could be considered by the idealist philosophies already mentioned as a simple ‘mode’ of divine thought, becoming aware of itself.
But there are many other avenues open to us if we are prepared to stray from the beaten track. Firstly, consciousness could be considered as pure energy, and not as a state. From this point of view, it would not be a mode of being of the ego or the subject. Its own movement could be conceptualised as essentially incessant, autonomous, and therefore essentially infinite. The essence of consciousness-energy would be that it always surpasses and increases itself, from its own point of view, in its own world, different from the material world, that ontologically static world where, it is said, ‘nothing is lost, nothing is created’.
Secondly, we cannot exclude a priori the idea that the soul does exist, as a substance, as an irreducible monad. The conceptual annihilation of the soul by modernists could itself be conceptually annihilated in the coming centuries, or millennia, as a result of discoveries that are unimaginable today.
If we follow these lines of thought, we may find that the conceptions of the German idealists (Fichte, Hegel, Schelling), who see in the human soul a kind of incarnate figure of the Absolute, are too simple. Their conclusions are too hasty, too premature. Nothing has yet been absolutely finalised in the great metaphysical and pan-cosmic drama that continues to unfold. Everything remains to be done.
The question of the self isproving to be a thorny one – much more so than a bush of burning thorns.
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iPascal. L’entretien avec M. de Saci sur Épictète et Montaigne. Delagrave, Paris, 1875, p.25
iiTo use Plato’s expression, Laws XII, 959 a, in Léon Robin’s translation.
ivFrédérique Ildefonse The multiple in the soul. On interiority as a problem. Vrin. Paris, 2022, p. 32
vFrédérique Ildefonse The multiple in the soul. On interiority as a problem. Vrin. Paris, 2022, p. 32
viJ. Lacan. The Seminar, Book II. The ego in Freud’s theory and in the technique of psychoanalysis. Paris, Seuil, 1978, p.24
viiMichel Bréal and Anatole Bailly. Latin etymological dictionary. Latin words, grouped according to meaning and etymology. Hachette, Paris, 1918, s.v. « ego ».
viiiPlato, Laws XII, 959 a-b, in the translation by Auguste Diès, quoted by F. Ildefonse.
ixLike those of Joseph de Maistre and Auguste Diès.
x« Between the soul and the body there is a radical difference, and in life precisely what makes each of us what we are is nothing other than our soul, whereas the body is a semblance with which each of us is individually accompanied ; and it is rightly said of the body of a dead man that it is a simulacrum of that man, whereas what each of us really is, that imperishable thing to which we give the name of soul, goes off to other Gods to give account to them, as our national traditions state. » Plato, Laws XII, 959 a-b. Translated by Léon Robin, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, Paris, 1950, p.1114.
xiM. Narcy, « En quête du moi chez Platon », in Le moi et l’intériorité, p.58.
xiiDictionnaire des sciences philosophiques by a society of professors and scholars under the direction of M. Adolphe Franck, Paris, Hachette, 1875, p.1122
xivDictionnaire des sciences philosophiques by a society of professors and scholars under the direction of M. Adolphe Franck, Paris, Hachette, 1875, p.1122
Long before the Cambrian explosion, the world’s genetic heritage had already begun its long, slow genesis. It was being built up, as it continues to be, through all forms of life, experiences and unfathomable memories, including the double embrace of DNA.
For more than four billion years, tenuous, repeated, tenacious and resilient genetic achievements and countless mutations have increased the common treasure, modified and transformed it, condemning dead-ends and rushing off in new directions.
All living things have contributed, to a greater or lesser extent, – fungi and oomycetes, amoebas and sea urchins, corals and earthworms, pterodactyls and stegosaurids, buzzards and bison, bonobos and aïsi , hominids and hominins…
Planet Earth, a tiny drop of mud and fire in the cosmic night, shelters and transports these lives, like a noetic ark.
An ark, because it is facing the flood of millennia and the threat of mass extinctions (five since the end of the Cambrian, and a sixth underway since the start of the Anthropocene).
Noetic, because all biological life ultimately boils down to information, in terms of its transmission. This information carries a meaning that needs to be heard. DNA molecules are therefore more than just a series of nucleotides. They convey ‘meaning’, they ‘signify’ living forms, past and future, – plant essences or animal ways of existing. Each gene embodies a ‘mode’ of existence, and each gamete potentially contains a certain ‘idea’ of being. The global noetic ark takes with it all sorts of ideas about living beings, those whose memory has been preserved and transmitted. But it has no awareness of this. It continues, impassive, its journey through time, a wandering vessel, without end or reason, given over to unconsciousness. It is the fragile, floating symbol of life thrown into the cosmic void in order to survive.
It is not alone. The ark of life here below is the local, earthly figure of a vaster, universal, cosmic life. We know neither its origin nor its end. We only know that this total, unconscious life must have preceded the appearance of all the proto-conscious forms of life in the cosmos, because it contained them all in potential.
The arch is a very general idea, representing a paradigm, an image of the self, a figure of separation between the interior and the vast, dangerous and stimulating exterior. The smallest paramecium is already a kind of arch, enveloping the cytoplasm, macronucleus, micronuclei, vacuoles, peristome, cytostome, cytopharynx and cytoprotect with its plasma membrane… But this protective envelope is not watertight. The cell absorbs water by osmosis and evacuates it through the pulsatile vacuoles. It feeds on bacteria that it ingests through the peristome and cytostome.
Let’s use a metaphor. Yet another arch, made of iron and fire, occupies the centre of the Earthii.The enormous mass of molten metal in the outer core is continually stirred by convection; it interacts with the Earth’s rotation and influences its precessional movement.
In the same way, the arch of life, like a telluric power, but of noetic and even psychoid essence, metamorphoses in its depths and is constantly renewed over millions of millennia. In this living orogeny, life forms emerge in slow, subconscious extrusions. Since the dawn of time, deep, chthonic layers of subterranean life have been set in motion. They erupt in crustal flows; their subductions never cease to melt and remelt; they bring to light, as the case may be, gneisses or migmatites, nuggets of native gold or diamonds in their gangue – all poor metaphors for the infinite variety of proto-consciousness.
Perhaps it would take a Hesiod or a Homer to evoke the cosmogonic, original power of these forms of subconsciousness or proto-consciousness, criss-crossed by hadal strata, riddled with dykes and intrusions, cut by sills…
We imagine them populated by mental plutons, shrouded in strange dreams, half-liquid half-solid intuitions, slowly traversing metamorphic abysses, with no imaginable depth or origin.
Floating lightly on the ocean of these consciousnesses in gestation, like a wind or a vapour, we could call ‘spirit’ that which, in them, blindly seeks the light, that which always precedes them, that which comes from below and from the depths, that which wants the distant and the wide, that which binds itself to the future, that which dislaces itself from the past without tiring of it.
The ark is a local metaphor for the self. But we can of course assume that there are other consciousnesses scattered throughout the universe, proto-, para- or even supra-consciousnesses, of which exo- or xeno-biology gives us an initial idea.
These elusive, exotic, exogenous consciousnesses undoubtedly traverse worlds and universes, infusing them, spying on them, watching them, feeding on them or brooding over them, wounding them or healing them, and who knows? enlivening them, elevating them and transcending them. We begin to dream that, higher up, far above the cosmological horizon, unheard-of nebulae of supra-consciousness, sapiential layers, seraphic ethers, impalpable flashes of light, swirl silently like goshawks or pilgrims. From such a considerable pile of ontic leaps, from heavy magmas to starry gases, from DNA to the soul, from flint to cherubim, how can we convey in words the dynamics of the thrills, the power of the transformations?
The use of ellipsis, allusion and trope is an expedient. We form the hypothesis that throughout the cosmos all sorts of levels of consciousness and subconsciousness fold endlessly, rise or fall, disjoin or rejoin. As they lower, sink or rise, they bind together forgotten places. By unfolding or folding, by compressing their cores, made of dreamy granites or dreamy gabbros, the most stratospheric layers of supra-consciousness envelop all the intermediate strata like swaddling clothes; these celestial entities encompass within them chthonic fires, which pulsate far below, as well as centres of the void.
Or, conversely, according to the topological archetypes of the ball, the sphere and the ‘whole’, it is the deep layers that fold in on themselves, that give birth to shreds of emerging consciousness, and at their heart give rise to the fire that engenders the subsequent spheres, which are difficult to decipher. In other words, whether the Self is at the centre of the sphere it has unified, at the heart of the total One, or whether it is itself the Encompassing, the Totalising, topologically amounts to the same thing. Like the mystical serpent, the Ouroboros, the Self (or the God who is its symbol) sacrifices itself by devouring itself through its end, and through its beginning. It feeds its centre from its periphery.
We need to see this process in its totality and understand it in its essence, and not just consider its local forms, be they fleeting, stacked, spherical, serpentine, metamorphic, spiral or perforated. This totality of consciousnesses in motion is clearly animated by an original, primal energy, albeit a conjectural one.
It can be represented as follows. All consciousness, the highest and most significant, as well as the smallest and most humble, is only the local, singular manifestation of a total, common energy. Human consciousness, for its part, is neither the highest nor the humblest consciousness in the universe. It is of an intermediate nature, combining a biological heritage (genetic, bodily and sensory memory) and the psychic, archetypal forms of the general unconscious, in the making since the time of Prehumansiii.
In every human consciousness there coexists the ‘conscious’ self and an ancient, deep memory, that of the Self. This memory comes partly from the proto-consciousness of generations of hominids and hominins. Added to this are memories of more assertive, more recent consciousnesses, for example those of generations of individuals of the genus Paranthropus, or Australopithecus, which preceded the genus Homo. This accumulated, additive, recapitulative memory is added to the body of unconscious representations, archetypes and symbolic forms that dot the consciousness of Homo sapiens. Symbolic, archetypal and ‘instinctual’ forms constantly mold the human psyche. The psyche is an immaterial substance that exists separately from the body. It even appears to be one of its organizing principles, a driving force for movement and metamorphosis. Other archetypal forms, known as ‘instinctive’, remain linked to the biological substratum, and derive their nature from living matter, insofar as it is more organized and teleological than non-living matter.
Tradition has bequeathed to us a great principle, that of the continuous transformation of psychic forms, analogous in a sense to the less perennial transformation of bodies. Ovid once sang of these metamorphoses:
In its multi-millennial movement, human consciousness does not know the nature of its own matter, its intimate substance, even though it is constantly experiencing its effects. It does not know the nature and essence of the psychic archetypes that structure and orient it. It is trapped in its own reality, which links the biological and the psychic. It does not have the means to represent them clearly, since all its representations are obscurely based on them, induced by them, and not the other way round. It comes from a psychic mold whose nature escapes it entirely. How could a form taken from a mold conceive the essence of that mold, and the conditions of the molding? How could a ‘moving’ thing conceive of the essence of the ‘motor’ that moves and animates it?
Human consciousness can represent ideas, images, symbols and forms. But it cannot represent where these ideas, images, symbols and forms emerge from. It only perceives the effects of the psychic energy in which it is immersed. It cannot conceive of the nature of what nourishes it, or its origin, let alone its purpose. Can we draw comparisons between instincts (linked to the biological substratum) and archetypes (which belong to a sphere that encompasses the psychic, but is not necessarily limited to it)?
Is there any analogy between instinctive, biological forms and symbolic, archetypal, psychological representations?
There are two very different hypotheses on this subject. The first is that instincts and archetypes are energetic phenomena, and are basically of the same nature. Although of distinct origin, they could represent modulations, at very different frequencies, of the same primal, fundamental energy.
In contrast, the second hypothesis draws a radical dividing line between instincts and archetypes, between matter and spirit. In the first case, we can conjecture that an intimate fusion or partial entanglement is possible between instincts and archetypes, between the biosphere and the ‘noosphere’, within the Whole. They would only represent different aspects of the same reality, the same substance.
In the second case, the Whole would contain an internal rupture, a break in continuity, an ontological cut between, on the one hand, what belongs to matter and biology and, on the other, what belongs to spirit and psychology.
In both cases, the archetype of the Whole is not called into question. Its presence in the psyche is obvious. What is open to conjecture is its very nature: is the essence of the Whole entangled or broken?
In the first hypothesis, the Whole is presented as an entity in fusion, apparently inwardly mobile, but basically totally unified. The essence of the Whole, insofar as it is also the One, the only One, is a fine entanglement of the One and the Whole.
In the second hypothesis, the Whole is constantly renewed by an interplay of contradictory forces and partial, provisional, open syntheses. Nothing about its power, its metamorphoses or its end is known or knowable. Everything is always possible, and the surest hypothesis is that something new eternally transfigures the Whole into the Very Other…
Two ideas of the Whole, then: a unified (and globally perennial, self-sufficient) fusion, or a living, agonistic and dialogical polarization.
These two models of the Whole also present two archetypal models of the divine: the oceanic model (final fusion), and the dual or bipolar model (the internal, ever-creative dialogue of the Theos with the Cosmos and the Anthropos). In the oceanic, fusion model, we need to be able to explain the irreducible presence of evil as a neighbor of good. We need to understand whether evil can ultimately be ‘reabsorbed’ or metabolized by the ultimate victory of unity-totality. In the dual model, we might consider that the dialectics of good/evil or God/man are only provisional representations of a dialectic of a much higher order: that of the Divine with Itself.
The very existence of such a dialectic, internal and proper to the Divinity, would imply that it is neither perfect nor complete (in its own eyes, if not in ours). It would always be in the process of becoming, in the act of self-fulfillment and always progressing in the illumination of its own night, in the exploration of its abysses and its heavens.
We could then add that the Divine eternally includes in itself, in its source, in its depth, in its very origin, entities such as ‘nothingness’ or ‘evil’.
From this we can deduce that It draws from this nothingness or evil in Itself the reasons for Its becoming – in other words, the means to exercise Its ‘will’ again and again in order to consolidate Its ‘reign’.
Since Jung, we have known that the psyche lives essentially through and in theexpression of the will. It is the will that is the essence of consciousness, the essence of the mind. If we suppose that the Divinity is ‘Spirit’, then is the essence of this Spirit its will? Let’s look at human consciousness. It cannot take an external view of itself. It can only observe itself from its own point of view. If we analyze our own consciousness scrupulously, we quickly realize that its nature changes at the very moment it becomes aware that it is observing itself. Like the instant, it cannot grasp itself as such; it can only grasp itself insofar as it is withdrawn from itself. It is difficult for consciousness to see its limits, its scope. Where does its power of elucidation end? Will it be able to move freely, carrying its light to the highest summits and to the depths of the abyss? It doesn’t know. Will it be able to determine whether this very bottom, this abyssal goal, actually exists, or whether it is in fact endless? It doesn’t know. As it explores itself, will the psyche reveal itself as ultimately ‘infinite’, ‘in the image’ and ‘likeness’ of the creative divinity who created it, according to Tradition? The answer is unknown.
It is equally difficult for consciousness to determine the conditions of its anchorage in living matter, which forms its biological substratum. To do so, it would have to be capable of placing itself outside itself, in order to consider objectively what, within it, makes possible the articulation between the biological and the psychic, between living matter and living consciousness. Are their respective ‘lives’ of the same nature? Or are they two distinct forms of life, similar in appearance but in reality distinct in essence?
The psyche does not clearly represent itself; it does not clearly represent the blurring of its boundary with matter, with the world of instinct, with the realm of archetypes, nor its ambiguous interface with the realm of spirit. It has no clear idea of who it is, what drives it, or the nature of its will.
The will that unfolds in consciousness would need to reach a supra-consciousness in order to ‘see’ itself at work, to become aware of itself, to consider itself in its choices, and if necessary, to be able to modify or confirm them.
The conscious will must have within itself, and for itself, a representation of what it ‘wants’ but also a representation of what it ‘does not want’, or of what it ‘no longer wants’, representations that it must keep subconsciously in its memory, in the flower of its consciousness, to give itself the means to regain its freedom at any moment, if the urge takes it. But where would this desire come from, from what source would it arise?
How does self-awareness, this higher supervision of consciousness, this conscious ‘knowledge’, emerge? How does it forge a purpose other than instinctual? How does some ‘desire’ for freedom actually take over again? Consciousness appears as a kind of continuous flow of energy, flowing upwards, downwards, in all directions. An endless flow of waves and ripples. Magma folds and unfolds. Consciousness twists and turns around itself, curls up, folds up, unfolds, and its deep levels, kneaded, mingle in new ways, knot into new forms, from which psychic potentials are suddenly discharged, unexpected sparks dazzle, instantaneous flashes of light illuminate, rapid conflagrations erupt…
Every consciousness lives its own Odyssey – it weaves and unweaves its desires, its dreams. Consciousness is at once a wanderer and a voyage; it is a ship made of light and obscurity, both an Argo and a Jason, constantly inventing its bearings, its brilliant constellations, its shadowy abysses and its golden fleece.
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i Aï: Three-toed sloth. South American quadruped, mammal of the toothless family, of the genus Bradypus, which moves extremely slowly.
iiWe know that the Earth’s core, which is liquid on the outside and solid on the inside (called the « seed »), is separated from the Earth’s mantle by the « Gutenberg discontinuity ».
iii« The lineage of the Prechimpanzees and that of the Prehumans separated some ten million years ago, the latter settling in a less wooded environment than the former. Here we see these prehumans standing up, walking and even climbing. Six genera and a dozen species illustrate this extraordinary radiation that flourished between 7 and 2 million years ago in the intertropical arc, from Chad to South Africa, via Ethiopia, Kenya, Tanzania and Malawi. » Yves Coppens and Amélie Vialet (eds.). Un bouquet d’ancêtres. Premiers humains: qui était qui, qui a fait quoi, où et quand? Pontifical Academy of Sciences and CNRS Éditions. Paris, 2021
ivOvid. The Metamorphoses. Book I, 1-2. Translated from the Latin by Marie Cosnay. Ed. de l’Ogre, 2017
Plato claims that the oldest inhabitants of Greece, the Pelasgians, gave their gods the name ‘Runners’ (θεούς, theous), because they saw the stellar and planetary gods ‘running’ across the sky. The name is said to come from the verb θέω, theo, ‘to run’.i The Cratylus abounds in somewhat fanciful etymologies, in the service of Platonic verve and irony. However, one of the meanings of the verb θέω is indeed ‘to run’. But there is a second, no less relevant: ‘to shine’.
The first meaning (‘to run; to rush; to extend, to develop’) allows Plato to consider this link, established by the Pelasgians, between the name of the gods and their celestial ‘course’. According to Chantraine’s Greek dictionary, this meaning of the verb θέω is etymologically related to a Sanskrit verb, dhavate, ‘to flow’. However, the second meaning of θέω, theo, ‘toshine’, would also be compatible with the ancient way of representing the divine essence. It is closer to another Sanskrit root, dyaus, द्यौष्, which is in fact the origin of the French word ‘dieu’, the English word ‘divine’ and the Greek name ‘Zeus’. In the Veda, the word ‘god’ (deva) meant the ‘Brilliant One’.
In other, even older traditions, the orderly march of the stars has been interpreted as an immense ‘army’ setting out to battle. This metaphor combines the two meanings of the verb θέω, evoking both the regular ‘course’ of the starry vault and the brilliant ‘brilliance’ of the ‘gods’ in arms. Schelling proposed giving the name ‘Sabaeism’ to this ‘astral’ religion, which he said should be recognised as the oldest religion of mankind. « This astral religion, which is universally and unquestionably recognised as the first and oldest of mankind, and which I call Sabaeism, from saba, army, and in particular the celestial army, was subsequently identified with the idea of a kingdom of spirits radiating around the throne of the supreme king of the heavens, who did not so much see the stars as gods, as vice versa in the gods, the stars ».ii In other texts, Schelling calls it « sabism » (Zabismus), retrospectively considering that the word sabism (Sabeismus) could lead to misunderstanding by implying that the name could come from the Sabaeans, the people of happy Arabia known for its astrolatry.iii The word saba, which Schelling mentions in passing without giving any further details, certainly refers to the Hebrew word צָבָא, tsaba‘, « army ». This word is actually used in the Hebrew Bible to denote the stars, tsaba ha-chamaïm, as being « the army of heaven » (Jer. 33:22), an expression that is also applied to denote the sun, the moon and the stars (Deut. 4:19). It also refers to the angels as the « host of heaven » (1 Kings 22:19). In the Hebrew Bible, the Lord is often called « YHVH of hosts » (YHVH Tsebaoth), or « Lord of hosts » (Elohim Tsebaoth), and even « YHVH Lord of hosts » (YHVH Elohim Tsebaoth).
The expression « the armies from the height », in Hebrew צְבָא הַמָּרוֹם , tseba ha-marom, is also used by Isaiah, but in an unexpected, paradoxical context. For Isaiah, the « armies from the height » will not be used by YHVH to punish the kings of the earth on the day of judgement, but they themselves, just as much as the latter, will be the object of His wrath: « On that day, YHVH will punish the armies of heaven in heaven and the kings of the earth on the earth. » (Is. 24:21). Be that as it may, a kind of historical and conceptual continuity links the « astral armies » of ancient religions and the « armies (tsebaoth) », celestial or angelic, gathered under the law of YHVH in Hebrew tradition.
In parallel, so to speak, in the Greek world, the mythological tradition portrayed the intense, passionate and exuberant lives of the gods. Hesiod’s Theogony describes in detail their war against the Titans, and their final victory, under the aegis of Zeus. Homeric polytheism presented many aspects of the divine pleroma, while also recognising the primacy of the greatest of them all, Zeus, in terms of power, intelligence and wisdom. In the Mysteries of Eleusis or Samothrace, it has been said that the initiation was in fact about the esoteric revelation of the supreme God, subsuming the exoteric multiplicity of gods and their various figures or attributes.
The unity of the Divine, insofar as it is called the One, was undoubtedly evoked very early on in the Greek tradition by pre-Socratic philosophers such as Heraclitus, Parmenides and Empedocles.
Heraclitus said, for example:
« The One, the only wise One, does not want to be called and wants the name of Zeus. »iv
He was aware of the esoteric nature of divine truths:
« The Logos, that which is, men are always unable to understand, either before hearing it or after hearing it for the first time ».vii
As for Parmenides, he was the first philosopher to assert that the path to Divinity is that of ‘it is’.
« But now there’s only one way left
Of which we can speak; it is that of ‘it is’.
As for the path of non-being, it leads nowhere. »viii
For his part, Empedocles, in the first book of his Physics, dialectically combines the being of the One and the being of the Multiple:
« I have two points to make. Indeed, sometimes the One
Increases to the point of existing alone
From the Multiple; and then again
Divides, and so out of the One comes the Many ».ix
In archaic times, long before the pre-Socratics, human consciousness was undoubtedly still undivided and fundamentally unified. The idea of divine multiplicity was meaningless then, compared with the immediate intuition of cosmic unity, the unity of the human world, nature and spirit. In ancient times, people worshipped rough stones or meteors as sacred images. This original cult symbolised the divine as a formless material, a ‘raw’ material, lithic, unalterable, shapeless stone, which sometimes fell from the sky. It corresponded to an immanent, muted, auroral consciousness. It represented the divine presence, unique, undivided, unbroken.
Originally, man’s first religion was naturally oriented towards the One and the All. Later, the cult and contemplative erection of individual sculptures, detached from the mass of the mountains or carved into the walls of caves, and the staging of idols made by human hands, visible and tangible, corresponded to another stage in religious awareness. The more visible the idols, the more paradoxically people became aware of the mystery hidden in the invisible.
Consciousness became freer, because it became more aware of its capacity to apprehend the existence of mystery behind the appearance of symbols, and all the more so because it had visible symbols in front of it. Visible, and therefore powerless to show the hidden, the concealed, the buried, the invisible essence. In so doing, consciousness began to divide itself; it oscillated between the exotericism of the visible, accessible to all, to ordinary mortals, and the esotericism of the ineffable, the indescribable, which only the rare initiated could conceive and contemplate. For the uninitiated, the multiplication of visible representations diffracted the light of the divine down here. They were specific, singular, vernacular, linked to the countless needs and vicissitudes of human existence.
