Roman sarcophagus depicting the Triumph of Dionysus and the Seasons
Melampus[1]
A legendary soothsayer and healer, originally of Pylos, who ruled at Argos. He introduced the worship of Dionysus, according to Herodotus, who asserted that his powers as a seer were derived from the Egyptians[2] and that he could understand the language of animals. A number of pseudepigraphal works of divination were circulated in Classical and Hellenistic times under the name Melampus. According to Herodotus and Pausanias (vi.17.6), on the authority of Hesiod, his father was Amythaon, whose name implies the "ineffable" or "unspeakably great";[3] thus Melampus and his heirs were Amythaides of the "House of Amythaon".
In Homer's Odyssey,[4] a digression concerning the lineage of Theoclymenus, "a prophet, sprung from Melampus' line of seers",[5] sketches the epic narrative concerning Melampus with such brevity that its details must have been familiar to Homer's audience. With brief hints, a sequence of episodes is alluded to, in which we discern strife in Pylos between Melampus and Neleus, who usurps Melampus's "great high house", forcing him into heroic exile. Melampus spends a year as bondsman in the house of Phylacus, "all for Neleus' daughter Pero". At his extremity, Melampus is visited by "the mad spell a Fury, murderous spirit, cast upon his mind. But the seer worked free of death" and succeeded at last in rustling Phylacus's cattle back to Pylos, where he avenged himself on Neleus and gave Pero in marriage to his brother Bias. But Melampus's own destiny lay in Argos, where he lived and ruled, married and sired a long line, also briefly sketched in Homer's excursus.
A work attributed in antiquity to Hesiod exists (Melampodia) in such fragmentary quotations and chance remarks that its reconstruction, according to Walter Burkert,[6] is "most uncertain." (Wikipedia)
Again, there isn’t much of a factual nature
about Orpheus though there is a lot of speculation about Orphism. So, Wikipedia again:
Orpheus
It was believed by Aristotle that Orpheus never existed. But to all other ancient writers, he was a real person, though living in remote antiquity. Most of them believed that he lived several generations before Homer. He is not mentioned by Homer or Hesiod.
Orpheus in Greek mythology was a Thracian bard, legendary musician and prophet. He was also a renowned poet and, according to the legend, travelled with Jason and the Argonauts in search of the Golden Fleece, and even descended into the underworld of Hades, to recover his lost wife Eurydice.
For the Greeks, Orpheus was a founder and prophet of the so-called "Orphic" mysteries. He was credited with the composition of the Orphic Hymns and the Orphic Argonautica. Shrines containing purported relics of Orpheus were regarded as oracles. (Wikipedia)
See Radcliffe G. Edmonds II, Redefining Ancient Orphism, Cambridge University
Press, Cambridge, UK, (2013) for a better idea of what Orphism was about,
though you still won’t get any real historical data about any life of Orpheus.
If he lived before Homer and Hesiod, you
would think that he would have been mentioned by them considering how otherwise
well-known he was. Of course, the authors of the works of Homer and Hesiod may
simply not have been aware of what was being talked about and shared among the
Greeks in Greece proper; that is, they may have been writing elsewhere. But,
since Homer does mention Melampus who was said to have introduced the worship
of Dionysus, perhaps Orpheus is simply Melampus by another name?
Here is another Orpheus type:
Musaeus of Athens
A legendary polymath, philosopher, historian, prophet, seer, priest, poet, and musician, said to have been the founder of priestly poetry in Attica. The mystic and oracular verses and customs of Attica, especially of Eleusis, are connected with his name. A Titanomachia and Theogonia are also attributed to him by Gottfried Kinkel. He composed dedicatory and purificatory hymns and prose treatises, and oracular responses.