Much later, other, more abstract ideas appeared, enriching the conception inherent in the single idea of « the One », with which they were associated. They represented the divine powers that accompanied the One, even before the Creation of the world. These powers were called ‘Wisdom’, ‘Intelligence’ or ‘Finesse’, and they are respectively quoted in the Hebrew Bible as חָכְמָה, ḥokhmah, בִינוּ , binah, and עָרְמָה , ‘ormah, The Scriptures also revealed that these divine powers were created before all things: « YHVH created me in the beginning of His ways »x . From this verse, we deduce that there was a time when YHVH began in his ways. So, before the world began its genesis, after having been created by Elohim, there was another « beginning » (rechit), a beginning of the « ways » (darakh) of which YHVH was the author.
To sum up: at the very beginning of the history of human consciousness, there was the intuition of the embracing of the One and the All. Then, after the muted intuition of this divine and immobile unity of the Whole, came the idea of the divine in movement, in action, in this world and in the next. This idea spread to the Vedic, Egyptian and Greek worlds, as well as to the Hebrew world. From this we can infer the genesis of a similar, overarching idea, that of the movement or overcoming of human consciousness, in its relationship to the divine and in its relationship with itself. What does this overcoming of consciousness mean? How can consciousness abandon itself and go beyond itself? For consciousness to be able to surpass itself, it must make itself surpassable, it must prepare to welcome within itself a power greater than its essence. ‘Rebirth’ could be an image of this potential overcoming.
The history of the divine in consciousness has only just begun. The next steps may seem all the more obscure for being so far away. But some Prophets see far ahead. David sung that, one day, « it will be said that in Zion every man is born' »xi . One may add: one day, every man will be born again, in consciousness, and will surpass himself by being « reborn ». All consciousness is both ‘in act’ and ‘in potential’. In essence, it is an « intermediary being », a metaxuxii , meaning that its function is « to make known and transmit to the Gods what comes from men, and to men what comes from the Gods »xiii . This ability to link worlds can be interpreted as belonging simultaneously, and without contradiction, to different orders of reality. An intermediate being is a ‘being’ from one point of view and a ‘non-being’ from another.
When YHVH revealed his name: « I will be who I will be »xiv , did He not imply that He too was both, in a sense, « being » and « non-being »? This name, « I will be » (Ehyeh), is grammatically, in Hebrew, the first person of the verb to be, conjugated in the imperfect (used generally to describe actions that are not completed or actions that occur in the present or future). One could argue that the Hebrew grammar then recognizes that God’s name is in essence ‘imperfect’ or ‘uncompleted’xv . As a being, He is still a non-being in relation to what He will be. But is not God also the Whole? We could conjecture that this Whole does not yet exist in its entirety, and that it is not entirely in action. In essence, a large part of the Whole remains unfinished, imperfect, and is perhaps still inconceivable, given the freedom of the actors who contribute to it and will contribute in the future. All that can be said is that the Whole exists partly « in act » and partly, « in potential ». The Whole is therefore also an « intermediate being », a metaxu.
As for God, what we can say is that there is a principle in Him according to which « He is who He is », and there is another principle, according to which « He will be who He will be », which the grammar of biblical Hebrew expresses by the imperfect conjugation of the verb to be, as we said.
Could it be that the very existence of everything God is not contributes to the emergence of His ‘power’, as yet unfulfilled and always in the process of becoming?
Creation evolves in temporal tandem with the timelessness of divine eternity. Does temporal creation play a role in God’s timeless ‘power’?
In consciousness there is already a substantial principle at work, which literally underlies consciousness (the English word ‘sub-stantial‘ comes form the Latin sub-stare, « to stand under »). It can be considered as a material principle, to which consciousness adds a formal principle. It is also a maternal principle (etymologically, mother = matter = matrix), through which consciousness generates a new principle, succeeding the previous one, and through which consciousness increases and surpasses itself. The feminisation of consciousness is the occasion for a transition from the old to the new, from the virgin to the wife, from the wife to the mother, and from the couple to the new-born child.
The separation of consciousness between a masculine and a feminine aspect (symbolised in mythology by the contrast between the male gods and the virgin goddesses, the wives and mothers goddesses) has been the occasion, in certain cultures, for the emergence of the idea of dualism, which links in absolute unity two apparently opposed principles, – one excluding the new creature and being hostile to it, and the other being benevolent to it.
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i« The men who first lived in Hellas knew no other gods than those who are now the gods of most Barbarians: Sun, Moon, Earth, Stars, Sky. Also, because they saw them all running in an endless race, theonta, they took this property, the property of ‘running’, theïn, as the basis for calling them ‘gods’, theoï. » Plato , Cratylus, 397d
iiF.W.J. Schelling. Philosophy of Revelation. Translation edited by J.F. Marquet and J.F. Courtine. PUF, 1991, Book II, p.244
iii F.W.J. Schelling. Philosophy of Mythology. Translated by Alain Pernet. Ed. Millon, Grenoble, 2018, Lesson 9, p.119
ivHeraclitus, Fragment XXXII. The Presocratics. Gallimard, 1988, p.154
vHeraclitus, Fragment XXXIII. The Presocratics. Gallimard, 1988, p.154
viHeraclitus, Fragment X. The Presocratics. Gallimard, 1988, p.148
viiHeraclitus, Fragment I. The Presocratics. Gallimard, 1988, p.145
viiiParmenides. Fragment II, Les Présocratiques. Gallimard, 1988, p. 257-258
ixEmpedocles. Fragment XVII. The Presocratics. Gallimard, 1988, p.379
x יְהוָה–קָנָנִי, רֵאשִׁית דַּרְכּוֹ: (Prov. 8,22)
xiPs 87,5 : וּלְצִיּוֹן, יֵאָמַר– אִישׁ וְאִישׁ, יֻלַּד-בָּהּ; Vé l-Zion yamar – ich v-ich youlad bah « And they will say of Zion, every man was born there ».
xvIn his Grammar of Biblical Hebrew, Paul Joüon explains: « The temporal forms of Hebrew express both tenses and certain modalities of action. As in our languages, they mainly express tenses, namely past, future and present; but they often express them less perfectly than in our languages because they also express certain modes of action, or aspects. These aspects are 1) the unicity and plurality of the action, depending on whether the action is represented as unique or as repeated; 2) the instantaneity and duration of the action, depending on whether the action is represented as being accomplished in an instant or over a more or less prolonged period of time. » Paul Joüon, Grammaire de l’hébreu biblique, Rome, 1923, p. 111 c
« 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.
« 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.
« A double axe painted on a pottery from Knossos »
On the edge of the Fayum, the pyramid of Hawara is considered the architectural masterpiece of the Middle Kingdom. Built of bricks covered with a limestone facing, it still forms a massive mound, housing an imposing funerary vault composed of enormous blocks of white quartzite. It was once flanked by an immense funerary temple, larger than the pyramid itself, but now almost entirely disappeared. Famous in antiquity, described with admiration by Herodotus and Strabo, this unique complex included twelve courtyards surrounded by numerous rooms, served by galleries and ambulatories. Long before the time of Herodotus (5th century B.C.), this place was already known as the « Labyrinth » of Egypt. Indeed, Greek visitors saw in its architectural complexity a supposed resemblance with another famous « Labyrinth », that of Knossos in Crete, which undoubtedly possessed the temporal precedence over that of Hawarai. Considering the numerous exchanges between Egypt and Crete, since ancient times, it is possible to argue that the idea of a ‘labyrinthine’ architectural complex with a religious or cultic function could have been imported from Crete to Egypt, to make a magnificent counterpart to the no less magnificent pyramidal tomb of Hawara.
In any case, what is sure, it is that the ‘labyrinthine’ idea was staged with greatness, both at Knossos and at Hawara, in a context strongly marked by the respective practice of the Minoan-Mycenaean religions on the one hand and Egyptian on the other hand.
It is particularly exciting that the word ‘labyrinth’, λαϐύρινθος, is certainly not an Egyptian word, and is not a Greek word either. The word ‘labyrinth’ actually has a pre-Hellenic origin, since it has been proven that this word means in Carian, an Indo-European language of Asia Minor, ‘the place of the double axe’.
Since the ‘double axe’ designates by name the ‘labyrinth’, one may wonder what this ‘double axe’ really represents. Why did it give its (Karian) name to two of the most prestigious architectural constructions of the brilliant Minoan and Egyptian civilizations?
The ‘double axe’ was in fact a symbol of the divine, widespread in all Asia Minor, since ancient times. Plutarch tells us that the supreme God, Zeus, was represented emblematically, in Anatolia, in the form of the ‘double axe’, and that he was called there Zeus Labradeus (Ζεύς λαϐραδευς), a name formed from the Carian word λάϐρυς, ‘axe’.
This view has since been confirmed by modern science: « Almost all scholars adopt the opinion that the double axe is the fetish or symbol of a deity (…) The double axe is considered to represent the heavenly God, (…) the Zeus Stratios of Labranda in Caria, the god Sandan in Tarsus, and other later gods. And during the peak of the Minoan civilization, the god Teshub of the Hittites carried the double axe in one hand and lightning in the other. He could well be the prototype of the gods we have just mentioned. One touches here the important question of the connection between the Minoan religion and that of Asia Minor.ii
What is certain, as has already been said, is that the word λάϐρυς is not Greek, and that the word labyrinth that derives from it is not Greek either, but Carian. The etymological trail thus takes us out of Egypt and Crete and into Asia Minor…
« The German philologist Kretschmer has shown that the group of ‘Asian’, non-Aryan languages, to which Lycian and Karian certainly belong, spread towards Greece and Italy before the Aryan Greeks penetrated Hellas. These languages have left traces in place names and in the Greek language itself. Before the ‘real’ Hellenes reached Crete, an Asian dialect must have been spoken there, and it is to this language that the word ‘labyrinth’ must originally belong. The original labyrinth was built in the territory of Knossos. The palace of Knossos was undoubtedly the seat of a religion celebrating a God whose emblem was the double axe. It was the ‘Place of the Double Axe’ of Knossos, the ‘Labyrinth’ of Crete. »iii
The word labyrinth thus denotes nothing objectively architectural, but refers only to the idea of the ‘double axe’, which is itself the cultic emblem of the Supreme Divinity. Why did this weapon receive the honor of symbolizing the supreme Deity, not only in Minoan Crete, but in other regions of Anatolia and Asia Minor, including Caria and Lycia?
Is it for its warrior symbolism, which could be appropriate to an Almighty God, Lord of the heavenly armies, or is it for a possible symbolism referring to the lightning of a god of the atmosphere? According to the opinion of specialists, it is much more likely that the double axe owes its emblematic elevation to its sacrificial role. The double axe is the symbol of the power to kill the victim destined for the God. It is indeed a fact that the double axe was used for the immolation of bulls or oxen, during the sacrifices considered the most important, the most ‘noble’.
Walter Burkert gives a striking description of such sacrifices:
« The most detailed representation of a sacrifice comes from the sarcophagus of Ayia Triada. A double axe, on which a bird has landed, is erected near a tree shrine. In front of the axe stands an altar that a priestess, ritually dressed in an animal skin, touches with both hands, as if to bless it. A little higher up, we see a vase for libations and a basket filled with fruit or bread, i.e. preparatory offerings that are brought to the altar. Behind the priestess, on a wooden table, lies a freshly sacrificed ox, whose blood is flowing from its throat into a vase. A flute player accompanies the scene with his sharp instrument. Following him, a procession of five women in a ritualistic attitude approaches. Almost all the elements of Greek sacrifice seem to be present here: procession (pompê), altar, preparatory offerings, flute accompaniment, collection of blood. Only the fire on the altar is missing ».iv
The sacrifice was an act of worship of great importance. It so happens that two of its by-products (so to speak), namely the horns of the sacrificed beast and the axe used for the sacrifice, have acquired considerable importance over time, reflected in a multitude of architectural, graphic, symbolic forms. « The sacrifice of the bull, the noblest of the sacrifices in normal time, is associated with the two sacred symbols of the most known and the most repetitive of the Minoan and Mycenaean cult: the pair of horns and the double axe. Both, nevertheless, are already fixed symbols, beyond their practical use, when, after a long prehistory, which begins in Anatolia, they end up reaching the Cretan shores. The excavations of the Neolithic city of Çatal Hüyük do not allow today to doubt that the symbol of the horns, which Evans named ‘horns of consecration’, drew its origin from real bull horns. (…) In the background, we find the custom of a partial restoration, observed by hunters, of a symbolic compensation for the killed animal. (…) The axe was used for the sacrifice of oxen, that does not suffer any discussion. In its form, the double axe joins practical efficiency to a powerful ornamental aspect which was surely charged with a symbolic function in very high times. (…) For the 4th millennium B.C., the first double axe is detected, still in lithic form, at Arpachiyah in Upper Mesopotamia. In the 3rd millennium, it is known in Elam and Sumer, as well as in Troy II. It reaches Crete at the beginning of the Minoan period, where it precedes the arrival of the symbol of the horns. »v
From the scene of the Minoan sacrifice reported by Burkert, I retain an idea: the ‘compensation’ due to the animal killed in sacrifice, through its horns, raised to the rank of divine symbol, – and a very beautiful image: ‘A double axe, on which a bird has landed’, on which I will return in a moment.
The two symbols, that of the pair of bovid horns (bulls, bucranes, or oxen), as well as that of the double axe used to immolate them, ended up transcending their respective origins, that (metonymic) of the animal victim, and that (equally metonymic) of the human sacrificer. They ended up designating the divine Himself, as figuratively and symbolically grasped in His highest essence…
This essence can be sensed in its ornamental, ubiquitous role, and it is revealed, in full light, by yet another metonymy, that of the bird which comes to rest at the top of the double axe.
To help us to understand the range, it is necessary to recall that « the most specific and distinctive feature of the Minoan experience of the divine resides in the epiphany of the Goddess who, during the trance, arrives ‘from above’. On a gold ring from Isopata, in the midst of an explosion of flowers, four women in festive garb lead a dance of varying figures, bending forward or raising their hands to the sky. Just above their outstretched arms appears a much smaller and differently dressed figure, which seems to float in the air. The interpretation is unanimous: in the midst of the swirling dances of the faithful, it is the Goddess who manifests herself.
Similar small floating figures appear in other scenes, each time forcing the interpretation of a divine epiphany (…) It is not known how the epiphany could be arranged during the cult itself, but it is possible that the women pushed their dance into a trance. According to a common interpretation, the birds should also be considered as an epiphany of the gods. « vi
Indeed, in his famous work on the Minoan-Mycenaean religion, Martin Nilsson devotes a whole chapter to the divine epiphanies which borrow forms of birds: « The fact that a bird is perched on the head of a large bell-shaped ‘idol’ in the Temple of the Double Axes at Knossos, must be interpreted as proof that it is an object of worship, that is, an image of the Goddess. For the bird is a form of the epiphany of the gods. (…) The obvious explanation is that birds are signs of the presence of the divinity. »vii
Nilsson gives another much older example, dating back to the Middle Minoan II period, that of the Sanctuary of the Dove-Goddess of Knossos, in which the birds symbolize the incarnation of the Divinity coming to visit the sacred place. He also cites the example of two gold leaves found in the third tomb at Mycenae representing a naked woman, her arm resting on her breasts. In one of the leaves, a bird seems to be whirling above her head, and in the other a bird seems to be touching her elbows with the tip of its wingsviii. I reproduce here these amazing figures:
How to interpret these « divine epiphanies » borrowing bird forms?
In the context of the cult of the dead implied by the Hagia Triada sarcophagus, Nilsson briefly mentions the hypothesis of ‘soul-birds’, representations of the souls of the deceased, but immediately rejects it. In agreement with the rest of the scientific community, he emphasizes that the double axe on which the birds are perched is assigned to the cult of the supreme divinity and cannot therefore be associated with human souls. He then proposes to follow Miss Harrison’s interpretation insteadix: « The bird is perched on a column. This column, as Dr. Evans has clearly shown, and as is evident from the sarcophagus at Hagia Triada, represents a sacred tree. This column, this tree, takes on a human form as a goddess, and this goddess is the Great Mother, who, taking different forms as Mother or Maiden, later develops into Gaia, Rhea, Demeter, Dictynna, Hera, Artemis, Aphrodite, Athena. As Mother Earth, she is also Pontia Theron [the ‘Bridge’ of Animals], with her lions, her deer, her snakes. And the bird? If the tree is of the earth, the bird is surely of the sky. In the bird perched on the column, we have, I think, the primitive form of the marriage of Ouranos and Gaia, of the Heaven-Father with the Earth-Mother. And from this marriage arose, as Hesiod told us, not only mortal man, but all divine glory. « x
The bird is thus clearly associated with the representation of the « epiphany » of the Supreme Divinity of the Minoans-Mycenians.
This is a very interesting result. But there is still more to say on this subject…
By carefully examining the numerous representations of the Double Axe, and their curious variations presented in the work of Nilssonxi, one can advance with a strong probability that the Double Axe could also have progressively taken the ‘shape’ of winged beings, in a vast range going from the abstract figuration of ‘butterflies’ to strange representations of anthropomorphic birds, or even of female and winged characters, which one could easily assimilate to figures of ‘angels’, if one did not risk anachronism, the biblical ‘angels’ appearing (in the Jewish Bible) one or two thousand years later… Here is an example taken from Nilsson’s book:
I am well aware, in doing so, of proposing a certain transgression, by mixing with Minoan and Mycenaean representations concepts and representations belonging to Assyrian, Mesopotamian and even Jewish and Hebrew traditions.
But it is difficult to resist in this case the metaphorical and metonymic shifts that Minoan and Mycenaean images allow and encourage, especially those that go in the direction of an increasingly refined abstraction.
The representation of the double axe as an abstract form of ‘butterflies’, is quoted by Nilsson himself, as stemming from the work of Seagerxii and Evansxiii: « Some scholars recognize a double axis in the so-called ‘butterfly’ patterntwo cross-hatched triangles touching each other at only one angle, the bases being parallel (…) The earliest example is an Early Minoan II saucer from Mochlos »xiv of which we present the reproduction below:
As for the evocation of winged anthropomorphic forms, let us consider the image of a double axe painted on a pottery chosen to illustrate the work of Joseph Joûbert, The archaeological excavations of Knossosxv:
It looks like a stylized double axe, but the general appearance also evokes a kind of angel. This idea of a winged being is reinforced when one remembers that a bird supposedly embodying the Divinity comes to perch at the top of the Double Axe, thus establishing a sort of twinning between the spread wings of the bird and the double blades of the axe.
In the chapter entitled « Epiphanies of the Gods in human shape » of his book, The Minoan-Mycenaean Religion and its Survival in Greek religion, Martin Nilsson finally quotes a very interesting opinion of Professor Blinkenberg according to which the names used to designate the Great Minoan Goddess such as Fanassa, Athenaia, Lindia, Paphia, suggest that the Minoans-Mycenaeans called their supreme deity simply ‘the Lady’ (or ‘Our Lady’), without giving her any particular name.xvi
Nilsson unreservedly agrees with Professor Blinkenberg’s opinion. I shall therefore adopt it in my turn, and I shall make it the subject of the conclusion of this article.
On the one hand, the labyrinth and the double axe have allowed us to establish the existence of real currents of religious, architectural and artistic exchange between Egypt, Crete and Anatolia.
Moreover, many works have shown that the double axe was in reality the emblem of the supreme divinity (a unique divinity, implying the emergence of a ‘Minoan monotheism’ with a matriarchal character) worshipped in Crete by the Minoans and the Mycenaeans from the end of the 3rd millennium BC. This cult was prolonged during the 2nd millennium B.C., thus well before the appearance of the ‘Abrahamic monotheism’ (with patriarchal character) as the many archaeological remains in Crete attest it.
Finally, we have accumulated evidence tending to prove that the imaginative force of the figurative representations of the ‘double axe’ had allowed free rein to the associations of ideas, and had encouraged the creation of completely abstract or singularly anthropomorphic forms, being able to go as far as to represent the incarnation of the Divinity in the form of double hatched triangles, or birds, or even figures of ‘angels’.
This is all the more astonishing since these figurations precede by at least a millennium the winged angels in the Jewish Torah, such as the angels of the Ark of the Covenant whose wings touch each other by their extremities, as described in the Book of Exodus: « These cherubim will have their wings spread out in front and dominating the mercy seat, and their faces, turned toward each other, will be directed toward the mercy seat. »xvii
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iThe Hawara Funerary Complex (the pyramid and Lbyrinth Temple) was built by Amenemhet III (1843-1797), the sixth king of Dynasty 12. According to some, the Hawara complex introduced the prototype of the ‘labyrinth’. However, the site of Knossos in Crete, populated since the 8th millennium B.C., already had a large palace in 2200 B.C., built several centuries before the Hawara complex, during the Ancient Minoan phase (MA III), and followed, during the Middle Minoan phase (MM IA) called ‘archaeopalatial’, dating from 2100 to 2000 B.C., by the construction of an Old Palace organized around a central courtyard. It is possible that reciprocal influences between Egyptian and Minoan civilizations took place as early as the 3rd millennium BC, or even earlier. In any case, the very name ‘labyrinth’ has nothing Egyptian or Greek about it, but is of Carian origin, and therefore of Asia Minor.
iiMartin P. Nilsson. The Minoan-Mycenaean Religion and its Survival in Greek religion. Copenhagen, London, 1927, p. 186-188
iiiL.W. King, H.R. Hall. History of Egypt, Chaldea, Syria, Babylonia and Assyria. The Grolier Society. London, 1907, p.125-126
ivWalter Burkert. The Greek religion in the archaic and classical period. Translation Pierre Bonnechere. Ed. Picard. 2011, p. 60
vWalter Burkert. The Greek religion in the archaic and classical period. Translation Pierre Bonnechere. Ed. Picard. 2011, p. 61-62.
viWalter Burkert. The Greek religion in the archaic and classical period. Translation Pierre Bonnechere. Ed. Picard. 2011, p. 65.
viiMartin P. Nilsson. The Minoan-Mycenaean Religion and its Survival in Greek religion. Copenhagen, London, 1927, p. 285
viiiHeinrich Schliemann. Mycenae : A Narrative of Researches and Discoveries at Mycenae and Tiryns, Ed. Scribner, Armstrong and Co., New York, 1878, p. 180, Fig. 267 et 268.
ixDans sa conférence Bird and Pillar. Worship in connexion with Ouranian Divinities. Transactions of the 3rd Congress for the History of Religions at Oxford, II, p.156.
xCité par Martin P. Nilsson. The Minoan-Mycenaean Religion and its Survival in Greek religion. Copenhagen, London, 1927, p. 292-293
xiMartin P. Nilsson. The Minoan-Mycenaean Religion and its Survival in Greek religion. Copenhagen, London, 1927, Ch. VI » The Double-Axe « , p. 162-200
xivMartin P. Nilsson. The Minoan-Mycenaean Religion and its Survival in Greek religion. Copenhagen, London, 1927, p.180
xvJospheh Joûbert, Les fouilles archéologiques de Knossos, Edition Germain et G. Grassin, Angers, 1905
xviBlinkenberg. The temple of Paphos. Det. Kgl. Danske Videnskabernes Selskab,Hist-filol. Medd, IX:2, 1924, p.29 cited by Martin Nilsson. In Op.cit. p.338.
For at least a million years, man has been using the spoken word more or less skillfully. Since ancient times, its uses and modes of expression have been infinite, from the most futile to the most elevated. The stammering child, the fluent poet, the sure sage, the inspired prophet, all tried and continue trying their own ways and speaking their voices.
With the same breath of expelled air, they generate gutturals from the glottis, fricatives from the pharynx, hissing on the tongue, whistling labials through the lips.
From these incessant sounds, what sense does exhale?
Heraclitus, master in obscure matters, great lord of meaning, once made this sharp judgment:
« The man is held as a little boy by the divinity, like the child by the man. »i
This both pessimistic and optimistic fragment proposes a ratio of proportion: what the child is to man, man is to the divinity. The observation of man’s impotence in relation to the divine is not dissociated from the natural and expected perspective of a passage from childhood to adulthood.
In his translation of this fragment, Marcel Conche curiously emphasizes speech, although the word logos isclearly absent from the Heraclitus text:
« A ‘marmot’ (a toddler) who cannot speak! Man is thus called by the divine being (δαίμων), just as a child is called by man. « ii
The periphrase ‘A marmot who cannot speak’ is the choice (bold and talkative) made by Marcel Conche to render the meaning of the simple Greek word νήπιος, affixed by Heraclitus to the word ‘man’ (ἀνὴρ).
Homer also uses the word νήπιος in various senses: ‘who is in infancy’, ‘young child’, but also ‘naive’, ‘foolish’, ‘devoid of reason’.
Conche evokes these various meanings, and justifies his own translation, which is periphrastic and therefore not very faithful, in the following way:
« Translating as ‘child without reason’ sounds right, but not precise enough: if νήπιος applies to the ‘infant’ child, one must think of the very young child, who does not yet speak. Hence the translation [in French] by ‘marmot’, which probably comes from ‘marmotter’, which originates from an onomatopoeia expressing murmuring, the absence of distinct speech. « iii
This is followed by a comment on the supposed meaning of the fragment:
« It is about becoming another being, who judges by reason, and not as habit and tradition would have it. This transformation of the being is translated by the ability to speak a new language: no longer a particular language – the language of desire and tradition – but a discourse that develops reasons referring to other reasons (…) Now, from this logical or philosophical discourse, from this logos, men do not have the intelligence, and, in relation to the demonic being – the philosopher – who speaks it, they are like little brats without speech (…) To speak as they speak is to speak as if they were devoid of reason (of the power to speak the truth). »iv
Although this fragment of Heraclitus does not contain any allusion to logos, the main lesson that Conche learns from it is : « Man is incapable of logos for the demonic being ».
In a second departure from the commonly received meaning for this fragment, Marcel Conche considers that the divinity or demonic being (δαίμων) evoked by Heraclitus is in reality the ‘philosopher’. For Conche, it is the philosopher who is the demonic being par excellence, and it is precisely he who is able to determine for this reason that « man is incapable of logos ».
However Heraclitus certainly did not say: « Man is incapable of logos.»
Man may mumble. But he also talks. And he even has, in him, the logos.
Indeed, if the word logos is absent from fragment D.K. 79, it is found on the other hand in ten other fragments of Heraclitus, with various meanings : ‘word’, ‘speech’, ‘discourse’, ‘measure’, ‘reason’…
Among these ten fragments, there are five that use the word logos in such an original, hardly translatable way that the common solution is just not to translate it at all, and to keep it in its original form : Logos…
Here are these five fragments:
« The Logos, which is, always men are incapable of understanding him, both before hearing him and after hearing him for the first time, for although all things are born and die according to this Logos, men are inexperienced when they try their hand at words or deeds. »v
« If it is not I, but the Logos, that you have listened to, it is wise to agree that it is the One-all. »vi
« In Prayer lived Bias, son of Teutames, who was more endowed with Logos than the others. « vii
In these three fragments, the Logos seems to be endowed with an autonomous essence, a power to grow, and an ability to say birth, life, death, Being, the One and the Whole.
In the next two fragments, the Logos is intimately associated with the substance of the soul itself.
« It belongs to the soul a Logos that increases itself. « viii
« You cannot find the limits of the soul by continuing on your way, no matter how long the road, so deep is the Logos it contains. « ix
As a reminder, here is the original text of this last fragment :
Strangely enough, Conche, who added the idea of speech in a fragment that did not include the word logos, avoids using the word logos here, in his translation, though the fragment does contain it explicitly: « You wouldn’t find the limits of the soul, even if you walked all the roads, because it has such a deep discourse.»x
Is it relevant to translate here the word logos by discourse?
If not, how to translate it?
None of the following meanings seems satisfactory: cause, reason, essence, basis, meaning, measure, report. The least bad of the possible meanings remains ‘speech, discourse’xiaccording to Conche, who opts for this last word, as we have seen.
But Heraclitus uses a strange expression here: ‘a deep logos‘, – a logos so ‘deep’ that it doesn’t reach its ‘limit’.
What is a logos thatnever reaches its own depth, what is a limitless logos?
For her part, Clémence Ramnoux decided not to translate in this fragment the word logos. She even suggested to put it in brackets, considering it as an interpolation, a late addition:
« You wouldn’t find a limit to the soul, even when you travel on all roads, (it has such a deep logos). « xii
She comments on her reluctance in this way:
« The phrase in parentheses may have been added over. If it was added, it was added by someone who knew the expression logos of the psyche. But it would not provide a testimony for its formation in the age of Heraclitus. « xiii
In a note, she presents the state of scholarly discussion on this topic:
» ‘So deep is her logos’. Is this added by the hand of Diogenes Laërtius (IX,7)?
Argument for: text of Hippolytus probably referring to this one (V,7): the soul is hard to find and difficult to understand. Difficult to find because it has no boundaries. In the mind of Hippolytus it is not spatial. Difficult to understand because its logos istoo deep.
Argument against: a text of Tertullian seems to translate this one: « terminos anime nequaquam invenies omnem vitam ingrediens » (De Anima 2). It does not include the sentence with the logos.
Among the moderns, Bywater deleted it – Kranz retained it – Fränkel retained it and interpreted it with fragment 3. »xiv
For his part, Marcel Conche, who, as we have seen, has opted for the translation of logos by ‘discourse’, justifies himself in this way: « We think, with Diano, that logos must be translated, here as elsewhere, by ‘discourse’. The soul is limited because it is mortal. The peirata are the ‘limits to which the soul goes,’ Zeller rightly says. But he adds: ‘the limits of her being’. « xv
The soul would thus be limited in her being? Rather than limited in her journey, or in her discourse? Or in her Logos?
Conche develops: « If there are no such limits, it is because the soul is ‘that infinite part of the human being’. »
And he adds: « Snell understands βαθὺς [bathus] as the Grenzenlosigkeit, the infinity of the soul. It will be objected that what is ‘deep’ is not the soul but the logos (βαθὺν λόγον). (…) In what sense is the soul ‘infinite’? Her power is limitless. It is the power of knowledge. The power of knowledge of the ψυχὴ [psyche] is limitless in so far as she is capable of logos, oftrue speech. Why this? The logos can only tell reality in a partial way, as if there was somewhere a reality that is outside the truth. Its object is necessarily reality as a whole, the Whole of reality. But the Whole is without limits, being all the real, and the real cannot be limited by the unreal. By knowledge, the soul is equal to the Whole, that is to say to the world. « xvi
According to this interpretation, reality is entirely offered to the power of reason, to the power of the soul. Reality has no ‘background’ that remains potentially obscure to the soul.
« The ‘depth’ of the logos is the vastness, the capacity, by which it equals the world and establishes in law the depth (immensity) of reality. Βαθὺς : the discourse extends so deeply upwards or downwards that it can accommodate everything within it, like an abyss in which all reality can find its place. No matter which way the soul goes on the path of knowledge, inward or outward, upward or downward, she encounters no limit to her capacity to make light. All is clear in law. Heraclitus’ rationalism is absolute rationalism. « xvii
Above all what is absolute, here, is the inability to understand the logos inits infinite depth, in its deepest infinity.
We’re starting to understand that for Heraclitus, the Logos cannot be just reason, measure or speech.
The soul (psyche) has no ‘limits’, because she has a ‘deep logos‘ (βαθὺν λόγον).
The soul is unlimited, she is infinite, because she is so vast, so deep, so wide and so high that the Logos himself can dwell in her always, without ever finding his own end in her, – no matter how many journeys or speeches he may make…
No wonder the (word) Logos is ‘untranslatable’. In theory, and in good logic, to ‘translate’ it, one would need an infinitely deep periphrase comprising an infinite number of words, made of infinite letters…
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iFragment D.K. 79. Trad. Jean-Paul Dumont. Les Présocratiques. Bibliothèque de la Pléiade. Gallimard 1988, p. 164
iiD.K. 79. Translation by Marcel Conche, in Héraclite PUF, 1986, p.77.
Socrates presents a figure difficult to surpass, that of an eternal hero of philosophical thought. But during his life, he nevertheless found his master, – or rather his mistress, by his own admission.
In the Symposium, Socrates reports that a « foreign », Dorian woman, Diotima, had made no secret of her doubts about Socrates’ limited abilities in truly higher matters.
Diotima had told him, without excessive oratory precaution, that he knew nothing about the ‘greatest mysteries’, and that he might not even be able to understand them…
Diotima had begun by inviting Socrates to « meditate on the strange state in which the love of fame puts one, as well as the desire to secure for the eternity of time an immortal glory.» i
Speaking of the « fruitful men according to the soul », such as poets or inventors, like Homer and Hesiod, who possess « the immortality of glory », or Lycurgus, « safeguard of Greece », she had emphasized their thirst for glory, and their desire for immortality. « It is so that their merit does not die, it is for such glorious fame, that all men do all that they do, and all the better they are. It is because immortality is the object of their love! » ii
Certainly, the love of immortality is something that Socrates is still able to understand. But there are much higher mysteries, and beyond that, the last, most sublime ‘revelation’…
« Now, the mysteries of love, Socrates, are those to which, no doubt, you could be initiated yourself. As for the last mysteries and the revelation, which, provided you follow the degrees of them correctly, are the goal of these last steps, I don’t know if you are capable of receiving them. I will nevertheless explain them to you, she said. As for me, I will spare nothing of my zeal; try, you, to follow me, if you are capable of it!» iii.
Diotima’s irony is obvious. No less ironic is the irony of Socrates about himself, since it is him who reports these demeaning words of Diotima.
Diotima keeps her word, and begins an explanation. For anyone who strives to reach ‘revelation’, one must begin by going beyond « the immense ocean of beauty » and even « the boundless love for wisdom ».
It is a question of going much higher still, to finally « perceive a certain unique knowledge, whose nature is to be the knowledge of this beauty of which I am now going to speak to you »iv.
And once again the irony becomes scathing.
« Try, she said, to give me your attention as much as you can. » v
So what is so hard to see, and what is this knowledge apparently beyond the reach of Socrates himself?
It is a question of discovering « the sudden vision of a beauty whose nature is marvelous », a « beauty whose existence is eternal, alien to generation as well as to corruption, to increase as well as to decrease; which, secondly, is not beautiful from this point of view and ugly to that other, not more so at this moment and not at that other, nor more beautiful in comparison with this, ugly in comparison with that (…) but rather she will show herself to him in herself and by herself, eternally united to herself in the uniqueness of her formal nature »vi.
With this « supernatural beauty » as a goal, one must « ascend continuously, as if by means of steps (…) to this sublime science, which is the science of nothing but this supernatural beauty alone, so that, in the end, we may know, in isolation, the very essence of Beauty. » vii
Diotima sums up this long quest as follows:
« It is at this point of existence, my dear Socrates, said the stranger from Mantinea, that, more than anywhere else, life for a man is worth living, when he contemplates Beauty in herself! May you one day see her! » viii
The ultimate goal then is: « succeeding in seeing Beauty in herself, in her integrity, in her purity, without mixture (…) and to see, in herself, the divine Beauty in the uniqueness of her formal nature »ix.
Moreover, it is not only a question of contemplating Beauty. It is still necessary to unite with her, in order to « give birth » and to become immortal oneself…
Diotima finally unveils her deepest idea:
« Do you really think that it would be a miserable life, that of the man whose gaze is turned towards this sublime goal; who, by means of what is necessaryx, contemplates this sublime object and unites with it? Don’t you think, she added, that by seeing Beauty by means of what she is visible by, it is only there that he will succeed in giving birth, not to simulacra of virtue, for it is not with a simulacrum that he is in contact, but with an authentic virtue, since this contact exists with the authentic real?
Now, to whom has given birth, to whom has nourished an authentic virtue, does it not belong to become dear to the Divinity? And does it not belong to him, more than to anyone else in the world, to make himself immortal? xi
To see Beauty herself, in herself, is the only sure way to make oneself immortal.
Is this what Socrates himself is « incapable of »?
Is then Socrates « incapable » of giving birth to virtue?
xIn order to do this, one must « use thought alone without resorting to sight or any other sensation, without dragging any of them along with reasoning » and « separate oneself from the totality of one’s body, since the body is what disturbs the soul and prevents it from acquiring truth and thought, and from touching reality. « Phédon 65 e-66a
« Within his soul each one possesses the power of knowledge (…) and is capable, directed towards reality, of supporting the contemplation of what is in the most luminous reality. And this is what we declare to be the Good » The Republic VII 518 c. » The talent of thinking is probably part of something that is much more divine than anything else. « Ibid. 518 e
The one « who was once great » and « ready for all battles » is Ouranos (the God of Heaven).
And the one who « found his conqueror and vanished » is Chronos, God of time, father of Zeus, and vanquished by him.
Of these two Gods, one could say at the time of the Trojan War, according to the testimony of Aeschylus, that the first (Ouranos) was already considered to have « never existed » and that the second (Chronos) had « disappeared » …
From those ancient times, there was therefore only ‘God alone’ (πλὴν Διός) who reigned in the hearts and minds of the Ancients…
The ‘victory’ of this one God, ‘Zeus’, this supreme God, God of all gods and men, was celebrated with songs of joy in Greece in the 5th century BC.
But one also wondered about its essence – as the formula ‘whatever He is’ reveals -, and one wondered if this very name, ‘Zeus’, could really suit him….
Above all, they were happy that Zeus had opened the path of ‘wisdom’ to mortals, and that he had brought them the consolation of knowing that ‘from suffering comes knowledge’.
Martin Buber offers a very concise interpretation of the last verses quoted above, which he aggregates into one statement:
« Zeus is the All, and that which surpasses it. » iii
How to understand this interpretation?
Is it faithful to the profound thought of Aeschylus?
Let us return to Agamemnon’s text. We read on the one hand:
« He who celebrates Zeus with all his soul will seize the Whole of the heart« .
and immediately afterwards :
« He [Zeus] has set mortals on the path of wisdom. »
Aeschylus uses three times in the same sentence, words with the same root: προφρόνως (prophronos), φρενῶν (phronōn) and φρονεῖν (phronein).
To render these three words, I deliberately used three very different English words: soul, heart, wisdom.
I rely on Onians in this regard: « In later Greek, phronein first had an intellectual sense, ‘to think, to have the understanding of’, but in Homer the sense is broader: it covers undifferentiated psychic activity, the action of phrenes, which includes ’emotion’ and also ‘desire’. » iv
In the translation that I offer, I mobilize the wide range of meanings that the word phren can take on: heart, soul, intelligence, will or seat of feelings.
Having said this, it is worth recalling, I believe, that the primary meaning of phrēn is to designate any membrane that ‘envelops’ an organ, be it the lungs, heart, liver or viscera.
According to the Ancient Greek dictionary of Bailly, the first root of all the words in this family is Φραγ, « to enclose », and according to the Liddell-Scott the first root is Φρεν, « separate ».
Chantraine believes for his part that « the old interpretation of φρήν as « dia-phragm », and phrassô « to enclose » has long since been abandoned (…) It remains to be seen that φρήν belongs to an ancient series of root-names where several names of body parts appear ». v
For us, it is even more interesting to observe that these eminent scholars thus dissonate on the primary meaning of phrēn…vi
Whether the truly original meaning of phrēnis « to enclose » or « to separate » is of secondary importance, since Aeschylus tells us that, thanks to Zeus, mortal man are called to « come out » of this closed enclosure, the phrēnes,and to « walk out » on the path of wisdom…
The word « heart » renders the basic (Homeric) meaning of φρενῶν (phrēn) ( φρενῶν is the genitive of the noun φρήν (phrēn), « heart, soul »).
The word « wisdom » » translates the verbal expression τὸν φρονεῖν (ton phronein), « the act of thinking, of reflecting ». Both words have the same root, but the substantive form has a more static nuance than the verb, which implies the dynamics of an action in progress, a nuance that is reinforced in the text of Aeschylus by the verb ὁδώσαντα (odôsanta), « he has set on the way ».
In other words, the man who celebrates Zeus « reaches the heart » (teuxetai phronein) « in its totality » (to pan), but it is precisely then that Zeus puts him « on the path » of « thinking » (ton phronein).
« Reaching the heart in its entirety » is therefore only the first step.
It remains to walk into the « thinking »…
Perhaps this is what Martin Buber wanted to report on when he translated :
« Zeus is the All, and that which surpasses him »?
But we must ask ourselves what « exceeds the Whole » in this perspective.
According to the development of Aeschylus’ sentence, what « surpasses » the Whole (or rather « opens a new path ») is precisely « the fact of thinking » (tonphronein).
The fact of taking the path of « thinking » and of venturing on this path (odôsanta), made us discover this divine law:
« From suffering is born knowledge », πάθει μάθος (pathei mathos)...
But what is this ‘knowledge’ (μάθος, mathos) of which Aeschylus speaks, and which the divine law seems to promise to the one who sets out on his journey?
Greek philosophy is very cautious on the subject of divine ‘knowledge’. The opinion that seems to prevail is that one can at most speak of a knowledge of one’s ‘non-knowledge’…
In Cratylus, Plato writes:
« By Zeus! Hermogenes, if only we had common sense, yes, there would be a method for us: to say that we know nothing of the Gods, neither of themselves, nor of the names they can personally designate themselves, because these, it is clear, the names they give themselves are the true ones! » vii
Léon Robin translates ‘εἴπερ γε νοῦν ἔχοιμεν’ as ‘if we had common sense’. But νοῦς (or νοός) actually means ‘mind, intelligence, ability to think’. The metaphysical weight of this word goes in fact much beyond ‘common sense’.
It would therefore be better to translate, in this context, I think :
« If we had Spirit [or Intelligence], we would say that we know nothing of the Gods, nor of them, nor of their names. »
As for the other Greek poets, they also seem very reserved as for the possibility of piercing the mystery of the Divine.
Euripides, in the Trojans, makes Hecuba say:
« O you who bear the earth and are supported by it,
whoever you are, impenetrable essence,
Zeus, inflexible law of things or intelligence of man,
The translation given here by the Bibliothèque de la Pléiade does not satisfy me. Consulting other translations available in French and English, and using the Greek-French dictionary by Bailly and the Greek-English dictionary by Liddell and Scott, I finally came up with a result more in line with my expectations:
« You who bear the earth, and have taken it for your throne,
Whoever You are, inaccessible to knowledge,
Zeus, or Law of Nature, or Spirit of Mortals,
I offer You my prayers, for walking with a silent step,
You lead all human things to justice. »
Greek thought, whether it is conveyed by Socrates’ fine irony that nothing can be said of the Gods, especially if one has Spirit, or whether it is sublimated by Euripides, who sings of the inaccessible knowledge of the God named « Whoever You Are », leads to the mystery of the God who walks in silence, and without a sound.
On the other hand, before Plato, and before Euripides, it seems that Aeschylus did indeed glimpse an opening, the possibility of a path.
Which path?
The one that opens « the fact of thinking » (ton phronein).
It is the same path that begins with ‘suffering’ (pathos) and ends with the act of ‘knowledge’ (mathos).
It is also the path of the God who walks « in silence ».
___________________
iΖεύς (‘Zeus’) is nominative, and Διός (‘God’) is genitive.
iiAeschylus. Agammemnon. Trad. by Émile Chambry (freely adapted and modified). Ed. GF. Flammarion. 1964, p.138
iiiMartin Buber. Eclipse of God. Ed. Nouvelle Cité, Paris, 1987, p.31.
ivRichard Broxton Onians. The origins of European thought. Seuil, 1999, pp. 28-29.
vPierre Chantraine. Etymological dictionary of the Greek language. Ed. Klincksieck, Paris, 1968.
The souls of peoples are revealed by what they collectively « forget », much more than by what they remember, what they dwell on and what they seemingly proclaim to the world.
Proof of this is the word oblivion itself, which in several languages seems to indicate in one stroke a vibrant part of the collective unconscious, emerging as if by accident, an indication of obscure depths…
The Latins use the word oblivio for ‘oblivion‘. It is a metaphor borrowed from writing over what has been erased: in the ‘palimpsests’ (from the Greek: « what one scratches to write again »), the copyists erased (or ‘obliterated’) theold text to write a new one.
The Greeks use the word λαθέσθαι, lathesthai, ‘to forget’, and λήθη, lethe, ‘forgetting’ , hence the famous Lethe, the river of the Underworld, which is known to make souls forgetful. These words derive from λανθάνω, lanthanô, whose first meaning is ‘to be hidden’. Greek ‘oblivion’ is therefore not a fatal erasure, but only a kind of withdrawal, of putting under the bushel, under a veil. Words with a priori positive connotations: ἀληθής, alethes, « true » or ἀλήθεια, aletheia, « truth, reality », are constructed with the privative alpha ἀ-, thus as negations. Truth or reality are not understood in ancient Greek as a dazzling evidence, but as a « not-hidden » or a « not-forgotten », then requiring a kind of work of extraction.
Arabic has the word نَسِيَ nassiya, whose first meaning is « to abandon, to neglect » and by derivation « to forget ». Nomadism cannot be encumbered, and on the long road of travel, many things are left behind, become negligible, and without regret, ‘forgotten’.
Sanskrit expresses the verb ‘to forget’ in many ways. One of them uses the pre-verb vi-: विस्मरति , vismarati, literally meaning « to come out of memory ». Another verb मृष्यते , mrisyate is built using the root मृष mṛṣ , whose primary meaning is ‘to forgive’. Forgetting is a grace given to the other, and even to the enemy…
The English and German languages use very similar words, to forget and vergessen, which are also built with preverbs (for and ver) connoting omission or failure, and comparable in this respect to Vi- Sanskrit. The English to get derives from the old Nordic geta and the Gothic bigitan, (‘to find’). German ver-gessen derives from the same root: *ghed-, ‘to take, to seize’. In both languages, ‘to forget’ therefore originally means ‘to divest oneself of’, ‘to throw away’, in an active sense, rather than just ‘lose’ or ‘misplace’. There is a kind of violence here.
In Hebrew, ‘to forget’ is שָׁכַח shakhah, as in « He will not forget the covenant of your fathers » (Deut. 4:31) or « And you forget me, declares the Lord God » (Ez. 22:12). But it is quite surprising that, with a slightly different vocalization, the verb שְׁכַח shekhah, has an almost exactly opposite meaning. Indeed, if שָׁכַח means « to forget », שְׁכַח means « to find » as in « I found a man » (Dan. 2,25) or « They were no longer found » (Dan. 2,35).
Curious ambivalence!
The fact of forgetting seems to carry in germ the possibility of ‘finding’, or conversely, the fact of ‘finding’ implies, in the word itself, the imminence of forgetting…
« To forget »…
What does this word really mean?
To erase (Latin) ? To hide (Greek) ? To abandon (Arabic) ? To forgive (Sanskrit) ? To throw away (Anglo-German)? To find (Hebrew) ?
Peoples are like diamonds, reflecting clean and changing shards… Their languages express much less what they think they feel, than what they are in fact blind to, what they remain astonishingly mute about, and forgetful deep down inside…
Pherecyde of Syros, the uncle and tutor of Pythagoras, active in the 6th century B.C., was the first to affirm that the souls of men are eternal, according to Ciceroi . However I presume that he must have been preceded by many shamans of ancient times, for whom eternity of souls was obvious, because they had personally experienced that human souls can travel between worlds, those of the living and those of the dead, under certain conditions.
Pherecyde wrote of a dead hero: « His soul was sometimes in Hades and sometimes in the places above the earth »ii . Did he have first-hand experience of these strange phenomena? Or was he just repeating stories he had heard from elsewhere ?
According to Suidas, Pherecyde had been influenced by the secret cults of Phoenicia. Many other Greeks, for their part, fell under the spell of the Chaldean rites, as reported by Diodorus of Sicily, or those of Ethiopia, described by Diogenes Laertius, or were fascinated by the depth of the ancient traditions of Egypt, reported by Herodotus with great detail. Many peoples have cultivated religious mysteries. The Magi of Persia loved the dark caves for their sacred celebrations; the Hebrews practiced the mysteries of the Kabbalah, probably long before their late medieval development; Caesar, in his Gallic Wars, describes those of the Druids.
Benjamin Constant devotes part of his book on « Religion, considered in its source, its forms and its development », to this transnational, multicultural, and several thousand year old phenomenon. « The mysteries of Eleusis were brought by Eumolpe, from Egypt or Thrace. Those of Samothrace, which served as a model for almost all those of Greece, were founded by an Egyptian Amazon (Diodorus of Sicily 3.55). The daughters of Danaus established the Thesmophoria (Herodotus 2:171; 4:172) and the Dionysians were taught to the Greeks by Phoenicians (Herodotus 2:49) or Lydians (Euripides, The Bacchaeans, 460-490). The mysteries of Adonis penetrated from Assyria through the island of Cyprus into the Peloponnese. The dance of the Athenian women to the Thesmophoria was not a Greek dance (Pollux, Onomast. 4) and the name of the Sabarian rites brings us back to Phrygia.» iii
Benjamin Constant notes that the names Ceres and Proserpine in the language of the Cabirs are identical to those of the Queen of the Underworld and her daughter among the Indians, Ceres deriving from Axieros and Asyoruca, and Proserpine from Axiocersa and Asyotursha. He quotes Creutzer who asserts, in his Mithraics (III,486), that the formulas with which the Greek initiates were consecrated (« Konx, Om, Pax ») are in reality Sanskrit words. Konx (κονξ) comes from Kansha (the object of desire), Om is the famous Vedic monosyllable, and Pax (παξ) comes from Pasha (Fortune).
Other similarities are worth noting, such as the role of the (stylized) representation of the sexual organs in Vedic and Greek cults. Constant indicates that the Pelagi in Samothrace worshipped the phallus, as reported by Herodotusiv, and that in the Thesmophoria a representation of the cteisv was staged. The Dionysian Canephores, young virgins chosen from the best families, carried the sacred phallus on their heads in baskets and brought it close to the lips of the candidates for initiation. »vi It was through the Lernéan mysteries that were celebrated in Argolide in honor of Bacchus, that the practice of planting phallus on the tombs was introduced »vii, symbols of genetic power, but also of the immortality of the soul and metempsychosis. Cicero speaks of the infamy of the Sabarian mysteriesviii, Ovid and Juvenal describe the obscene ceremonies of the feasts of Adonisix. Tertullian condemns: « What the mysteries of Eleusis have of more holy, what is carefully hidden, what one is admitted to know only very late, it is the simulacrum of the Phallus. » x
Eusebius of Caesarea is also interested in these ancient orgies and quotes Clement of Alexandria, a well-informed source, who does not hide his indignation: « Do you want to see the orgies of the Corybantes? You will see only assassinations, tombs, laments of priests, the natural parts of Bacchus with his throat cut, carried in a box and presented for adoration. But don’t be surprised if the barbaric Tuscans have such a shameful cult. What shall I say of the Athenians and the other Greeks, with their mysteries of Demeter? »» xi.
Both sexes are publicly displayed in the sacred cults of the Dioscuri in Samothrace and Bacchus in the Dionysies. It is a « feast of raw flesh, » the interpretation of which can vary considerably. One may decide to see it as a simple allusion to the wine harvest: the torn body of Bacchus is the body of the grape pulled from the vine and crushed under the press. Ceres is the Earth, the Titans are the grape-pickers, Rhea gathers the members of the God torn to pieces, who is incarnated in the wine made from the juice of the grapes.
But the metaphor can be completely overturned, and one can read in it the profound message of a theophany of God’s death and sacrifice, of his dismembered body shared in communion, in a strange prefiguration of Christ’s death, and then of the communion of his flesh and blood by his faithful, even today, at the crucial moment of the Mass.
Always in a kind of pagan prefiguration of Christian beliefs, more than half a millennium ahead of time, we witness the death and resurrection of God: Attys, Adonis, Bacchus and Cadmille die and rise again, following the example of Osiris and Zagreus, avatar of the mystic Dionysus.
We can see that the mystery religions of the Greeks owe almost everything to much older cults, coming from Egypt, Phoenicia, Chaldea, Mesopotamia, and further east still.
This raises a question which is not without merit: to what extent was Christian worship, which appeared some seven or eight centuries later, influenced by those ancient pagan cults revering a God who died in sacrifice for men, and whose body and blood are shared in communion by them? « The Logos as son of God and mediator is clearly designated in all the mysteries. » Benjamin Constant affirms in this regard. xii
The protagonists of the initiation ceremonies, composed of many degrees, certainly did not ask themselves such questions at the time. The initiates to the small mysteries (μύσται, the « mystes ») remained confined to the vestibules of the temples, only the initiates to the great mysteries (ἐπόπται, the « epoptes », a name that later applied to Christian « bishops ») could enter the sanctuary.
But what was their motivation? What was this secret that was so difficult to obtain? What justified to stoically endure eighty degrees of trials (hunger, whip, stay in the mud, in the ice water, and other torments…) to be initiated, for example, to the mysteries of Mithra?
What is certain is that these systems of initiation were subversive, they ruined the bases of the established order, of public religions, making too many gods proliferate, too visible. Part of this last revelation, which it took so long to discover, was the idea of the non-existence of these Homeric gods, popular, multiplied, covering the peristyles of the cities, encouraged by the government of the plebeians. The radical negation of the existence of the national gods, was part of the truths finally revealed to only a very small number of chosen ones.
« The secret did not lie in traditions, fables, allegories, opinions, or the substitution of a purer doctrine: all these things were known. What was secret, then, was not the things that were revealed, but that these things were thus revealed, that they were revealed as the dogmas and practices of an occult religion, that they were revealed gradually. » xiii
The initiation was, well before the time of the modern Enlightenment, a conditioning, a training of the mind, an asceticism of the soul, an exercise in radical doubt, an absolute « mise en abîme ». It was a revelation of the inanity of all revelation. At the end of this long journey, there were no other established doctrines than the absence of any doctrine, only an absolute negation of all known assertions, those which the uneducated people were being fed with. There were no more dogmas, but only signs of recognition, symbols, rallying words that allowed the initiated to allusively share the feeling of their election to penetrate the ultimate ends.
But what were these? If we had to free ourselves from all known gods and dogmas, what was left to believe?
That men go to heaven, and that the Gods have gone to earth.
Cicero testifies to this, in an exchange with an initiate: « In a word, and to avoid a longer detail, was it not men who populated the heaven? If I were to delve into antiquity, and take it upon myself to delve deeper into the stories of the Greeks, we would find that even those of the Gods, who are given the first rank, lived on earth, before going to heaven. Find out which of these Gods, whose tombs are shown in Greece. Since you are initiated into the mysteries, remember the traditions. » xiv
Cicero encourages us to recognize that the greatest of mysteries is that of our soul, and that the most sacred sanctuary is therefore not so inaccessible, since it is so close, though buried in the depths of our intimacy, in the center of our very soul.
« And truly there is nothing so great as to see with the eyes of the soul, the soul itself. This is the meaning of the oracle, which wants everyone to know each other. No doubt Apollo did not pretend to tell us to know our body, our size, our figure. For he who speaks of us does not speak of our body; and when I speak to you, it is not to your body that I speak. When therefore the oracle says to us, ‘Know thyself,’ he hears, ‘Know thy soul. Your body is, so to speak, only the vessel, only the home of your soul. » xv
Cicero, at the peak of his art, is modest. He knows that he owes everything he believes to Plato. This can be summed up in a few incisive phrases, in precise, surgical logic: « The soul feels that she is moving: she feels that she is not dependent on a foreign cause, but that she is by herself, and by her own virtue; it can never happen that she misses herself, so she is immortal.» xvi
If one finds the elliptic reasoning, one can read the more elaborate version, as developed by Plato in the Phaedra, as cited by Cicero in his Tusculanes:
« A being that always moves, will always exist. But he who gives movement to another, and who receives it himself from another, necessarily ceases to exist, when he loses his movement. There is therefore only the being moved by his own virtue, who never loses his movement, because he never misses himself. And moreover he is for all other things that have movement, the source and principle of the movement they have. Now, who says principle, says what has no origin. For it is from the principle that everything comes, and the principle cannot come from anything else. It would not be a principle if it came from elsewhere. And since it has no origin, it will therefore have no end. For, being destroyed, it could neither be itself reproduced by another principle, nor produce another, since a principle presupposes nothing anterior. Thus the principle of movement is in the being moved by its own virtue. A principle that can be neither produced nor destroyed. Otherwise it is necessary that heaven and earth be turned upside down, and that they fall into eternal rest, without ever being able to recover a force, which, as before, makes them move. It is obvious, therefore, that that which is moved by its own virtue, will always exist. And can it be denied that the ability to move in this way is not an attribute of the soul? For everything that is moved only by a foreign cause is inanimate. But that which is animated is moved by its own virtue, by its inner action. Such is the nature of the soul, such is its property. Therefore, the soul being, of all that exists, the only thing that always moves itself, let us conclude from this that it is not born, and that it will never die ». xvii
Are we satisfied enough? Do we need more? We are still far from the Gods, or perhaps much closer than we think. « Immortality, wisdom, intelligence, memory. Since our soul gathers these perfections, it is therefore divine, as I say. Or even a God, as Euripides dared to say. » xviii
The soul is a sun. Cicero reports these last words of Socrates, a few moments before drinking the hemlock: « The whole life of philosophers is a continual meditation of death ». This was his swan song. The swans, by the way, were dedicated to Apollo, because they seem to hold from him the art of knowing the future. Foreseeing the benefits of following death, the swans die voluptuously, while singing. Likewise Socrates, who took the time to recall this metaphor in front of his assembled disciples, sang an unforgettable song, and pondered his ultimate doubt, in the face of imminent death, with the smile of a wise man: « When one looks too fixedly at the setting sun. One comes to see no more. And in the same way, when our soul looks at herself, her intelligence sometimes becomes blurred, so that our thoughts become blurred. We no longer know what to fix ourselves on, we fall from one doubt to another, and our reasoning has as little consistency as a ship beaten by the waves. »
This very doubt, this blindness, this ultimate blurring, when we approach revelation, comes only from the too great strength of this inner sun, which the weak eyes of the mind cannot bear.
To detach the mind from the body is to learn how to die. Let us separate ourselves from our bodies by the power of the soul, and thus become accustomed to dying. By this means, our life will already hold a heavenly life, and we will be better prepared to take off when our chains break.
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i« According to the written documents, Pherecyde of Syros was the first to have said that the souls of men are eternal. « Cicero, Tusculanes, I, 16, 38.
iiPherecyde of Syros, fragment B 22, trans. G. Colli, La sagesse grecque, t. 2, p. 103: scholies of Apollonius of Rhodes, I, 643-648.
iiiBenjamin Constant. Of religion considered in its source, its forms and its developments. 1831. Book 13, ch.12
ivHerodotus, Story 2:51: « The Greeks, then, hold these and many other rites among the Egyptians, of which I will speak later; but it is not according to these peoples that they give the statues of Mercury an indecent attitude. The Athenians were the first to take this custom from the Pelasians; the rest of Greece followed their example. The Pelasges remained in fact in the same canton as the Athenians, who, from that time, were among the Hellenes; and it is for this reason that they then began to be reputed as Hellenes themselves. Whoever is initiated into the mysteries of the Cabires, which the Samothracians celebrate, understands what I am saying; for these Pelasges who came to dwell with the Athenians used to inhabit Samothrace, and it is from them that the peoples of this island took their mysteries. The Athenians are thus the first of the Hellenes who learned from the Pelagiuses to make statues of Mercury in the state we have just represented. The Pelasges give a sacred reason for this, which is explained in the mysteries of Samothrace. « Pierre-Henri Larcher. Paris, Lefevre and Charpentier 1842.
vSee Theodoret, Serm. 7 and 12. The cteis is a Greek word which literally means « tooth comb » but which also figuratively designates the pubis of the woman, and also means « cup, chalice ».
viTheodoret, Therapeut. Disput. 1, cited by B. Constant in op.cit. Book 13, ch.2
Some words are like solitary gems, waiting to be re-discovered, in order to reveal some strange resonances. They sometimes indicate constants of the human nature, which travel through passed millennia, vanished empires, linguistic basins, linking together distant cultures and old civilizations.
For example, in English, the words: « medecine, meditate, mediation, moderate, modest, mode », all actually originate from the same Indo-European root MED-, in Sanskrit : मद्. It is a very rich root, which is also reflected in Latin (medicus, meditor, modus) and Greek ( μἠδομαι, medomai: ‘to meditate, think, imagine’ ; μῆδος, mêdos: ‘thought, design’).
What is more surprising is that in its plural form, this latter word reveals a latent, but significant ambiguity. The plural of μῆδος is μἡδεα, médéa, which means « thoughts » but may also mean « human genitals », establishing thereby an unexpected link between two different aspects of human experience.
There is something even more surprising! The ambivalence between « thought » and « genitals » embedded in this Greek word is found almost identically in Arabic and Hebrew, even though these two semitic languages do not belong to the same linguistic and cultural Indo-European sphere as Greek. How can this happen ? Pure coincidence ? Or symptom of a deeper constant of the human mind ?
The primary meaning of the Arabic verb ذَكَرَ , dzakara, is : « to touch, hit or hurt someone in the virile member », and its secondary meanings are : « to remember, to tell », and « to pray, to say one’s prayers ». We also find a similar ambivalence in the nouns that derive from it. For example, ذِكْرً , dzikr, means « reminiscence, remembrance, recollection » and also « invocation, prayer, reading the Koran ». The same root with different vowels,ذَكَرً , dzakar, means « male », and its plural ذُكُورً, dzoukour, is the « male organ ».
In Hebrew, the verb זָכַר, zakhar, means « to think, to remember, to mention », but also, in a derived sense, « to be born male ». The name of the prophet Zechariah takes his name from this verbal root, and means : « The one God remembers ». The noun זַכֶר , zakher, means « remembrance, name » and זָכָר, zakhar, « that which is male, masculine ».
The word zakhar is, for example, used very crudely by Maimonides in the Guide for the Perplexed(Part I, Chapter 6), which deals with « man and woman » (ish and ishâ)i: « The term zakhar v-nekebah was afterwards applied to anything designed and prepared for union with another object » ii Note that the Hebrew word nekebah literally means « hole », and that zakhar v-nekebah thus literally means « the member and the hole ».
I find it extremely astonishing that languages as different as Greek, Hebrew, and Arabic should share such analogies, by creating direct verbal links between the male organ, mind, memory, and even the sacred.
Even more surprisingly, similar analogies and links can be found in Sanskrit !…
The Sanskrit root MED-, मद् is associated with the idea of strength, vigor, energy. It gave words like medas, « fat, marrow, lymph », medin, « vigor, energy », medini, « fertility, earth, soil », medah, « fat-tailed sheep », or medaka « spirituous liquor ».
As for the root MEDH-, मेध् , it gave words such as: medha: « juice, sauce, marrow, sap; essence; sacrificial victim; sacrifice, oblation »; medhā: « intellectual vigor, intelligence; prudence, wisdom »; medhas: « sacrifice »; medhya: « full of sap, vigorous; strong, powerful; fit for sacrifice; pure; intelligent, wise ».
We see in all these meanings the same kind of metonymic thinking at work. Marrow and sacrifice, sap and power, physical strength and mental energy, intelligence and wisdom draw semantic orbs where the vital energy (sap, fat, seed) is, by its abundance, conducive to sacrifice, and rises to signify man’s higher functions.
If we dig deeper the relationship between fat, sex and mind, we find some amazing leads. In fact, the sanskrit root MED- is a strong form of MID-, « getting fat » or MITH- « understanding » and « killing ».
How can « understanding » and « killing » have the same root, the same etymology? MITH- has as first meaning « to unite, to couple » and as derived meanings « to meet, to alternate », and also « to provoke an altercation ».
It seems that the idea of « meeting » is fundamentally twofold: one can meet as a friend or as an enemy, as a couple or as an antagonist, hence the two meanings derived from this very deep, very primeval intuition: that of « understanding » and that of « killing ».
One can go back even further to more originary sources with the root MI- , « to fix in the ground, to found, to build, to plant pillars ». Hence the derived meanings: « to measure, judge, observe » and « to perceive, know, understand ». Thus the word mit means: « pillar, column », and more generally « any erected object ». It is close to mita, « measured, metered; known ».
Let’s summarize. Every « erection » is a « foundation », and a preparation for future « knowledge »; to « erect » is to prepare oneself to « know ». Memory is rooted in the very foundation of one’s being.
For these ancient languages, « to be manly » is to be pegged to one’s own body, and thus rooted in the entire memory of the species, but it also means projecting oneself entirely into the future.
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iCuriously enough, the French edition of the Guide des égarés published by Editions Verdier (1979) left entirely over the sentenceAs can be seen on page 39 of the 1979 edition, but it is indeed present in the English translation dating from 1919.
iiMoses Maimonides. The Guide for the Perplexed. Translated by M. Friedländer. Ed. George Routledge & Sons, London, 1919, p.19
« Orpheus ripped to shreds by the Maenads », Pierre-Marcel Béronneau, 1895.
To the sound of cymbals and flutes, to the light of torches, disheveled women dance. They are the bacchae. Dressed in fox skins, wearing horns on their heads, holding snakes in their hands, seized by a « sacred madness, » they rush on animals chosen for sacrifice, tear them to pieces, tear them to pieces, and devour the bloody flesh raw.
These bacchanals — or Dionysian feasts, have fascinated the ancients for centuries.
« The bacchanals celebrate the mystery of angry Dionysus, leading the sacred madness to the ingestion of raw flesh, and they perform the absorption of the flesh of the massacres, crowned with snakes, and crying out ‘Evoha !’»i.
What did it mean? The myth reports that Dionysus Zagreus, son of Zeus and Persephone, had taken the form of a young bull to try to escape his pursuers. But he was caught, torn and devoured by the Titans, enemies of Zeus.
In Thrace, this god is called Sabos or Sabazios, and in Phrygia it is called Cybele.
It is in Thrace that initially, between the 8th and 7th centuries BC, these cults of divine madness and ecstatic dancing, culminating in the dismemberment of living flesh, and its bloody devotion, arose.
Historians of religion are inclined to detect in them, not a local phenomenon, but the symptom of a more universal movement originating in human nature, in its desire to establish a relationship with the divine.
« This Thracian orgiastic cult was merely the manifestation of a religious impulse which is emerging at all times and in all places throughout the earth, at all levels of civilization, and which, therefore, must derive from a deep need of man’s physical and psychic nature (…) And in every part of the earth, There are peoples who consider these exaltations as the true religious process, as the only way to establish a relationship between man and the spirit world, and who, for this reason, base their worship above all on the uses that experience has shown them to be most suitable for producing ecstasies and visions.”ii
Many peoples, on all continents, have had similar practices aimed at achieving ecstasy. The Ostiaks, the Dakotas, the Winnebagos, in North America, the Angeloks in Greenland, the Butios in the West Indies, the Piajes in the Caribbean, and many other peoples followed shamanic rites.
In Islam, the Sufis and the Whirling Dervishes know the power of ecstatic dance. Jalâl al-Dîn Rûmî testified: « He who knows the power of dance dwells in God, for he knows how Love kills. Allahu !”iii
The cult of « divine madness » and frenetic exaltation has also been recorded in « Christian bacchanals » in Russia, in the sect of « Christi », founded by a « holy man », named Philippoff, « in whose body God came one day to dwell and who from then on spoke and gave his laws as the living God.”iv
The Dionysian cult of drunkenness and divine ecstasy is closely related to the belief in the immortality of the soul, for many peoples, in all periods of short human history.
This belief is based not on dogmas or prophecies, but on an intimate experience, really and personally felt, by all those who actively participated in those nights of madness and ecstasy.
The link between the belief in the immortality of the soul and the devouring of pieces of the torn body probably appeared in the most ancient times.
As early as a remote era, going back more than eight hundred thousand years (if we take into account the dating of the remains found in the Chou-Kou-Tien caves), the cutting up of corpses was probably a way of definitively ensuring the death of the dead, a way of making them harmless forever, unable to return to earth to threaten the living.
But it was also, ipso facto, an indication of an ancient and diffuse belief in the survival of the soul, despite the evidence of the death of the body.
We will probably never know what Homo Sinanthropus thought of the spirit world. On the other hand, we do have myths of dismemberment attested throughout antiquity and throughout the world.
Orpheus, a divine hero, died torn apart and dismembered alive by mad Thracian women.
Agamemnon, murdered by his wife Clytemnestra, complains in the other world of the atrocious outrages she inflicted on him after killing him: « After my shameful death, she subjected me, out of malice, to maschalism.”v
Maschalism consists in symbolically mimicking the treatment of animal victims during sacrifices. The priests would cut off or tear off the animal’s limbs and offer them as first-fruits to the gods in the form of raw flesh.
The astonishing thing is that the murderers used this method for their own purification, to inflect the anger of the victims, and especially to make the dead person powerless to punish the murderer.
Consequently, they cut up the corpse of the victims, amputating or tearing off the arms and legs at their joints, and then forming a chain that they hung around the shoulders and armpits of the corpse.
There is a certain logic at work here. The dead man’s arms and legs are amputated so that his soul cannot grasp the weapons placed in front of his grave and come back to fight.
In Egypt, Osiris is killed and then cut into fourteen pieces by his brother Set. The body parts are thrown into the Nile and scattered throughout the country.
Let us note that the Osirian myth is replayed for all the deceased, at the time of embalming.
It is in Egypt that the cutting up of corpses took the most ritualized and elaborate form, using a battery of surgical, chemical, and magical methods, including dismemberment, maceration, mummification, cremation, and exposure of various body parts. The embalming ritual lasts seventy days.
« The brain is extracted through the nose, the viscera are removed through an incision made in the side; only the heart, swaddled, is put back in its place, while the organs are placed in « canopies », vases with lids in the shape of human or animal heads. The remaining soft parts and body fluids are dissolved by a solution of natron and resin and evacuated from the body rectally. This first phase takes place under the sign of purification. Everything that is « bad » is removed from the body, in other words everything that is perishable and can compromise the form of eternity that is the goal.”vi
In the ancient Egyptian religion, all these violent interventions around the dead and dislocated body were intended to make the dead person die, as it were, permanently. But they also facilitate the passage from death to eternal life after the embalming of the body and mummification, which is an essentially « magical » operation.
« Then begins the drying phase (dehydration and salting), which lasts about forty days. Reduced to skin and bones, the corpse will then be put back in shape during the mummification ritual; It is then that the skin is anointed with balsamic oils to restore its suppleness, stuffed with resins, gum arabic, fabrics, sawdust, straw and other materials, inlaid with fake eyes, cosmetics and wigs, and finally swaddled with strips of fine linen, partly inscribed with magical formulas and between which amulets are slipped. The result of all these operations is the mummy. The mummy is much more than a corpse: it is the figure of the god Osiris and a hieroglyphic representation of the whole human being, « full of magic, » as the Egyptians say.”vii
Then comes the time for words, prayers and invocations. « In Egyptian, this mortuary therapy by speech is expressed by a word that is fundamentally untranslatable, but which it is customary in Egyptology to render by « glorification » or « transfiguration ». The dead person is invoked by an uninterrupted stream of words (…) The dead person thus becomes a spirit endowed with power capable of surviving in many forms (…) Through the recitation of glorifications, the scattered limbs of the body are somehow brought together in a text that describes them as a new unity. »
The « glorification » and the « transfiguration » of the dead are reminiscent of those of Osiris. « It is the rites, images and texts that awaken Osiris and bring him back to life; it is with the help of symbolic forms that the dislocated dead is recomposed and that the border separating life and death, here below and beyond, is crossed. The mystery of this connectivity capable of triumphing over death, however, lies not in the symbolic forms, but in the love that puts them to work. Who performs the rites, pronounces the words and appears in images is anything but indifferent. It is first and foremost the affair of the goddess Isis, wife and twin sister of Osiris. On this point, the myth of Osiris and Isis corresponds moreover to that of Orpheus and Eurydice (…) For Isis, it is love which confers on her magical rites and recitations a force of cohesion able to supplement the inertia of the heart of Osiris and to bring the god back to life. The combination of love and speech is the strongest cohesive force known to Egyptians and at the same time the most powerful elixir of life.”viii
« Death of the god ». « Glorification ». « Transfiguration ». « Resurrection ». « Power of love. » It is difficult not to find in these themes possible parallels with the death and resurrection of Christ, even in certain details.
Christ’s last moments are described as follows: « As it was the Preparation, the Jews, in order to prevent the bodies from remaining on the cross during the Sabbath – for that Sabbath was a great day – asked Pilate to break their legs and take them away. So the soldiers came and broke the legs of the first, and then of the other who had been crucified with him. When they came to Jesus, when they saw that he was already dead, they did not break his legs, but one of the soldiers pierced his side with his spear, and immediately blood and water came out of him. He who has seen bears witness, – his witness is true, and he knows that he speaks the truth – so that you too may believe. For this happened so that the Scripture might be fulfilled:
This word of Scripture is indeed found in the text of Exodus :
« YHVH said to Moses and Aaron, ‘This is the Passover ritual: no stranger shall eat of it. But any slave who has been bought for money, when you have circumcised him, may eat it. The resident and the hired servant shall not eat it. It will be eaten in one house, and you will not take any piece of meat out of that house. You shall not break any bones.”x
It must be hypothesized that the precept given to Moses by YHVH « not to break any bones » is a radical reversal of the « idolatrous » practices that were to be entirely abandoned. If the « pagan » priests were tearing off the limbs of animals, breaking bones and joints, one can think that Moses considered it useful to advocate a practice strictly contrary to this, in order to differentiate himself from it.
In contrast to the Egyptian cutting up of bodies, Dionysian dismemberment, or Greek maschalism, the members of Jesus’ body were left intact, so that the Scripture might be fulfilled.
On the eve of his death, however, Jesus symbolically shared his body and blood with his disciples at the Last Supper.
« As they were eating, Jesus took bread, blessed it, broke it, and gave it to the disciples, saying, ‘Take and eat, this is my body. Then taking a cup, he gave thanks and gave it to them, saying, ‘Drink from it, all of you; for this is my blood, the blood of the covenant, which is to be poured out for many for the remission of sins.”xi
Pagan practices consist in breaking the limbs of the victims who have been sacrificed and drinking their blood. Jesus breaks bread and drinks wine. This sacrifice is symbolic. But it is also a prefiguration of the real sacrifice that will take place, the very next day, on the cross.
The ancient shamanic sacrifices, the dismemberment of Osiris, the dilaceration of the body of Dionysus, the broken bread and the shared wine by Christ belong to very different cultures and spanning over several millennia.
But there is one thing in common: in all these cases, a God dies in sacrifice, and his remains are ‘shared’, ‘distributed’. Then the God is resurrected by the power of love and the word.
Given the striking analogy in these narrative patterns, we are led to make a hypothesis.
The hunting meal of the first hominids has been the beginning of religion since the dawn of time. It was during the chewing and eating of animal flesh that the idea of the permanence and transmission of the spirit attached to the bloody flesh insidiously came to haunt human consciences.
But then a conceptual leap, an incredible leap took place. It was imagined that the sacrificial victims were themselves only a distant image of the Supreme Sacrifice, that of God, the Lord of all creatures.
More than 6,000 years ago, in the great tradition of Veda, it was affirmed: « The Lord of creatures gives Himself to the gods as a sacrifice.”xii
vAeschylus. Choephori439. Quoted by Erwin Rohde. Psyché. Le culte de l’âme chez les Grecs et leur croyance à l’immortalité. Les Belles Lettres, 2017, p. 229.
viJan Assmann. Mort et au-delà dans l’Égypte ancienne. Ed. Du Rocher, 2003, p.59
What was it that Empedocles did refuse to reveal? Why didn’t he tell what he was « forbidden to say »? What was he afraid of, – this famous sage from Agrigento, this statesman, this gyrovague shaman and prophet? Why this pusillanimity on the part of someone who, according to legend, was not afraid to end up throwing himself alive into the furnace of Etna?
Empedocles wrote:
« I ask only what ephemeral humans are allowed to hear. Take over the reins of the chariot under the auspices of Piety. The desire for the brilliant flowers of glory, which I could gather from mortals, will not make me say what is forbidden… Have courage and climb the summits of science; consider with all your strength the manifest side of everything, but do not believe in your eyes more than in your ears.”i
Empedocles encourages us to « climb the summits of science » …
The Greek original text says: καὶ τὸτε δὴ σοφίης ἐπ’ ἄίκροισι θοάζειν, that translates literally: « to impetuously climb to the summits (ἐπ’ ἄίκροισι, ep’aikroisi) of wisdom (σοφίης sophias) ».
But what are really these « summits of wisdom »? Why this plural form? Shouldn’t there be just one and only one « summit of wisdom », in the proximity of the highest divinity?
In another fragment, Empedocles speaks again of « summits », using another Greek word, κορυφή, koruphe, which also means « summit, top »:
John Burnet and Auguste Reymond translated (in French):
« Marchant de sommet en sommet,
ne pas parcourir un sentier seulement jusqu’à la fin… »iv i.e.:
« Walking from summit to summit,
not to walk a path only to the end…”
Paul Tannery adopted another interpretation, translating Κορυφὰς as « beginnings »:
« Rattachant toujours différemment de nouveaux débuts de mes paroles,
et ne suivant pas dans mon discours une route unique… »v
« Always attaching new and different beginnings to my words,
and not following in my speech a single road…”
I wonder: does the apparent obscurity of this fragment justify so wide differences in its interpretation?
We are indeed invited to consider, to dig, to deepen the matter.
According to the Bailly Greek dictionary, κορυφή (koruphe), means « summit« , figuratively, the « zenith » (speaking of the sun), and metaphorically: « crowning« , or « completion« .
Chantraine’s etymological dictionary notes other, more abstract nuances of meaning for κορυφή : « the sum, the essential, the best« . The related verb, κορυφῶ koruphô, somewhat clarifies the range of meanings: « to complete, to accomplish; to rise, to lift, to inflate« .
The Liddell-Scott dictionary gives a quite complete review of possible meanings of κορυφή: « head, top; crown, top of the head [of a man or god], peak of a mountain, summit, top, the zenith; apex of a cone,extremity, tip; and metaphorically: the sum [of all his words], the true sense [of legends]; height, excellence of .., i.e. the choicest, best. »
Liddell-Scott also proposes this rather down-to earth and matter-of-fact interpretation of the fragment 24: « springing from peak to peak« , i.e. « treating a subject disconnectedly ».
But as we see, the word κορυφή may apply to human, geological, tectonic, solar or rhetorical issues…
What is be the right interpretation of κορυφή and the ‘movement’ it implies, for the fragment 24 of Empedocles?
Etymologically and originally, the word κορυφή relates to κόρυς, « helmet« . Chantraine notes incidentally that the toponym « Corinth » (Κόρινθος) also relates to this same etymology.
The primary meaning of κορυφή, therefore, has nothing to do with mountains or peaks. It refers etymologically to the « summit » of the body, the « head ». More precisely, it refers to the head when « helmeted », – the head of a man or a woman (or a God) equipped as a warrior. This etymology is well in accordance with the long, mythological memory of the Greeks. Pythagorasvi famously said that Athena was « begotten », all-armed, with her helmet, « from the head » of Zeus, in Greek: κορυφἆ-γενής (korupha-genes).
If we admit that the wise and deep Empedocles did not use metaphors lightly, in one of his most celebrated fragments, we may infer that the « summits », here, are not just mineral mountains that one would jump over, or subjects of conversation, which one would want to spring from.
In a Greek, philosophical context, the « summit » may well be understood as a metaphor for the « head of Zeus », the head of the Most High God. Since a plural is used (Κορυφὰς, ‘summits’), one may also assume that it is an allusion to another Godhead, that of the divine « Wisdom » (a.k.a. Athena), who was born from Zeus’ « head ».
Another important word in fragment 24 is the verb προσάπτω, prosapto.
Bollack translates this verb as « to join, » Burnet as « to walk, » Tannery as « to attach”, Liddell-Scott as « to spring »…
How diverse these scholars’ interpretations!… Joining the summits one to the other… Walking from summit to summit… Attaching new beginnings to a narration… Springing from peak to peak, as for changing subjects…
In my view, all these learned translations are either too literal or too metaphorical. And unsatisfactory.
It seems to me necessary to seek something else, more related to the crux of the philosophical matter, something related to a figurative « God Head », or a « Godhead »… The word koruphe refers metaphorically to something ‘extreme’, — also deemed the ‘best’ and the ‘essential’. The Heads (koruphas) could well allude to the two main Greek Godheads, — the Most High God (Zeus) and his divine Wisdom (Athena).
More precisely, I think the fragment may point to the decisive moment when Zeus begets his own Wisdom, springing from his head, all armed….
The verb προσάπτω has several meanings, which can guide our search: « to procure, to give; to attach oneself to; to join; to touch, to graze » (Bailly).
Based on these meanings, I propose this translation of the first line of fragment 24:
« Joining the [God] Heads, one to the other ».
The second verb used in fragment 24 (line 2) is τελέειν, teleein: « To accomplish, to perform, to realize; to cause, to produce, to procure; to complete, to finish; to pay; (and, in a religious context) to bring to perfection, to perform the ceremony of initiation, to initiate into the mysteries (of Athena, the Goddess of Wisdom) » (Bailly).
Could the great Empedocles have been satisfied with just a banal idea such as « not following a single road », or « not following a path to the end », or even, in a more contorted way, something about « not saying a single path of words »?
I don’t think so. Neither Bollack, Burnet, nor Tannery seem, in their translations, to have imagined and even less captured a potential mystical or transcendent meaning.
I think, though, that there might lie the gist of this Fragment.
Let’s remember that Empedocles was a very original, very devout and quite deviant Pythagorean. He was also influenced by the Orphism then in full bloom in Agrigento .
This is why I prefer to believe that neither the ‘road’, nor the ‘path’ quoted in the Fragment 24, are thought to be ‘unique’.
For a thinker like Empedocles, there must be undoubtedly otherways, not just a ‘single path’…
The verb τελέειν also has, in fact, meanings oriented towards the mystical heights, such as: « to attain perfection, to accomplish initiation, to initiate to the mysteries (of divine Wisdom) ».
As for the word μύθων (the genitive of mythos), used in line 2 of Fragment 24, , it may mean « word, speech », but originally it meant: « legend, fable, myth ».
Hence this alternative translation of μύθων μὴ τελέειν ἀτραπὸν μίαν (mython mè teleein atrapon mian) :
« Not to be initiated in the one way of the myths »…
Here, it is quite ironic to recall that there was precisely no shortage of myths and legends about Empedocles… He was said to have been taken up directly to heaven by the Gods (his « ascension »), shortly after he had successfully called back to life a dead woman named Panthea (incidentally, this name means « All God »), as Diogenes of Laërtius reportedvii.
Five centuries B.C., Empedocles resurrected “Panthea” (« All God »), and shortly afterwards he ‘ascended’ to Heaven.
One can then assume that the Fragment 24 was in fact quite premonitory, revealing in advance the nature of Empedocles’ vision, the essence of his personal wisdom.
The Fragment 24 announces an alternative to the traditional « way of initiation » by the myths:
« Joining the [God] Heads, one to the other,
Not to be initiated in the only way of the myths. »
Empedocles did not seem to believe that the myths of his time implied a unique way to initiation. There was maybe another « way » to initiation: « joining the Most High Godhead and his Wisdom …
According to Genesis, taken literally, man was created twice.
Genesis, in chapter 1, describes a first creation of « man » called ha-adam. The word ha-adam includes the definite article ha and literally means « the earth », metaphorically « the red » (for the earth is red), and by extension « man ».
In Chapter 2, Genesis describes a second creation of man (ish), accompanied by a creation of woman (isha). These two words are not preceded by the article ha.
The most immediately noticeable differences between the two creations are as follows.
First of all, the names given to the man differ, as we have just seen: ha-adam on the one hand, ish and isha on the other.
Secondly, the verbs used to describe the act of creation are not the same. In the first chapter of Genesis we read: « God said, ‘Let us make man in our image, in our likeness' » (Gen. 1:26). The Hebrew word for ‘let us make’ is נַעֲשֶׂה from the verb עֲשֶׂה, ‘asah, to do, to act, to work. In the second chapter of Genesis we read: « And the Eternal God planted a garden in Eden toward the east, and there he placed the man whom he had fashioned. « (Gen. 2:8) The Hebrew word for ‘fashioning’ is יָצָר , yatsara, to make, to form, to create.
Thirdly, in Genesis 1, God created man « male and female » (zakhar and nqebah). Man is apparently united in a kind of bi-sexual indifferentiation or created with « two faces », according to Rashi.
In contrast, in Genesis 2, the creation of woman is clearly differentiated. She is created in a specific way and receives the name ‘isha‘, which is given to her by the man. The man, ‘ha-adam‘, then calls himself ‘ish‘, and he calls his wife ‘isha‘, « because she was taken from ‘ish‘ ».
Rashi comments on this verse: « She shall be called isha, because she was taken from ish. Isha (‘woman’) is derived from ish (‘man’). From here we learn that the world was created with the holy language, [since only the Hebrew language connects the words ‘man’ and ‘woman’ with a common root]. (Berechith raba 18, 4).”
I don’t know if it can be said with impunity that only the Hebrew language connects the words « man » and « woman » to a common root. English, for example, displays such a link with « man » and « woman ». In Latin, « femina » (woman) would be the feminine counterpart of « homo » (« hemna« ).
But this is a secondary issue. However, it shows that Rashi’s interest is certainly not exercised here on the problem of double creation and on the triple difference between the stories of Genesis 1 and Genesis 2: two nouns (adam/ish), two verbs to describe creation (‘asah/yatsara), and two ways of evoking the difference between genders, in the form ‘male and female’ (zakhar/nqebah) and in the form ‘man and woman’ (ish/isha).
The double narrative of the creation of man and woman could be interpreted as the result of writing by independent authors at different times. These various versions were later collated to form the text of Genesis, which we have at our disposal, and which is traditionally attributed to Moses.
What is important here is not so much the identity of the writers as the possible interpretation of the differences between the two stories.
The two ‘ways’ of creating man are rendered, as has been said, by two Hebrew words, עֲשֶׂה ‘to make’ and יָצָר ‘to form’. What does this difference in vocabulary indicate?
The verb עֲשֶׂה ‘asah (to do) has a range of meanings that help to characterize it more precisely: to prepare, to arrange, to take care of, to establish, to institute, to accomplish, to practice, to observe. These verbs evoke a general idea of realization, accomplishment, with a nuance of perfection.
The verb יָצָר yatsara (to shape, to form) has a second, intransitive meaning: to be narrow, tight, embarrassed, afraid, tormented. It evokes an idea of constraint, that which could be imposed by a form applied to a malleable material.
By relying on lexicon and semantics, one can attempt a symbolic explanation. The first verb (עֲשֶׂה , to do) seems to translate God’s point of view when he created man. He « makes » man, as if he was in his mind a finished, perfect, accomplished idea. The second verb (יָצָר , to form) rather translates, by contrast, the point of view of man receiving the « form » given to him, with all that this implies in terms of constraints, constrictions and limits.
If we venture into a more philosophical terrain, chapter 1 of Genesis seems to present the creation of man as ‘essence’, or in a ‘latent’ form, still ‘hidden’ to some extent in the secret of nature.
Later, when the time came, man also appears to have been created as an existential, natural, visible, and clearly sexually differentiated reality, as chapter 2 reports.
S. Augustine devoted Part VI of his book, Genesisin the literal sense, to this difficult question. He proposes to consider that God first created all things ‘simultaneously’, as it is written: ‘He who lives for eternity created everything at the same time. « (Ecclesiasticus, 18,1) The Vulgate version says: « inaeternum, creavit omnia simul« . This word ‘simul‘ seems to mean a ‘simultaneous’ creation of all things.
It should be noted in passing that neither Jews nor Protestants consider this book of Ecclesiasticus (also called Sirach) to belong to the biblical canon.
For its part, the Septuagint translates from Hebrew into Greek this verse from Ecclesiasticus: » o zon eis ton aiôna ektisen ta panta koinè « . (« He who lives for eternity has created everything together. »)
This is another interpretation.
So shall we retain ‘together’ (as the Greek koinè says) or ‘simultaneously’ (according to the Latin simul)? It could be said that it amounts to the same thing. However it follows from this difference that Augustine’s quotation from Sirach 18:1 is debatable, especially when it is used to distinguish between the creation of man in chapter 1 of Genesis and his second creation in chapter 2.
According to Augustine, God in the beginning created all things ‘in their causes’, or ‘in potency’. In other words, God in chapter 1 creates the idea, essence or principle of all things and everything in nature, including man. « If I say that man in that first creation where God created all things simultaneously, not only was he not a man in the perfection of adulthood, but was not even a child, – not only was he not a child, but was not even an embryo in his mother’s womb, but was not even the visible seed of man, it will be believed that he was nothing at all.”
Augustine then asks: what were Adam and Eve like at the time of the first creation? « I will answer: invisibly, potentially, in their causes, as future things are made that are not yet.”
Augustine takes the side of the thesis of the double creation of man, firstly in his ‘causal reason’, ‘in potency’, and secondly, ‘in act’, in an effective ‘existence’ which is prolonged throughout history.
This is also true of the soul of every man. The soul is not created before the body, but after it. It does not pre-exist it. When it is created, it is created as a ‘living soul’. It is only in a second stage that this ‘living soul’ may (or may not) become ‘life-giving spirit’.
Augustine quotes Paul on this subject: « If there is an animal body, there is also a spiritual body. It is in this sense that it is written: The first man, Adam, was made a living soul, the last Adam, the ‘newest Adam’ (novissimusAdam), was a life-giving spirit. But it is not what is spiritual that was made first, it is what is animal; what is spiritual comes next. The first man, who came from the earth, is earthly; the second man, who came from heaven, is heavenly. Such is the earthly, such are also the earthly; and such is the heavenly, such are also the heavenly. And just as we have put on the image of the earthly, so shall we also put on the image of him who is of heaven.”
And Augustine adds: « What more can I say? We therefore bear the image of the heavenly man from now on by faith, sure that we will obtain in the resurrection what we believe: as for the image of the earthly man, we have clothed it from the origin of the human race. »
This basically amounts to suggesting the hypothesis of a third ‘creation’ that could affect man: after adam, ish or isha, there is the ‘last Adam‘, man as ‘life-giving spirit’.
From all of this, we will retain a real intuition of the possible metamorphoses of man, certainly not reduced to a fixed form, but called upon to considerably surpass himself.
It is interesting, at this point, to note that Philo of Alexandria offers a very different explanation of the double creation.
Philo explains that in the beginning God « places » (וַיָּשֶׂם שָׁם ) in the Garden of Eden a « fashioned » man (‘The Eternal God planted a garden in Eden towards the east and placed the man he had fashioned in it’). Gen. 2:8). A little later he ‘established’ (וַיַּנִּח ) a man to be the worker and the guardian (‘The Eternal-God therefore took the man and established him in the Garden of Eden to cultivate and care for it’. Gen. 2:15).
According to Philo, the man who cultivates the garden and cares for it is not the « fashioned » man, but « the man [that God] has made« . And Philo says: « [God] receives this one, but drives out the other.”i
Philo had already made a distinction between the heavenly man and the earthly man, by the same verbal means. « The heavenly man was not fashioned, but made in the image of God, and the earthly man is a being fashioned, but not begotten by the Maker.”ii
If we follow Philo, we must understand that God drove the ‘fashioned‘ man out of the garden, after having placed him there, and then established the ‘made‘ man there. The man whom God ‘fashioned‘ was ‘placed‘ in the garden, but it seems that he was not considered worthy to cultivate and keep it.
Moreover, in the text of Genesis there is no evidence to support Philo’s thesis of a cross between a ‘fashioned’ man and a ‘made’ man.
Philo specifies: « The man whom God made differs, as I have said, from the man who was fashioned: the fashioned man is the earthly intelligence; the made man is the immaterial intelligence.”iii
Philo’s interpretation, as we can see, is metaphorical. It must be understood that there are not two kinds of men, but that there are rather two kinds of intelligence in man.
« Adam is the earthly and corruptible intelligence, for the man in the image is not earthly but heavenly. We must seek why, giving all other things their names, he did not give himself his own (…) The intelligence that is in each one of us can understand other beings, but it is incapable of knowing itself, as the eye sees without seeing itself »iv.
The ‘earthly’ intelligence can think of all beings, but it cannot understand itself.
God has therefore also ‘made‘ a man of ‘heavenly’ intelligence, but he does not seem to have had a happier hand, since he disobeyed the command not to eat of the fruit of the ‘tree of the knowledge of good and evil’.
But was this tree of ‘the knowledge of good and evil’ really in the Garden of Eden? Philo doubts it. For if God says, « But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, you shall not eat of it », then « this tree was not in the garden »v.
« You shall not eat of it.” This should not be interpreted as a prohibition, but as a simple prediction of an all-knowing God.
This can be explained by the nature of things, Philo argues. The tree could have been present in « substance », but not in « potency »…
The man ‘in the image’ could have eaten the substance of a fruit of this tree. But he did not digest all its latent potency, and therefore he did not benefit from it in any real way.
There is yet another possible interpretation. Knowledge is not found in life. It is found only in potency, not in life, but in death.
The day in which one eats from the fruit of the tree of knowledge is also the day of death, the day in which the prediction is fulfilled: « Thou shalt die of death » מוֹת תָּמוּת (Gen. 2:17).
In this strange verse the word « death » is used twice. Why is this?
« There is a double death, that of man, and the death proper to the soul; that of man is the separation of soul and body; that of the soul is the loss of virtue and the acquisition of vice. (…) And perhaps this second death is opposed to the first: this one is a division of the compound of body and soul; the other, on the contrary, is a meeting of the two where the inferior, the body, dominates and the superior, the soul, is dominated.”vi
Philo quotes fragment 62 of Heraclitus: « We live by their death, we are dead to their life.”vii He believes that Heraclitus was « right to follow the doctrine of Moses in this ». As a good Neoplatonist, Philo also takes up Plato’s famous thesis of the body as the ‘tomb of the soul’.
« That is to say that at present, when we live, the soul is dead and buried in the body as in a tomb, but by our death, the soul lives from the life that is proper to it, and is delivered from evil and the corpse that was bound to it, the body.”viii
There is nevertheless a notable difference between the vision of Genesis and that of the Greek philosophers.
Genesis says: « You shall die of death! «
Heraclitus has a very different formula: « The life of some is the death of others, the death of some, the life of others.”
The word “plagiarism originally meant « the act of selling or buying a free person as a slave ». The word comes from the Latin plagiarius or plagiator, « thief of man ». This meaning is unused today. The word is now only used in a literary, artistic or scientific context. Plagiarism is the act of appropriating someone else’s ideas or words by passing them off as one’s own.
The Latin plagiator and plagiarists have one thing in common, and that is that they attack the very being of man. To steal a man’s ideas is to steal him as a being, to steal his substance.
« Plagiarising » means enslaving a man’s thought, putting it under the control of another man, making it a « slave ».
A Palestinian bishop, Eusebius of Caesarea (265-339), recognised as the « Father of the Church », brought a severe charge against the many plagiarisms and borrowings made by the Greeks at the expense of the many peoples who had preceded them in the history (of ideas).
Eusebius’ intention was apologetic. It was intended to diminish the prestige of Greek philosophy at a time when the development of the Christian religion needed to be reinforced.
« The Greeks took from the Barbarians the belief in multiple gods, mysteries, initiations, and furthermore the historical relations and mythical accounts of the gods, the allegorising physiologies of the myths and all idolatrous error ».i
Pillage is permanent, universal. The Greeks steal from everyone and steal from each other.
« The Greeks monopolised Hebrew opinions and plundered the rest of the sciences from the Egyptians and Chaldeans as well as from the other barbarian nations, and now they are caught stealing each other’s reputation as writers. Each of them, for example, stole from his neighbor passions, ideas, entire developments and adorned himself with them as his own personal labor.”ii
Eusebius quotes the testimony of Clement of Alexandria: « We have proved that the manifestation of Greek thought has been illuminated by the truth given to us by the Scriptures (…) and that the flight of truth has passed to them; well! Let us set the Greeks against each other as witnesses to this theft.»iii
The most prestigious names in Greek thought are put on the pillory of dishonor.
Clement of Alexandria quotes « the expressions of Orpheus, Heraclitus, Plato, Pythagoras, Herodotus, Theopompus, Thucydides, Demosthenes, Eschina, Lysias, Isocrates and a hundred others that it would be superfluous to enumerate.”iv
Porphyrus, too, accuses Plato of being a plagiarist in his Protagoras.
The accusation is clear, precise and devastating. « All the famous philosophical culture of the Greeks, their first sciences, their proud logic were borrowed by them from the Barbarians.”v
The famous Pythagoras himself went to Babylon, Egypt and Persia. He learned everything from the Magi and the priests. He even went to learn from the Brahmins of India, it is said. From some he was able to learn astrology, from others geometry and from others arithmetic and music.vi
Even the Greek alphabet was invented in Phoenicia, and was introduced to Greece by Cadmos, a Phoenician by birth.
As for Orpheus, he borrowed from the Egyptians his rites, his « initiations into the mysteries », and his « affabulations » about Hades. The cult of Dionysus is entirely modelled on that of Osiris, and the cult of Demeter on that of Isis. The figure of Hermes Psychopompe, the conductor of the dead, is obviously inspired by Egyptian myths.
It must be concluded, says Eusebius, that Hebrew theology must be preferred to the philosophy of the Greeks, which must be given second place, since it is nothing but a bunch of plagiarism.
The Greek gods form a cohort of second-hand gods, of eclectic borrowings, from Egypt to Mesopotamia and from India to Persia. Moses predates the capture of Troy and thus precedes the appearance of the majority of the gods of the Greeks and their sages.
Eusebius aims to magnify the Hebrew heritage by completely discrediting « Greek wisdom » and the pantheon of its imported gods.
So, Greek thought, — a plagiary thought?
First of all, the ideas of the Persian magi, the Egyptian priests and the Brahmins of India were not copied as such. Pythagoras or Plato digested them, transformed, even transmuted them into something entirely original.
Greek thought also added a level of freedom of thought by copying, augmenting, criticizing.
Then the so- called « Greek loans » represent a very long chain, which goes back to the dawn of time. And everyone was doing that. It is not at all certain, for example, that Moses himself was entirely free of plagiarism. Raised at the court of Pharaoh Amosis, – according to Tatian and Clement of Alexandria, it is very likely that Moses benefited from many Egyptian ideas about the hidden God (Ammon) and the one God (Aten).
Ammon, the ‘hidden’ God, had been worshipped in Egypt for more than two millennia before Moses. As for the « one » God Aten, he was celebrated by Amenophis IV, who took the name of Akhenaten in his honour several centuries before the Exodus. Several religious rites established by Moses seem to have been copied from the Egyptian rites, by means of a deliberate « inversion », taking the direct opposite side, which is, it is true, an original form of plagiarism. Thus the biblical sacrifice of sheep or cattle was instituted by Moses, as it were, as a reaction against the Egyptian cult which banned precisely blood sacrifices. It is not by chance that Moses had adopted as a « sacred » rite what seemed most « sacrilegious » to the Egyptians — since they accorded the bull Apis the status of a sacred, and even « divine » figure, and for whom it was therefore out of the question to slaughter cows, oxen or bulls on altars.
It is interesting to recall that this prohibition of bloody sacrifices had also been respected for several millennia by the Vedic cult in the Indus basin.
What can we conclude from this? That the essential ideas circulate, either in their positive expressions, or by provoking negative reactions, direct opposition.
As far as ideas are concerned, let us say provocatively, nothing is more profitable than plagiarism, in the long term. And as far as religion is concerned, the more we plagiarize, the closer we come, in fact, to a common awareness, and to a larval consensus, but one can hope for a slowly growing one, on the most difficult subjects.
World religion began more than 800,000 or a million years ago, as evidenced by the traces of religious activity found at Chou Kou Tien, near Beijing, which show that Homo sapiens already had an idea of the afterlife, of life after death, and therefore of the divine.
Moses and Plato are milestones in the long history of world religion. The shamans who officiated 40,000 years ago in the cave of Pont d’Arc, those who later took over in Altamira or Lascaux, were already human in the full sense of the word.
From the depths of the centuries, they have been announcing the coming of the prophets of the future, who will emerge, it is obvious, in the heart of an overpopulated planet, threatened by madness, death and despair.
iEusebius of Caesarea. Praeparatio Evangelica, X, 1,3
Epicurus said: « We must laugh and philosophize at the same time »i.
In ancient Greek, the words « laugh » and « laughter » are rendered by γέλᾶν, from which derives the noun γαλήνη, which metaphorically denotes « the calm of the sunny sea », and more generally an aura of quiet brilliance.
It also denotes, by metonymic shift, the « silvery galena » (lead sulphide), but also the « serenity of the soul ».
It seems significant that the Greek language has a precise word, to remind the men that the sea laughs in the sun, calmly, and that the serene soul then resembles it.
By consulting Chantraine’s Greek Dictionary of Etymology, we also learn that γέλᾶν, « laugh », has its origin in the notion of brightness.
In ancient Greek when the earth « shakes », one also says that it « laughs », that it « bursts » (out of laughing ).
The word γέλᾶν, therefore, is ambivalent. It can evoke the calm of the sea, or the fury of the earth, the peaceful smile of the waves, and the chthonian forces that are unleashed.
The ancient Greek name of the earth, chtonos, had no relation to the nourishing land, a cultivable expanse. It was used in a religious sense, to refer to what was felt to be the outer shell of the world of the dead and the underground powers. When the earth trembles, the underworld, the world of the dead “laughs”.
These forgotten words depict a vision of the world. They remind us that when they were spoken, they also were summoning the trace and the deeds of the gods, and they were making them glimmer.
« The gods exist, the knowledge we have of them is clear evidence.”ii
The Epicureans really believed in the gods, and banished all fear of Hadesiii. So did the Stoics, who lived in accordance with the cosmic God.
As for the Skeptics, such as Pyrrho of Elis, Timo of Phlius or Aenesidemus, they believed in nothing. They doubted everything. Indifference, apathy, ataraxy. Detachment. That were their words.
Pyrrho said: « The generations of men are like the ephemeral leaves of the woods.”
Menander said: « Do you want to know who you are? Cast your eyes on the tombs that line the path. There are the bones and light ashes of kings, tyrants, wise men and all those men, who were swollen with the pride of their nobility, their fortune, their reputation or their beauty. This is the last term to which all mortals end. When you see this, you will know what you are. »
Timo of Phlius used the epicurean metaphor of the « smiling calm of the sea » (γαλήνη) to depict the peace of the wise Skeptic.
But Timo’s « smiling » or « sunny calm » was not really similar to Epicurus’ laughing wisdom…
For Epicurus believed in the gods. Timo believed in nothing.
« The end, according to the Skeptics, is the suspension of judgment, which is followed like a shadow by ataraxy, according to Timo and Aenesidemus.”iv
Diogenes Laërtius explained that Pyrrho had gone to India, and that, influenced by Indian gymnophists and Persian magi, he had brought back to Greece this philosophy of ataraxy, acatalepsy and « suspension of judgement ».
He also relates this anecdote:
One day a dog attacked Pyrrho.
He could not help but move backward to protect himself. He was reproached for this inconsistency, – in relation to his stated philosophy of ataraxy. He replied that it was difficult to completely strip oneself of one’s humanity, but that every effort should be made to bring one’s behavior into harmony with the world.
It is better to laugh about that rather tepid answer.
Quite early in history, the idea of a « universal religion » appeared in various civilisations – despite the usual obstacles posed by tradition and the vested interests of priests and princes.
This idea did not fit easily into the old frames of thought, nor into the representations of the world built by tribal, national religions, or, a fortiori, by exclusive, elitist sects, reserved for privileged initiates or a chosen few.
But, for example, five centuries before the Prophet Muhammad, the Persian prophet Mani already affirmed out of the blues that he was the « seal of the prophets ». It was therefore up to him to found and preach a new, universal religion. Manichaeism then had its hour of glory. Augustine, who embraced it for a time, testifies to its expansion and success in the territories controlled by Rome at the time, and to its lasting hold on the spirits.
Manichaeism promoted a dualist system of thought, centred on the eternal struggle between Good and Evil; it is not certain that these ideas have disappeared today.
Before Mani, the first Christians also saw themselves as bearers of a really universal message. They no longer saw themselves as Jews — or Gentiles. They thought of themselves as a third kind of man (« triton genos« , « tertium genus« ), « trans-humans » ahead of the times. They saw themselves as the promoters of a new wisdom, « barbaric » from the Greek point of view, « scandalous » for the Jews, – transcending the power of the Law and of Reason.
Christians were not to be a nation among nations, but « a nation built out of nations » according to the formula of Aphrahat, a Persian sage of the 4th century.
Contrary to the usual dichotomies, that of the Greeks against the Barbarians, or that of the Jews against the Goyim, the Christians thus thought that they embodied a new type of « nation », a « nation » that was not « national », but purely spiritual, a « nation » that would be like a soul in the body of the world (or according to another image, the « salt of the earth »i).
The idea of a really « universal » religion then rubbed shoulders, it is important to say, with positions that were absolutely contrary, exclusive, and even antagonistic to the last degree, like those of the Essenes.
A text found in Qumran, near the Dead Sea, advocates hatred against all those who are not members of the sect, while insisting on the importance that this « hatred » must remain secret. The member of the Essene sect « must hide the teaching of the Law from men of falsity (anshei ha-‘arel), but must announce true knowledge and right judgment to those who have chosen the way. (…) Eternal hatred in a spirit of secrecy for men of perdition! (sin’at ‘olam ‘im anshei shahat be-ruah hasher!)ii « .
G. Stroumsa comments: « The peaceful conduct of the Essenes towards the surrounding world now appears to have been nothing more than a mask hiding a bellicose theology. »
This attitude is still found today in the « taqqiya » of the Shi’ites, for example.
It should be added that the idea of « holy war » was also part of Essene eschatology, as can be seen in the « War Scroll » (War Scroll, 1QM), preserved in Jerusalem, which is also known as the scroll of « The War of the Sons of Light against the Sons of Darkness ».
Philo of Alexandria, steeped in Greek culture, considered that the Essenes had a « barbaric philosophy », and « that they were in a sense, the Brahmins of the Jews, an elite among the elite. »
Clearch of Soles, a peripatetic philosopher of the 4th century BC, a disciple of Aristotle, had also seriously considered that the Jews were descended from Brahmins, and that their wisdom was a « legitimate inheritance » from India. This idea spread widely, and was apparently accepted by the Jews of that time, as evidenced by the fact that Philo of Alexandriaiii and Flavius Josephusiv naturally referred to it.
The « barbaric philosophy » of the Essenes and the « barbaric wisdom » of the early Christians have one thing in common: they both point to ideas emanating from a more distant East, that of Persia, Oxus and even, ultimately, the Indus.
Among oriental ideas, one is particularly powerful. That of the double of the soul, or the double soul, depending on the point of view.
The text of the Rule of the Community, found in Qumran, gives an indication: « He created man to rule the world, and assigned to him two spirits with which he must walk until the time when He will return: the spirit of truth and the spirit of lie (ruah ha-emet ve ruah ha-avel).”v
There is broad agreement among researchers to detect an Iranian influence in this anthropology. Shaul Shaked writes: « It is conceivable that contacts between Jews and Iranians led to the formulation of a Jewish theology, which, while following traditional Jewish motifs, came to resemble closely the Iranian worldview. »
G. Stroumsa further notes that such duality in the soul is found in the rabbinic idea of the two basic instincts of good and evil present in the human soul (yetser ha-ra’, yetser ha-tov)vi.
This conception has been widely disseminated since ancient times. Far from being reserved for the Gnostics and Manicheans, who seem to have found their most ancient sources in ancient Persia, it had, as we can see, penetrated Jewish thought in several ways.
But it also aroused strong opposition. Christians, in particular, held different views.
Augustine asserts that there can be no « spirit of evil », since all souls come from God.vii In his Counter Faustus, he argues: « As they say that every living being has two souls, one from the light, the other from the darkness, is it not clear that the good soul leaves at the moment of death, while the evil soul remains?”viii
Origen has yet another interpretation: every soul is assisted by two angels, an angel of righteousness and an angel of iniquityix. There are not two opposing souls, but rather a higher soul and another in a lower position.
Manichaeism itself varied on this delicate issue. It presented two different conceptions of the dualism inherent in the soul. The horizontal conception put the two souls, one good and one bad, in conflict. The other conception, vertical, put the soul in relation to its celestial counterpart, its ‘guardian angel’. The guardian angel of Mani, the Paraclete (« the intercessor angel »), the Holy Spirit are all possible figures of this twin, divine soul.
This conception of a celestial Spirit forming a « couple » (suzugia) with each soul was theorised by Tatian the Syrian in the 2nd century AD, as Erik Peterson notes.
Stroumsa points out that « this conception, which was already widespread in Iran, clearly reflects shamanistic forms of thought, according to which the soul can come and go outside the individual under certain conditions.”x
The idea of the soul of Osiris or Horus floating above the body of the dead God, the angels of the Jewish tradition, the Greek « daimon », the split souls of the Gnostics, the Manicheans, or the Iranians, or, even more ancient, the experiences of the shamans, by their profound analogies, testify to the existence of « anthropological constants », of which the comparative study of ancient religions gives a glimpse.
All these traditions converge in this: the soul is not only a principle of life, attached to an earthly body, which would be destined to disappear after death.
It is also attached to a higher, spiritual principle that guards and guides it.
Science has recently taken a step in this direction, foreseen for several millennia, by demonstrating that man’s « spirit » is not only located in the brain itself, but that it is also « diffused » all around him, in the emotional, symbolic, imaginary and social spheres.
Perhaps one day we will be able to objectify in a tangible way this intuition, so ancient, and so « universal ». In the meantime, let us conclude that it is difficult to be satisfied with a narrowly materialistic, mechanical description of the world.
In a short dialogue, Hermes addresses his son Tati to summarize some ancient, and quite essential ideas. We learn that man is made up of separate envelopes, body, mind, soul, reason, intelligence. As he gradually emerges from these envelopes, man is called upon to « know » better and better. His final vocation is « apotheosis », a word that must be taken literally i.e. to go « above the gods ».
Hermes:
– The energy of God is in His will. And God wants the universe to be. As Father, as Good, He wants the existence of that which is not yet. This existence of beings, there is God, there is the Father, there is the Good, it is no other thing. The world, the sun, the stars participate in the existence of beings. But they are not, however, for the living the cause of their life, or the origin of the Good. Their action is the necessary effect of the will of the Good, without which nothing could exist or become.
[My comment: Hermes does not believe in the immanence of the divine in the world. The divine is absolutely transcendent, and only His Will, whose effect can be observed through the existence of His creation, bears witness to this transcendent remoteness.]
Hermes:
It must be recognized that the vision of the Good is above our strength. The eyes of our intelligence cannot yet contemplate its incorruptible and incomprehensible beauty. You will see it a little, perhaps, when you at least know that you can say nothing about it. For true knowledge is found in the silence and rest of every sensation. Whoever achieves it can no longer think of anything else, nor look at anything, nor hear anything, nor even move his body. There is no more sensation or movement for him.
[My comment: There are two kinds of spirits. Those who have « seen » the Good, but cannot say anything about it, and those who have not « seen » it, but who will perhaps one day see it, under certain conditions. Hermes belongs to the first group. He can only express himself by allusion. He cannot say anything about it, which is already a lot …].
Hermes:
– The splendor that inundates all his thought and his soul tears man from the bonds of the body and transforms him entirely into divine essence. The human soul reaches the apotheosis when he has contemplated this beauty of Good.
Tat :
– What do you mean by « apotheosis », Father?
[My comment: Tat’s question is not a lexicographical one. He is waiting for a full description of the phenomenon. The word « apotheosis » is not a neologism, a word invented by Hermes. The word was used, for example, previously by Strabo to describe the death of Diomedes, which he also describes as « apotheosis », but in a sense that seems to transcend the reality of his « death ». « Some authors add to the subject of Diomedes that here he had begun to dig a canal leading to the sea, but having been called back to his homeland he was surprised by death and left this and many other useful undertakings unfinished. This is a first version about his death; another makes him stay until the end and die in Daunie; a third, purely fabulous, and which I have already had occasion to recall, speaks of his mysterious disappearance in one of the islands that bear his name; finally, one can look at this claim of the Henetians to place in their country, if not death, at least the apotheosis of the hero, as a fourth version…. « (Strabo, Geogr. VI, 3,9)].
Hermes:
– Every unfulfilled soul, my son, is subject to successive changes. The blinded soul, knowing nothing of beings, neither their nature nor the Good, is enveloped in bodily passions. The unfortunate soul, unaware of herself, is enslaved to foreign and abject bodies. She carries the burden of the body. Instead of commanding, she obeys. This is the evil of the soul. On the contrary, the good of the soul is knowledge. He who knows is good, and already divine.
[My comment: The body is a veil whose envelope prevents access to knowledge. In the body, the soul is enslaved. Not only can she not ‘see’, but she cannot ‘know’. She can only know her slavery, her enslavement. Which is already a lot, because it is the beginning of her liberation].
Hermes:
– Beings have sensations because they cannot exist without them; but knowledge is very different from sensation. Sensation is an influence that one undergoes. Knowledge is the end of a search, and the desire to search is a divine gift. For all knowledge is incorporeal.
[My comment: The sensation is imposed from the outside. Knowledge is first and foremost a desire for knowledge. To know is first of all a desire to know. But where does this desire come from, if one has no knowledge of what one can desire? « The desire to seek is a divine gift ». But isn’t it unfair to those who are deprived of the grace of this desire? No, this desire is in everyone, in latent form. The desire to know only asks to be born. It only needs to be set in motion, and it grows stronger with every step].
Hermes:
– All knowledge is a form, which grasps the intelligence, just as the intelligence uses the body. Thus both use a body, either intellectual or material. Everything comes down to this combination of opposites, form and matter, and it cannot be otherwise.
[My comment: Form and matter can be considered, as Hermes does, as a « combination of opposites ». One could also say « alliance of opposites », to mean that their whole is more than the sum of their parts. There is also the idea that intellectual representations can be described as having a « body », which itself is endowed with a spirit and perhaps a soul. This leads us to imagine a whole ascending hierarchy, of souls and spirits, up to a supreme root, of all souls and spirits. Two thousand years after these ideas began to be formulated, the Jewish Kabbalah of the European Middle Ages took up exactly the same ideas ].
Tat:
– What is this material God?
Hermes:
– The world is beautiful but it is not good, because it is material and passive. It is the first of the ‘passive’, but the second of the beings, and is not self-sufficient. It is born, though it is always, but it is in birth, and it becomes perpetual. Becoming is a change in quality and quantity – like any material movement.
[My comment: Here the influence of Gnosis is revealed. The world is beautiful, but it is not good. The assertions of Genesis are therefore contradicted head-on: ‘And God saw that it was good.’ (Cf. Gen. 1:4, Gen. 1:10, Gen. 1:12, Gen. 1:25). The first chapter of Genesis even concludes as follows: ‘And God saw everything that He had made, and it was very good.’ (Gen. 1:31). But this Gnosis can be interpreted. The world is not « good », admittedly, but it does not necessarily mean that it is « bad » either. If it is not « good » it is because it is always « becoming », it is always being « born ». Besides, one can argue that ‘Only God is good’, as Jesus said. This Gnosticism is therefore not incompatible with an interpretation of Creation as a living process, as an eschatological aim].
Hermes:
– The world is the first of the living. Man is second only to the world, and first among mortals. Not only is man not good, but he is evil, being mortal. Nor is the world not good, since it is mobile; but being immortal, it is not evil. Man, being both mobile and mortal, is evil. »
[My comment: Here, the vision of Gnosis becomes even more precise. The world is not evil, but Man is. The difference between the world and Man is that the world is always born, it is always alive and reborn, whereas Man is mortal. The only possibility, however, of escaping this fundamental evil is resurrection. If it is possible, then Man is also reborn, again, he escapes death, – and evil].
Hermes:
– It is necessary to understand how man’s soul is constituted: intelligence is in reason, reason in the soul, the soul in the mind, the mind in the body. The spirit, penetrating through veins, arteries and blood, moves the animal and carries it, so to speak. The soul infuses the spirit. Reason is at the bottom of the soul. And it is Intelligence that makes reason live.
[My comment: Man is a kind of metaphysical onion, containing deep down within him, in his inner core, a divine principle, – Intelligence, which is another name for Divine Wisdom.]
Hermes:
– God does not ignore man; on the contrary, He knows him and wants to be known by him. The only salvation of man is in the knowledge of God; this is the way of ascent to Olympus; only by this alone does the soul become good, not sometimes good, sometimes bad, but necessarily good.
[My comment: The ascent to Olympus is another metaphor for apotheosis].
Hermes:
“Contemplate, my son, the soul of the child; the separation is not yet complete; the body is small and has not yet received full development. It is beautiful to see the child, not yet sullied by the passions of the body, still almost attached to the soul of the world. But when the body has developed and holds her [the soul] in its mass, separation is accomplished, oblivion occurs in her, she ceases to participate in the beautiful and the good.”
[My comment: the loss of innocence of the soul begins from the first days of her apprenticeship in the body she has inherited. This loss of innocence can also be interpreted as the first steps in the long « ascent » that still awaits her].
Hermes:
« The same thing happens to those who come out of their body. The soul enters into herself, the spirit withdraws into the blood, the soul into the spirit. But the Intelligence, purified and freed from its envelopes, divine by nature, takes a body of fire and travels through space, abandoning the soul to its tribulations. »
[My comment: These words are a striking summary of the highest wisdom attained over tens of thousands of years by shamans, visionaries, prophets, poets, all over the world. They must be taken for what they are: a naked revelation, destined only to those souls predisposed, by their abysmal and primordial desire, to understand what it is all about].
Tat:
– What do you mean, O Father? Does intelligence separate from the soul and the soul from the spirit, since you said that the soul is the envelope of intelligence and the spirit is the envelope of the soul?
[My comment: Tat listens to his father very well, and he remains faithful to logic itself. His question is a request for clarification. The difference between the spirit and the soul and the difference between the soul and the intelligence may need to be explained more clearly. But how to explain “intelligence” to those who cannot imagine the power of its infinite possibilities? Hermes knows this difficulty well. He will try another way of explanation].
Hermes:
– It is necessary, my son, that the listener follow the thought of the speaker and associate himself with it; the ear must be finer than the voice. This system of envelopes exists in the earthly body. The naked intelligence could not be established in a material body, and that body could not contain such immortality or carry such virtue. The intelligence takes the soul as its envelope; the soul, which is divine itself, is enveloped in spirit, and the spirit is poured into the animal. »
[My comment: The key expression here is « naked intelligence ». What is revealed in these words is that even intelligence, in its highest, most divine form, can still remain « veiled ». Nothing can be said about this here, for the moment. We are only alluding to the fact that the process of ascension, of apotheosis, is certainly not finished, but that it is itself susceptible to other, even more radical forms of spiritual nakedness, unclothing].
Hermes:
– When the intelligence leaves the earthly body, it immediately takes its tunic of fire, which it could not keep when it inhabited this earthly body; for the earth cannot withstand fire, of which a single spark would be enough to burn it. This is why water surrounds the earth and forms a rampart that protects it from the flame of fire. But intelligence, the most subtle of divine thoughts, has the most subtle of elements, fire, as its body. It takes it as an instrument of its creative action.
[My comment: One of the garments of intelligence, described here under the metaphor of the « tunic of fire », is a way of describing one of its essential attributes: creative ability. But there are certainly many others. Other metaphors, other « garments » would be needed to try to account for them].
Hermes:
– The universal intelligence uses all the elements, that of man only the earthly elements. Deprived of fire, it cannot build divine works, subject as it is to the conditions of humanity. Human souls, not all of them, but pious souls, are « demonic » and « divine ».
[My comment: The idea that the soul is « demonic » is an idea that Plato communicated to us through the speech of Diotima in the Symposium. There can be found also another fundamental idea, to which I have been attached all my life – the idea of metaxu].
Hermes:
– Once separated from the body, and after having sustained the struggle of piety, which consists in knowing God and harming no one, such a soul becomes all intelligence. But the unholy soul remains in its own essence and punishes herself by seeking to enter into an earthly body, a human body, for another body cannot receive a human soul, it cannot fall into the body of an animal without reason; a divine law preserves the human soul from such a fall.
[My comment: Here we find the idea of metempsychosis. Since ages, these ideas circulated from the Far East to Greece].
Hermes:
– The punishment of the soul is quite different. When the intelligence has become a « daimon », and by God’s command has taken on a body of fire, she [the intelligence] enters the ungodly soul and is scourged with the whip of its sins. The unholy soul then rushes into murder, insults, blasphemy, violence of all kinds and all human wickedness. But by entering the pious soul, the intelligence leads her to the light of knowledge. Such a soul is never satiated with hymns and blessings for all men.
[My comment: A distinction must therefore be made between light, knowledge and the « light of knowledge ». The latter form of consciousness is the possible source of a meta-apotheosis, – for the moment, this word is a neologism, which I propose, because here it is very necessary].
Hermes:
– This is the universal order, the consequence of unity. Intelligence penetrates all the elements. For nothing is more divine and more powerful than intelligence. She unites Gods with men and men with Gods. It is the intelligence that is the good « daimon« ; the blessed soul is full of her, the unhappy soul is empty of her.
[My comment: intelligence is the « metaxu » par excellence. The Hebrews gave it the name neshamah. But what a name is, it is its essence that we must try to understand].
Hermes:
– The soul without intelligence could neither speak nor act. Often intelligence leaves the soul, and in this state the soul sees nothing, hears nothing, and looks like an animal without reason. Such is the power of intelligence. But it does not support the vicious soul and leaves it attached to the body, which drags it down. Such a soul, my son, has no intelligence, and in this condition a man can no longer be called a man. For man is a divine animal which must be compared, not to other terrestrial animals, but to those in heaven, who are called Gods.
[My comment: Aristotle said that « man is an animal who has reason (logos) ». We can see that Hermes rises several notches above Aristotle in his intuition of what man is, in essence. Aristotle is the first of the moderns. Plato is the last of the Ancients. But in these difficult matters, the Ancients have infinitely more to teach us, with their million years of experience, than the Moderns, really out of their depths in these matters].
Hermes:
– Or rather, let’s not be afraid to tell the truth, the real man is above them, or at least equal to them. For none of the heavenly Gods leaves his sphere to come to earth, while man ascends into heaven and measures it. He knows what is above and what is below; he knows everything accurately, and what is better is that he does not need to leave the earth in order to ascend. Such is the greatness of his condition. Thus, dare we say that man is a mortal God and that a heavenly God is an immortal man. All things will be governed by the world and by man, and above all is the One.
My comment : There is a strikingly equivalent intuition in the Veda. In the Veda, Puruṣa, devanāgarī : पुरुष, means « man, person, hero, vital principle, spirit » but also and foremost : « the Soul of the Universe »…
Towards the end of the 15th century, Marsilius Ficinus summed up the whole of « ancient theology » in six emblematic names: Hermes Trismegistus, Orpheus, Aglaophemus, Pythagoras, Philolaos, and Plato. In his mind, these characters formed one and the same ‘sect of initiates’, transmitting knowledge, wisdom and secrets to each other.
The first link in this long chain of initiation was Hermes Trismegistus, « three times very great », of whom Plato himself is only a distant disciple.
Well after Plato, in the 2nd century AD, the Corpus Hermeticum appeared, supposedly bringing back the essence of this ancient knowledge. The first Book of the Corpus is called after Poimandres, a Greek name meaning « the shepherd of man ».
In this Book, Hermes tells of his encounter with Poimandres:
« Who are you then?
– I am Poimandres (the « shepherd of man »), the Sovereign Intelligence. I know what you desire, and I am with you everywhere.”
Poimandres then enlightens the mind of Hermes, who expresses himself in the first person to recount his vision: « I am living an indefinable spectacle. Everything became a soft and pleasant light that charmed my sight. Soon afterwards, a frightful and horrible darkness descended in a sinuous form; it seemed to me as if this darkness was changing into some kind of damp and troubled nature, exhaling a smoke like fire and a kind of gloomy noise. Then there came out an inarticulate cry which seemed to be the voice of light.”
« Have you understood what this vision means? » asks Poimandres. « This light is me, the Intelligence, – your God, who precedes the wet nature out of darkness. The luminous Word that emanates from Intelligence is the Son of God.
– What do you mean, I replied.
– Learn this: what you see and hear in you is the Word, the word of the Lord; intelligence is the Father God. They are not separated from one another, for the union is their life.
– I thank you, I replied.
– Understand the light, he said, and know it. »
We can deduce from the words of Poimandres that « vision » is only a glimpse of the mystery, not its end. Understanding is not knowing, and knowing is not understanding. This is an essential principle of Gnosis.
At the time when the Corpus Hermeticum was composed, the Roman Empire reached its apogee. The Pax romana reigned from Brittany (England) to Egypt, from Tingitan Mauritania to Mesopotamia. The emperor was considered a god. Marcus Aurelius had to fight against the Barbarians on the Danube front, but the invasions and serious crises of the 3rd century had not begun.
Christianity was still only a ‘superstition’ (superstitio illicita) among many others. The cult of Mithra dominated in the Roman armies, and the influence of the Eastern and Gnostic cults was significant. Hermeticism took its place in this effervescence.
Hermetic formulas undoubtedly originated several centuries earlier, and thus well before the Gospel of John, written at the end of the 1st century AD.
But as transcribed in the Poimandres, these formulas are striking in the simplicity and ease with which they seem to prefigure (or repeat?) some of the formulas of the Gospel of John. According to John, Christ is the Word of God, His Logos. Christ is the Son of God, and he is also « One » with Him. Would John have been sensitive to any hermetic influence? Or was it the opposite, the hermeticism of Poimandres mimicking Christian ideas?
Hermetic formulas do not copy the Johannine metaphors, nor do they duplicate them in any way. Under the apparent analogy, significant discrepancies emerge.
Hermeticism, however heraldable it may be to certain aspects of Christian theology, is certainly distinguished from it by other features, which belong only to it, and which clearly refer to Gnosis – from which Christianity very early wanted to distance itself, without, moreover, totally escaping its philosophical attraction.
Poïmandres says, for example, that the Sovereign of the world shows the image of his divinity to the « inferior nature ». Nature falls in love with this image, an image that is none other than man. Man too, seeing in the water the reflection of his own form, falls in love with his own nature (or with himself?) and wants to possess it. Nature and man are therefore closely united by mutual love.
Poïmandres explains: « This is why man, alone among all the beings living on earth, is double, mortal in body and immortal in essence. Immortal and sovereign of all things, he is subject to the destiny that governs what is mortal; superior to the harmony of the world, he is captive in his bonds; male and female like his father, and superior to sleep he is dominated by sleep.”
Then comes man’s ascent among the powers and towards God. By uniting with man, nature successively generates seven « men » (male and female), who receive their soul and intelligence from « life » and « light », in the form of air and fire.
This succession of « men » is an allegory of the necessary evolution of human nature. Various human natures must succeed one another through the historical ages.
Man must finally reach the stage where he/she strips him/herself of all the harmonies and beauties of the world. With only his/her own power left, he/she reaches an « eighth nature ».
In this eighth stage the « powers » reign, « ascending » towards God, to be reborn in Him.
Poimandres concluded his speech to Hermes with the following words: « This is the final good of those who possess Gnosis, – to become God. What are you waiting for now? You have learned everything, you only have to show the way to men, so that through you God may save the human race.”
Then began the mission of Hermes among Humankind: « And I began to preach to men the beauty of religion and Gnosis: peoples, men born of the earth, immersed in the drunkenness, sleep and ignorance of God, shake off your sensual torpor, wake up from your foolishness! Why, O men born of the earth, do you surrender yourselves to death, when you are allowed to obtain immortality? Come back to yourselves, you who walk in error, who languish in ignorance; depart from the dark light, take part in immortality by renouncing corruption ».
Who was Hermes Trismegistus really? A syncretic entity? A Ptolemaic myth? A pagan Christ? A Gnostic philosopher? A theological-political creation?
Through his ideas, Hermes Trismegistus embodied the fusion of two cultures, Greek and Egyptian. He is both the god Hermes of the Greeks, messenger of the gods and conductor of souls (psychopompos), and the god Thoth of ancient Egypt, who invented hieroglyphics and helped Isis to gather the scattered members of Osiris.
I stand by the interpretation of Marsilius Ficinus. Hermes is the first of the « ancient theologians ».
One lends only to the rich. In the 4th century B.C., Hecateus of Abatea had written that Thot-Hermes was the inventor of writing, astronomy and the lyre.
Artapan, in the 2nd century BC, even saw in him a figure of Moses.
Hermes in fact spoke, like Moses, with God. He too was given the mission of guiding mankind towards the Promised Land, the land that has a name: the knowledge of immortality.
The intuition of mystery has touched humanity from the earliest ages. Eight hundred thousand years ago, men carried out religious rites accompanying the death of their loved ones, in a cave near Beijing, at Chou Kou Tien. Skulls were found there, placed in a circle and painted in red ochre. They bear witness to the fact that almost a million years ago, men believed that death was a passage.
Fascination with other worlds, a sense of mystery, confrontation with the weakness of life and the rigor of death, seem to be part of the human genetic heritage, since the dawn of time, inhabiting the unconscious, sculpting cultures, knotting myths, informing languages.
The idea of the power of the divine is an extremely ancient idea, as old as humanity itself. It is equally obvious that the minds of men all over the world have, since extremely ancient times, turned towards forms of animism, religions of immanence or even religions of ecstasy and transcendent trance, long before being able to speculate and refine « theological » questions such as the formal opposition between « polytheism » and « monotheism ».
Brains and cultures, minds and languages, were not yet mature.
Animism, shamanism, polytheism, monotheism, and the religions of the immanence try to designate what cannot be said. In the high period, the time of human dawn, all these religions in -isms obviously came together in a single intuition, a single vision: the absolute weakness of man, the irremediable fleetingness of his life, and the infinite greatness and power of the unknown.
Feeling, guessing, fearing, worshipping, revering, this power was one and multiple. Innumerable names throughout the world have tried to express this power, without ever reaching its intrinsic unity.
This is why the assertion of the monotheisms that « God is One » is both a door that has been open for millions of years and at the same time, in a certain way, is also a saying that closes our understanding of the very nature of the « mystery », our understanding of how this « mystery » has taken root in the heart of the human soul, since Homo knew himself to be a sapiens…
In the 17th century, Ralph Cudworth was already tackling the « great prejudice » that all primitive and ancient religions had been polytheistic, and that only « a small, insignificant handful of Jews »i had developed the idea of a single God.
A « small insignificant handful of Jews »? Compared to the Nations, number is not always the best indicator. Another way to put the question is: was the idea of the One God invented by the Jews? If so, when and why? If not, who invented it, and for how long was it there around the world?
If we analyse the available sources, it would seem that this idea appeared very early among the nations, perhaps even before the so-called « historical » times. But it must be recognized that the Jews brought the idea to its incandescence, and above all that they « published » it, and « democratized » it, making it the essential idea of their people. Elsewhere, and for millennia, the idea was present, but reserved in a way to an elite.
Greek polytheism, the Sibylline oracles, Zoroastrianism, the Chaldean religion, Orphism, all these « ancient » religions distinguished a radical difference between multiple born and mortal gods, and a Single God, not created and existing by Himself. The Orphic cabal had a great secret, a mystery reserved for the initiated, namely: « God is the Whole ».
Cudworth deduced from the testimonies of Clement of Alexandria, Plutarch, Iamblichus, Horapollo, or Damascius, that it was indisputably clear that Orpheus and all the other Greek pagans knew a single universal deity who was « the One », and « the Whole ». But this knowledge was secret, reserved for the initiated.
Clement of Alexandria wrote that « All the barbarian and Greek theologians had kept the principles of reality secret and had only transmitted the truth in the form of enigmas, symbols, allegories, metaphors and other tropes and similar figures. « ii And Clement made a comparison between the Egyptians and the Hebrews in this respect: « The Egyptians represented the truly secret Logos, which they kept deep in the sanctuary of truth, by what they called ‘Adyta’, and the Hebrews by the curtain in the Temple. As far as concealment is concerned, the secrets of the Hebrews and those of the Egyptians are very similar.”iii
Hieroglyphics (as sacred writing) and allegories (the meaning of symbols and images) were used to transmit the secret arcana of the Egyptian religion to those who were worthy of it, to the most qualified priests and to those chosen to succeed the king.
The « hieroglyphic science » was entirely responsible for expressing the mysteries of theology and religion in such a way that they remained hidden from the profane crowd. The highest of these mysteries was that of the revelation of « the One and Universal Divinity, the Creator of the whole world, » Cudworth added.
Plutarch noted several times in his famous work, On Isis and Osiris, that the Egyptians called their supreme God « the First God » and considered him a « dark and hidden God ».
Cudworth points out that Horapollo tells us that the Egyptians knew a Pantokrator (Universal Sovereign) and a Kosmokrator (Cosmic Sovereign), and that the Egyptian notion of ‘God’ referred to a « spirit that spreads throughout the world, and penetrates into all things to the deepest depths.
The « divine Iamblichus » made similar analyses in his De Mysteriis Aegyptiorum.
Finally, Damascius, in his Treatise on First Principles, wrote that the Egyptian philosophers said that there is a single principle of all things, which is revered under the name of ‘invisible darkness’. This « invisible darkness » is an allegory of this supreme deity, namely that it is inconceivable.
This supreme deity has the name « Ammon », which means « that which is hidden », as explained by Manetho of Sebennytos.
Cudworth, to whom we owe this compilation of quotations, deduced that « among the Egyptians, Ammon was not only the name of the supreme Deity, but also the name of the hidden, invisible and corporeal Deity ».
Cudworth concludes that long before Moses, himself of Egyptian culture, and brought up in the knowledge of ‘Egyptian wisdom’, the Egyptians were already worshipping a Supreme God, conceived as invisible, hidden, outside the world and independent of it.
The One (to Hen, in Greek) is the invisible origin of all things and he manifests himself, or rather « hides » himself in the Whole (to Pan, in Greek).
The same anthropological descent towards the mysterious depths of belief can be undertaken systematically, notably with the oldest texts we have, those of Zend Avesta, the Vedas and their commentaries on Upaniṣad.
« Beyond the senses is the mind, higher than the mind is the essence, above the essence is the great Self, higher than the great [Self] is the unmanifested.
But beyond the unmanifested is Man, the Puruṣa, passing through all and without sign in truth. By knowing Him, the human being is liberated and attains immortality.
His form does not exist to be seen, no one can see it through the eye. Through the heart, through the intelligence, through the mind He is apprehended – those who know Him become immortal. (…)
Not even by speech, not even by the mind can He be reached, not even by the eye. How can He be perceived other than by saying: « He is »?
And by saying « He is » (in Sanskrit asti), He can be perceived in two ways according to His true nature. And by saying « He is », for the one who perceives Him, His true nature is established.
When all the desires established in one’s heart are liberated, then the mortal becomes immortal, he reaches here the Brahman.”iv
The Zohar also affirms: « The Holy One blessed be He has a hidden aspect and a revealed aspect. »
Aren’t these not « two ways » of perceiving the true nature of « He is »? Rabbi Hayyim of Volozhyn affirms: « The essence of the En-Sof (Infinite) is hidden more than any secret; it must not be named by any name, not even the Tetragrammaton, not even the end of the smallest letter, the Yod.” v
So what do all these names of God mean in the purest monotheism?
« R. ‘Abba bar Mamel says: The Holy One blessed be He says to Moshe: Do you want to know my Name? I name Myself after my deeds. Sometimes my name is El Shadday, Tsebaoth, Elohim, YHVY. When I judge creatures my name is Elohim, when I fight the wicked I am called Tsebaoth, when I suspend the faults of men I am El Shadday and when I take pity on the worlds I am YHVH. This Name is the attribute of mercy, as it is said: « YHVY, YHVH, merciful and compassionate God » (Ex. 34:6). Likewise: ‘Ehyeh, asher ‘Ehyeh (I am who I am) (Ex. 3:14) – I name myself after my deeds.”vi
These are very wise words, which invite us to ask ourselves what was the name of YHVH, 800,000 years ago, at Chou Kou Tien, when He saw the sorrow of these men and women, a small group of Homo sapiens in affliction and grief, assembled at the bottom of a cave.
iRalph Cudworth, True Intellectual System of the Universe (1678), quoted in Jan Assmann, Moïse l’Égyptien, 2001, p.138
Every language has its genius, their words have their power, their potency. One speaks them without really knowing them. One grazes their abysses, fly over their peaks, ignoring their heaps of secrets.
Our languages tell us that we are enigmas to ourselves.
Perhaps two examples will shed some light on the far-reaching implications of this unconscious of languages.
The Hebrew verb נָהַר (nāhar) means ‘to shine, to radiate with joy’, as in Is 60:5 (“Then you will look and be radiant”i). A derived word נָהָר (nāhār) means « stream, river ». In feminine form, this word becomes נָהָרָה (nāhārā) and means « light ». And in a different vocalization, attested in Chaldean, נָהִירוּ (nāhiru) means « wisdom ».
This word, therefore, may incarnate unto itself light, joy, a river – and wisdom!
Curiously, the Greek language also has words that bring together the meaning of light, the idea of joy and the brilliance of water. A verse from Aeschylus in the Prometheus in chains sings « the countless smile of the sea waves » (ποντίων τε κυμάτων άνήριθμον γέλασμα).
Another example highlights the intrinsic capacity of a word to bear witness to the dream of the whole language, and of those who speak it. Thus the verb עָלַם (‘alam) means « to hide, to be ignored ». As a noun, the same word עָלַם means ‘eternity’. One would like to ask: does this word incite to think that eternity is ‘hidden’? Or that ignorance is ‘eternal’?
In another vocalization, the same word means ‘world’. But perhaps even most beautifully, the word , in yet another vocalization (‘elem), means ‘child’.
Again the mind wanders… Is the world a veiled child? Does a child hide his eternity? Does eternity veil and hidden childhood? Is the veil the eternal childhood of the world?
A thousand possible thoughts arise from just one word. Languages, all of them, abound with simple surprises, disconcerting shifts, and forgotten nuggets. Yet they bear witness to a dream, they testify that the smallest word is linked to untold mysteries.
Originally, the Greek word Logos had two rather simple, distinct meanings: ‘word’ and ‘reason’.
With Plato, the concept of Logos began its extraordinary destiny. The Logos became a Principle. By extension, it was also to represent the whole of intelligible things and ideas, as well as the link that connects all the divine powers, and what founds their unity. Finally, it was to become the Intermediary between man and God.
The Neo-Platonists took up the concept and its rich harvest.
Philo of Alexandria, for example, several centuries after Plato, made the Logos an essential attribute of the God of Israel. In God, the Logos was to incarnate the divine Intelligence, the eternal Thought, the Thought in its eternal potency, the Thought that always thinks, the Thought that can think everything, anything, forever.
For Philo, the Logos could also take a second form, which resided not in God, but in the real world. The Logos was then the Thought in act, the Thought which is realized outside God.
Shortly after Philo, John in turn gave his vision of the Logos, in its Christian interpretation. The Gospel of John says that “in the beginning” the Logos was with God and the Logos was God. And the Logos became “flesh”.
Does this mean that there are three instances of the Logos? The Logos who is God, the Logos who is with Him and the Logos who becomes flesh? Are these verbal nuances, poetic metaphors, or metaphysical realities?
In Philo’s theology, the Logos is double: Intelligence in potency, and also Intelligence in act.
In Christian theology, one may say that there are three kind of Logos, who personify themselves respectively as Father, Son, Spirit.
For the philosopher who always seeks for structures, it is possible to discern a general outline in these various interpretations.
The Logos comes out in three ways, according to what it “is”, to what it “thinks” and to what it “says”.
In theory, Being, Thinking and Saying do converge. But who knows?
These three states are also fundamental states of the human being. And Philo goes quite far in his ternary theory of the Logos, in spite of the putative difficulty that monotheism opposes when one wants to reconcile the unity of God and the multiplication of His appearances.
One way of overcoming this difficulty is to posit that the Logos is the set of all ideas which are ‘living’ in God. All the things that exist in the universe are deemed to derive from an original “idea”, from a « seal ». The Logos is the general seal whose imprint is on the whole universe.i
Divine ideas “act like seals, which when they are brought close to the wax, produce countless imprints without themselves being affected in any way, always remaining the same.”ii
Unlike the Logos of John, the Logos of Philo is not a divine person. It is only the ‘Organ’ of God. It is both His Reason and His Word, — which are manifested in His Creation.
Philo multiplies metaphors, analogies, images, applying them to the divine, human and natural realms. The Logos is creation, word, conception, flow, radiation, dilatation. According to yet another image, the Logos governs, as God reigns.
Philo’s thought about the Logos is quite complex. A 19th century commentatoriii judged that a tremendous confusion was in fact at the basis of Philo’s system, because he indiscriminately mixed up Logos (Word), Pneuma (Spirit), Sophia (Wisdom) and Episteme (Knowledge).
All the difficulty comes down to a simple question: what can one really infer a priori from the nature of the divine Spirit?
Difficult to stay.
Maybe one could start by saying that, in the divine Spirit, no distinction can really be made between what « contains » and what is « contained ».
Consequently, for instance for Philo, the Logos is at the same time the Author of the Law and the Law itself, the Spirit and the Letter.iv
The Logos is the Law, and is also the One who announces it, who reveals it.
The Wisdom of God is the source of the Logos, and it is also the Logos itself. In the same way, the Spirit of God is the source of all the intelligible beings, and it is also their total sum.
Everything which constitutes the Logos is divine, and everything which is divine, apart from the essence of God, is the Logos.
The Logos is, in all the universe, the image of the divine brought to unity. He is also the intermediary between this unity and God.
These difficult ideas have in fact been described by some hasty commentators as a « philosophical hodgepodge », adding that they showed a « lack of rigor »v on Philo’s part.
But, in my opinion, other conclusions may emerge.
On the one hand, Philo and John, independently of each other, and at about the same time in History, about two thousand years ago, just before the destruction of the Second Temple, clarified the contours of a “theophany” of the Logos, with some clear differences but also deep common structures.
On the other hand, what is still striking today is the extraordinary resilience of the concept of Logos, throughout history.
The Logos of the Stoics, the Platonic Noos, the Angel of the Eternal, the Word of YHVH, the Judeo-Alexandrine Logos, the Word made flesh, the Messiah of the first Christian Church, all these noetic figures are more similar in their absolute analogies than in their relative differences.
For the various sectarians of monotheism, however, the main difficulty lies in reconciling the idea of the unity of God with the reality of his multiple emanations, such as the Law (the Torah), or His Wisdom (Ḥokhma).
On a more philosophical level, the real difficulty is to think a Thought that exists as an absolute Being, but which also unfolds as a living, free, creative Being, in the Universe, and which finally reveals itself as the revealed Word, in the world.
Today, the « moderns » willingly deny the existence of the Logos, or of the Noos.
The Spirit, as it manifests itself in each one of us, is said by the “moderns” to arise only from biochemical mechanisms, synaptic connections, epigenetic processes, in the midst of glial cells.
The brain would multiply cellular and neuronal networks, and even « viral » ones. By their proliferation, the mechanical miracle of the Spirit coming to consciousness would appear.
But it is only a relative miracle, since we are assured that the “singularity” is close. And tomorrow, or the day after tomorrow, it is affirmed, we will pass from deep learning AI to the synthesis of artificial consciousness…
However, another line of research seems possible, in theory.
It is a hypothesis that Kant already put forward, in a slightly provocative way.
“Our body is only the fundamental phenomenon to which, in its present state (in life), the entire power of sensibility and thus all thought is related. Separation from the body is the end of this sensitive use of one’s faculty of knowledge and the beginning of intellectual use. The body would therefore not be the cause of thought, but a merely restrictive condition of thought, and, consequently, it should be considered, without doubt, as an instrument of the sensible and animal end, but, by that very fact, as an obstacle to pure and spiritual life.”vi
Pursuing this line of research, purely intuitive it is true, one could conjecture that the brain, the human body, but also all peoples and Humanity as a whole could figure, in their own way, as immense metaphysical antennas, singular or collective, whose primary mission would be to capture the minute and diffuse signs of a supra-worldly Wisdom, of a creative Intelligence.
The greatest human geniuses would not find their ideas simply by the grace of unexpected crossings of some of their synapses, assisted by ionic exchanges. They would also be somehow « inspired » by the emanations of immense clouds of thinking thoughts, in which all living things are mysteriously immersed from the beginning.
In this hypothesis, who is really thinking then? Just synapses? Or the infinite, eternal choir of wise beings? Who will tell?
Who will say who really thinks, when I think, and when I think that I am?
I am thinking a thought that is born, that lives, and that becomes. I am thinking that thought, which never ceases to let itself think, – and from there, intuitively, I pass to the thought of a thought that would immediately precede and dispense with all thoughts; a thought that would never dispense with thinking, eternally.
Who will say why I pass to this very thought, immediate, eternal? Another shot of ionised synapses, by chance excited, finding their way among a hundred billion neurons (approximately), and twice as many glial cells?
Man is an “intermediate being”, said Plato, “between the mortal and the immortal”i. This obscure expression can be understood in several senses.
Man is constantly on the move. He goes up and down. He ascends towards ideas he doesn’t quite understand, and he descends towards the matter he has forgotten and which reminds him of her. Systole and diastole of the soul. Breathing of the body, inhalation, exhalation of the spirit.
The ancients had formed words that can help to understand these opposite movements. The Greek word ἒκστασις (extasis), means « coming out of oneself ». In « ecstasy », the spirit « comes out » of the body, it is caught in a movement that carries it away. Ecstasy has nothing to do with what is called « contemplation », which is immobile, stable, and which Aristotle called θεωρία (theoria).
The meaning of the word θεωρία as « contemplation, consideration » is rather late, since it only appears with Plato and Aristotle. Later, in Hellenistic Greek, the word took on the meaning of « theory, speculation », as opposed to « practice ».
But originally, θεωρία meant « sending delegates to a religious festival, religious embassy, being a theorist ». The « theorist » was the person going on a trip to consult the oracle, or to attend a religious ceremony. A « theory » was a religious delegation going to a holy place.
Ecstasy is an exit from the body. The theoria is a journey out of the homeland, to visit the oracle of Delphi. These words therefore have one thing in common, that of a certain movement towards the divine.
They are images of the possible movement of the soul, vertically or horizontally, as ascent or approach. Unlike the theoria, which denotes a journey of the body in the literal sense, ecstasy takes the form of a thought in movement outside the body, traversed by lightning and dazzle, always aware of its weakness, its powerlessness, in an experience which is beyond it, and which it knows it has little chance of really grasping, little means of fixing it in order to share it on its return.
The word ecstasy is the minimal trace of a kind of experience that is difficult to understand for those who have not lived it. It is not simply a matter of « ascending » to higher or even divine realities. When the soul moves into these generally inaccessible regions, she encounters phenomena that are absolutely dissimilar to anything she has ever observed on earth, in her usual life. She runs an infinitely fast race, in pursuit of something that is always ahead of her, and which draws her further and further away, into an ever-changing elsewhere, and which projects her to an infinite distance of what she has ever experienced.
Human life cannot know the end of this incredible race. The soul, which is given the experience of ecstasy, understands by experience the possibility of such a search. She will always remain marked by her ‘election’, by the gift given to her of a striking flight towards a reality that is forever elusive.
It is interesting to question the texts that report ecstasies that have had the effect of changing the course of history, and to analyze their differences.
In his comments on the experience of ecstasyii, Philo considers that Moses, despite the fame and the power of his visioniii, did not have access to the full understanding of the divine powers.
Philo then sought in the vision of Jeremiah, with more success, the traces of a greater penetration of these powers.
Moving forward in these fields is a random and delicate undertaking. The texts are difficult, they resist interpretation.
“This is how the word of God was addressed to Jeremiah”iv.
This is a restrained way of giving an account of what was, one might think, originally an ecstasy. Reading these lines, one can guess at its hold.
Other prophets expressed the marks of their ecstasy in other metaphors. Ezekiel says that « the hand of God came »vi upon him, or that the spirit « prevailed ».vii
When ecstasy is at its height, the hand of God weighs more than usual:
“And the spirit lifted me up and carried me away, and I went away sorrowful in the exaltation of my spirit, and the hand of the Lord weighed heavily on me.”viii
The definition of ‘ecstasy’ according to the National Center for Textual and Lexical Resource (CNRTL) is as follows:
“A particular state in which a person, as if transported out of himself, is removed from the modalities of the sensible world by discovering through a kind of illumination certain revelations of the intelligible world, or by participating in the experience of an identification, of a union with a transcendent, essential reality.”
This definition speaks of enlightenment, identification or union with transcendental realities. But what do these words really cover?
According to other testimonies, ecstasy, of mystical essence, seems infinitely more dynamic, more transforming. It draws its principle and its energy from the intuition of the divine infinite and from participation in its movement.
Ecstasy is more a race than a stasis, more a dazzle than an illumination.
Bergson, the philosopher of movement, paradoxically gives a rather static, ‘arrested’ image of ecstasy: “The soul ceases to turn on herself (…). She stops, as if she were listening to a voice calling out to her. (…) Then comes an immensity of joy, an ecstasy in which she is absorbed or a rapture which she undergoes: God is there, and it is in her. No more mystery. Problems fade away, obscurities dissipate; it is an illumination.”ix
It is not known whether Bergson knows from real personal experience what he is talking about.
One only has to pay attention to the testimonies of Blaise Pascal or S. John of the Cross, to guess that ecstasy cannot be so luminously static. Taken to such an elevation, ecstasy has a fiery power that carries away all certainty, all security, and even all illumination.
Ecstasy dazzles like a primal dive into the center of Light. And the worlds, all the worlds, are then only like tiny quantum hairs emanating from a divine Black Hole.
It is difficult to explain in audible words, in palpable images, the infinite rapture of the soul, when she is given to see her own, eternal, birth.
« If a lion could speak we could not understand him », wrote Ludwig Wittgenstein in his Philosophical Investigations.
This remark is worthy of consideration… and of generalization. What if it were a tuna, — or a rattlesnake nest, or a flight of starlings? Or a pile of dust, a block of granite, a cluster of galaxies? Or a prion, a plasmid, a proton? An angel, a seraphim, — or even God?
If God would speak, now, could we understand Him, more than a virus?
Is there any serious chance, after all, that we could just figure out, or somewhat understand, in any way, what is not human?
To start with, do we even understand what it really means to be human?
Pessimism usually prevails in this sort of metaphysical questioning. Leonine grammar is probably simpler than the Greek or the Sanskrit ones.
But these are probably much simpler than a seraphic one.
What is the worldview of the lion ? The crushing of the jaws ? The raw smell of blood, the subtle scent of the steppe?
What about the unfulfilled dreams of the fly, or the vulture, over the corpses? What about the ontological worries of the photon, lost in (relativist) translations?
What about the angel’s sorrow? And what about cherubinic rejoicing?
Isn’t all this, irremediably, out of syntax, out of any human lexicon?
If a million future Champollions tried to decipher, during one million years, the roar of the feline, or to decrypt the vibrato of the lizard, would there be any hope of breaking new grounds? Could we not, one day, find some Rosetta Stone translating equivalences among all the living entities, here on earth, and beyond?
Perhaps one day, we will find such powerful, universal, paradigmatic Babelian stones. Who knows? Who can tell?
Let’s make it simple. We should start by simply trying to understand men and women when they speak, or when they keep silent.
If we could really understand their silence, then perhaps we would better understand things that we still do not understand in the universe, — and perhaps we would get an unhinged glimpse at its core, silent, meaning?
Human speech is continuously made of virtual palimpsests. But these are ignored, — and they stay buried, hidden, impotent, powerless.
Human words have dark or shiny reflections, shimmering with a latent, interior, fire, — sometimes striken by an unexpected, unhoped-for, light of meaning, yet vigorously smouldering under the ashes.
The « Hidden Jew » is an ancient figure. Joseph and Esther first hid their Jewishness. Esther’s name in Hebrew means « I will hide ». Esther belonged to the harem of King Ahasuerus. She revealed to him that she was a Jew and thus saved her people.
Closer in time, the Marrano Jews also « hid ». Shmuel Trigano affirms that they were « adventurers » and « pioneers who can be counted among the first modern men »i. They were the ferment of Jewish modernity, and thus they were the origin and foundation of modernity itself. Far from betraying their people, they saved them, as it were, by surreptitiously facilitating their acculturation, if we are to believe Trigano’s thesis.
It is a stimulating hypothesis, with broad perspectives. Marranism would not be an escape, a treason, a » decay « , but would in fact embody the courage and resilience of the Jews, and would pose a larger question, inherent in Judaism from its very origins:
« The Marran experience reveals the existence in Judaism of a potentiality of Marranism, a predisposition to Marranism, unrelated to the fact that it also represents a decay of Judaism. The ambivalence is greater: imposed by force, it also constitutes a high fact of the courage and perseverance of the Jews. The real question is this: is Marranism structurally inherent in Judaism, was it inscribed from the beginning in Judaism? (…) How could Jews have thought that they were becoming even more Jewish by becoming Christians (in fact this is what Jewish Christians have thought since Paul)? »ii
This question undoubtedly has a Judeo-Christian component, but its scope goes beyond the historical framework of Judeo-Christian relations. It goes much further back in time. Above all, it sheds light on a fundamental component of Judaism, its latent tendency towards universalism, as perhaps the Psalmist testifies. « But of Zion, it will be said, every man was born there » (Ps. 87:5).
Philo, a Jew and philosopher who lived in Alexandria and died about 50 A.D., offers an interesting figure to study in this regard.
Philo had no connection with Christianity, the birth of which he was a contemporary. Of Greek and Jewish culture, he was well acquainted with the Greek philosophers and had a perfect knowledge of the texts of Judaism, which he interpreted in an original way. He was also interested in the religions of the Magi, the Chaldeans and the Zoroastrians.
He sought higher syntheses, new ways, more adapted to the forms of » globalization » whose progress he observed in his time.
Philo was certainly not a hidden Jew. But what kind of Judaism was he representing? What kind of profound thought, of irrepressible aspiration, was he the bearer?
Philo, two thousand years ago, like the Spanish and Portuguese marranes five centuries ago, represented a paradoxical Judaism. They seem to be moving away from it somewhat, or temporarily , but only to return to it later, in a deeper way. They seem to betray it on the surface, but it is by the effect of a fidelity of their own, perhaps more essential to its true spirit. By taking some distance, by linking themselves to the world, they build bridges, establish links with nations, with non-Jews, and open up the possibility of other syntheses.
Ignored by the Synagogue, Philo professed opinions that might seem unorthodox. It was, moreover, the Christian philosophers and theologians of the first centuries who preserved Philo’s writings, and who found a posteriori in his thought enough to nourish their own reflections.
What was the real state of Judaism just before the destruction of the Second Temple? There were many varieties of Judaism at that time: Pharisees, Sadducees, Essenes, etc., not to mention the diasporas, more or less Hellenized.
There was undoubtedly a difference in perspective between the Jews of Jerusalem, who prayed every day in the Temple, not knowing that its end was imminent, and the Jews of the Diaspora, whose freedom of thought and belief, if we take Philo as a reference, was undoubtedly greater than in Jerusalem.
Let us judge by this text:
« God and Wisdom are the father and mother of the world, » Philo wrote in De Ebrietate, « but the spirit cannot bear such parents whose graces are far greater than those it can receive; therefore it will have as its father the right Logos and as its mother the education more appropriate to its weakness. »
Philo clarifies the scope of the metaphor: « The Logos is image and eldest son. Sophia is the spouse of God, whom God makes fruitful and who generates the world. »
It is not difficult to imagine the reaction of the Doctors of the Law to these remarks. It is also easy to understand why the Judeo-Christians found in Philo a valuable ally.
In a passage from his Cherubim (43-53), Philo evokes Sophia or Wisdom, the bride of God, and at the same time a Virgin, or Nature without defilement, and « Virginity » itself. Union with God makes the soul a virgin. The Logos is both father and husband of the soul.
This idea of a “virgin-mother-wife” is found almost everywhere in various traditions of antiquity, especially among the Orphics. The symbolic fusion between the wife and the daughter of God corresponds to the assimilation between Artemis and Athena among the latter. Korah, a virgin, daughter of Zeus and Demeter, unites with Zeus, and is the life-giving source of the world. She is the object of the mysteries of Eleusis. In the Osirid tradition, Osiris is the ‘principle’, Isis the ‘receptacle’ and Horus the ‘product’, which is translated philosophically by the triad: ‘Intelligible, matter, sensible’.
Was Philo an orthodox Jew? It is doubtful. Then who was he? One could say that he was, in anticipation, a sort of « Marrano » Jew, mutatis mutandis, converted by force of circumstance to spiritual globalization…
Schmuel Trigano writes in the conclusion of his work: « The double identity of the modern Jew could well be akin to the Marrano score. »
He generalized « Marranism » and made it a general model of the identity of modern man. « Marranism was the laboratory of Jewish modernity, even among those Jews who escaped Marranism. Let us go further: Marranism was the very model of all political modernity. »iii
What does Marranism testify to? The deep ambivalence of a worldview based on messianic consciousness. « Messianic consciousness encourages the Jew to live the life of this world while waiting for the world to come and thus to develop a cantilevered attitude towards this world. »
This feeling of strangeness in the world is particularly acute for anyone with an acute awareness of the implications of the coming of the Messiah.
But, paradoxically, it is in no way specific to Judaism.
Buddhism views this world as an appearance. This has also been the feeling of the shamans since the dawn of time. The feeling of strangeness in the world is so universal, that it must be taken as a fundamental trait of the most original religious feeling .
Man’s heart is hidden. It is for itself a mystery, that the world and its wonders come close without ever reaching it.
The « Marrano » man, doubly torn between his interior and exterior, as a man and as a persecuted person, discovered that modernity, through the State, could strive to systematically break down the interior of the self. But he also learned over time the means to resist alienation, the necessary wiles, the ability to thwart the games of political power, over very long periods of time.
We must not forget this lesson. At a time when the most « democratic » nations are actively preparing the means of mass surveillance, intrusive to the last degree, at a time when the prodromes of new barbarities are rising on a planetary scale, we will need this ancient lesson of duplicity in order to survive.
In order to prepare a better, universal, wise, humane world, we must follow the lesson of Philo: navigate among religions and nations, thoughts and languages, not as if we belonged to them, but as if they belonged to us.
iShmuel Trigano. « Le Juif caché. Marranisme et modernité », Pardès, 2000
Ancient ideas will still live on for a long time to come. For centuries, for millennia. But the daily traffic of billions of Internet users, what will remain of it in four thousand years?
People have always been eager to communicate their myths, to transmit their dreams, to share their intuitions. These ideas, these forces, are not those of empires and kingdoms. But they have made it possible to build worlds, to bring movements to life, capable of traversing the history of the centuries.
For a long time to come, ideas will still connect people, as they once did.
Megasthenes went to India in the 4th century B.C. to represent King Seleucus I Nicator, – successor of Alexander the Great. In the third book of his Indica, the Greek ambassador stated: “Really all that our ancients have said about nature is also said by philosophers foreign to Greece, either in India by the Brahmans or in Syria by those called the Jews.”i
Wasn’t that already a ‘globalization’ going on? The obvious recognition of a world wide community of concern? Far from suffering from distance, it was religious and philosophical ideas that traveled the farthest, across borders and languages, systems and prejudices, in these times of openness to all sides.
Eusebius also recalls Numenius of Apamea, who wrote: “After quoting Plato’s testimonies, it will be necessary to go back further and link them to the teachings of Pythagoras, and then appeal to the peoples of renown, conferring their initiations, their dogmas, the religious foundations which they accomplish in agreement with Plato, and all that the Brahmins, the Jews, the Magi and the Egyptians have established.”ii
It is a testimony that India, Persia, Mesopotamia, Israel, and Egypt, together with Greece, were then a fertile arc of thoughts and dreams, an immense, luminous, flow of genius at work.
Megasthenes and Numenius testified to the natural possibility of human minds to correspond, to provide each other with signals, ladders, guides and relays.
The 21st century therefore has no real lesson to teach in this matter. It has electrified and digitalized globalization, making it quasi-immediate, but at the same time quite superficial. We know « in real time » the stock market prices in Shanghai, Frankfurt and New York, as well as the number of corpses found after terrorist attacks and earthquakes. But we know less about the initiation of peoples, their way of evolution, their cultural foundations. Torrents of superfluous details abound. But where are the great visions, the profound prophecies staged?
Porphyry, a good analyst, is quite critical of the capacity of peoples in general. Some of them discover, some other just stray. « The oracle of Apollo has said: Chained with a bronze chain is the steep and arduous road that leads to the Gods; the Barbarians have discovered many paths, but the Greeks went astray; those who barely had it lost it; and the God gave the honor of discoveries to the Egyptians, the Phoenicians, the Chaldeans, the Assyrians, the Lydians, and the Hebrews.”iii
Porphyry, a neo-Platonic philosopher of the 3rd century AD, recognized the intellectual and spiritual brotherhood of the peoples who lived in these lands, today called Egypt, Israel, Lebanon, Turkey, Syria, Iraq, Iran. They shared a common march on the « steep and arduous road that leads to the Gods ».
But the Greeks got lost along the way.
Porphyry adds: « Furthermore, Apollo said in another oracle: To the Chaldeans alone is wisdom, and also to the Hebrews, who are holy worshippers of the God-King born of Himself.»iv
Religion is not enough to successfully take the steep and arduous road that leads to the Gods. It must also be done with « wisdom ». The Chaldeans and the Hebrews were the custodians of it, then.
But today, where are the peoples who speak « wisely » in the name of the « God-King born of Himself »?
iQuoted by par Eusebius of Caesarea. Prep. Ev., Book XI
The spirits of the people have each their own truth, said Hegel. Each people has its role to play, at a given moment in history, and precisely at that moment. After that, they experience decadence and fall, preparing « the passage of the spirit into a new principle, and of universal history into another people.”i.
Hegel distinguishes four epochs, which present various degrees of the incarnation of the spirit of the world, various states of its self-awarenessii.
The first period corresponds to the apogee of the Eastern Empire. The government is a theocracy, the ruler is a supreme priest or a God, legislation comes from religion, and « the individual personality disappears without rights. In this context, the spirit is known as « substance », as « identity », in which individualities are lost. Individuals have no justification as such.
The second epoch corresponds to the Greek Empire, where « a mysterious basis, repressed in a dark reminiscence, in the dark depth of tradition » and an individual spirituality coexist, which « arises in the light of knowledge, becomes measure and clarity through beauty and through free and cheerful morality ». The spirit acquires knowledge of itself, a positive content, which allows the birth of a moral, objective individuality.
The third moment is that of the Roman Empire, where « the separation of private personal consciousness from abstract universality” is accomplished to the point of tearing it apart. t is the moment of the cold and greedy violence of the aristocracy, the corruption of the plebs, the dissolution of society, the universal misfortune and the death of moral life.
Consciousness deepens to an abstract universality, and then contradicts the objectivity of the world deserted by the spirit.
The last epoch is that of the Germanic Empire, where the principle of the unity of the divine and human natures is realized. It is the Nordic principle of the Germanic peoples that has the task of achieving this unity. The contradiction between consciousness and objectivity is resolved. Consciousness is ready to « receive within itself its concrete truth », and to « reconcile itself with objectivity and settle into it ». The mind returns to its primary substance, it knows itself as truth, as thought and as legal reality.
The mission of the German Empire is to overthrow previous empires. It must bring the spirit out of the loss of self, out of the infinite suffering that results from it, « suffering to serve as a support to which the Israelite people were kept ready. »
With the hindsight of history, which judges it differently from philosophy, we can see that Hegel was mistaken about the mission of the « Germanic empire ». This empire did not put an end to the suffering of the universe, nor to that of the « Israelite people ».
We also know that other empires than the Germanic one have settled down today in history. The Soviet and American empires may have believed their time had come at different times in the 20th century. Ephemeral victories, in battles à la Pyrrhus.
What will the next empire be able to meet the Hegelian challenges?
What empire will tomorrow be able to unify the divine and human natures, to put an end to the loss of oneself, to put an end to infinite suffering?
Perhaps it is in fact Hegel’s moment that has passed? Perhaps the dream of uniting the divine and the human, or of putting an end to suffering, has no chance of coming true?
If we bet on Hegel’s prophetic genius, we can try to imagine a thousand-year-old über-empire that will be able to meet these challenges.
The über-empire will be globalized, decentralized, self-organized, self-regulated. Capable of imposing a global über-tax, a system of über-social protection and a guaranteed über-income for all, this new empire will allow freedom of movement and living anywhere on earth. No borders, no passports (replaced by facial recognition). End of all wars (guaranteed by a global security force with all the necessary means). Global labour regime, based on a principle of strict equality across the planet. A system of über-political elections at all levels (local, regional, global), which will elect the « wise men » responsible for guaranteeing the forms of self-regulation necessary in the long term.
The über-empire is undoubtedly a utopia, but not so much more than Hegel’s « German Empire ».
I would even say that it is much less utopian, because one day, as is obvious, in a hundred, a thousand or ten thousand years, it will make itself, in a shrunken planet, asphyxiated by the untenable egoisms of dysfunctional nations.
The European experience shows what does not work in dreams of federal integration. It also shows what needs to be corrected in the institutions. And one day über-Europe will extend to über-Eurasia, when Russia has been civilised and China decentralised … Then the other hemisphere will come around…
There will still be a long way to go before the union of the divine and human natures is achieved. But if we take even one single step to reduce the « infinite suffering » of the peoples of the world, will we not have made a giant leap toward an über-utopia?
Metaxu. Le blog de Philippe Quéau 
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