In 450 BCE, the playwright Euripides in his play Rhesus describes him thus: "Musaeus, too, thy holy citizen, of all men most advanced in lore." In 380 BCE, Plato says in his Ion that poets are inspired by Orpheus and Musaeus but the greater are inspired by Homer. In the Protagoras, Plato says that Musaeus was a hierophant and a prophet. In the Apology, Socrates says: "What would not a man give if he might converse with Orpheus and Musaeus and Hesiod and Homer? Nay, if this be true, let me die again and again." According to Diodorus Siculus, Musaeus was the son of Orpheus, according to Tatian he was the disciple of Orpheus, but according to Diogenes Laërtius he was the son of Eumolpus. (Eumolpus was a legendary king of Thrace, allegedly the son of Poseidon and Chione. Alternately, he was the son of Apollo and the nymph Astycome. He was one of the first priests of Demeter and one of the founders of the Eleusinian Mysteries. According to Philochorus, Eumolpus was the father of Musaeus by the lunar goddess Selene.
Alexander Polyhistor, Clement of Alexandria and Eusebius say Musaeus was the teacher of Orpheus. Aristotle quotes him in Book VIII of his Politics: "Song is to mortals of all things the sweetest." According to Diogenes Laërtius he died and was buried at Phalerum, with the epitaph: "Musaeus, to his sire Eumolpus dear, in Phalerean soil lies buried here." According to Pausanias, he was buried on the Mouseion Hill, south-west of the Acropolis, where there was a statue dedicated to a Syrian. For this and other reasons, Artapanus of Alexandria, Alexander Polyhistor, Numenius of Apamea, and Eusebius identify Musaeus with Moses the Jewish lawbringer. Musaeus is singled out in Book 6 of The Aeneid, as someone particularly admired by the souls of Elysium. (Wikipedia)
So, Musaeus was “the son of Orpheus”, or
the “disciple of Orpheus” or the “teacher of Orpheus”. His alleged father, Eumolpus, seems a lot
like Melampus – even the names would be easily mixed, I think.
In any event, I have listed Melampus,
Orpheus, and Musaeus, because they were definitely part of the intellectual environment in which Greek philosophy arose. The three of them appear to be remarkably similar in
type making one wonder if they were all the same person known by different
names in different regions?
Brother Love’s Traveling Salvation Show
If you think that itinerant revival
preachers, tent evangelists, or faith-healing meetings are a Christian
phenomenon, think again: such activities have their roots in the ancient
Orientalizing influences on Greece according to Walter Burkert. They were, it
seems, a very special kind of traveling skilled artisans whose importance and
influence suggests to us the seriousness of the environment in which such could
develop and prosper. Seers and doctors were mentioned by Homer as “migrant
craftsmen”, individuals which communities were anxious to attract and keep, as
the two activities appear to have been closely connected. The fact that these
individuals were seen as specialists of a particular craft – partly hereditary,
partly acquired by learning and initiation, reveals the important place that
religious therapies for individuals, groups, cities and nations held.
The Derveni
papyrus, written in about 340 BCE by the circle of philosophers that included
the ill-fated Anaxagoras who we will soon meet, describes individuals who
specialize in initiations as “He who make the sacred his craft”. Strabo, too,
refers to the “Dionsiac and Orphic crafts”. Even Hippocrates, who was at pains
to differentiate between medicine as a science, and psychological catharsis,
admitted that migrant seers and healers presented themselves as bearers of
special knowledge.
It seems that in those times, as today,
charismatic technicians of other-worldly interactions could become widely
sought-after personalities. In fact, it appears that they represented the
intellectual elite of that time. We get a hint of this in the regard that even
Heraclitus had for Pythagoras who was certainly just such a technician. Their
special status gave them the ability to freely cross borders and thereby
transfer cultural knowledge from one place to another. In the Amarna
correspondence from the time of Akhenaten, the kings of Ugarit and Hatti requested
physicians and seers from the Egyptians. (Obviously, they were not yet aware of
the fact that Egypt, itself, was falling into dire straits and none of its
psychic specialists seem to have been able to counter the deleterious effects
of the regime of the last members of the 18th dynasty.)
In 670 BC, it is said that Thaletas of
Gortyn (Crete), a charismatic musician, delivered Sparta from a plague.[7] Apparently, the presence of an epidemic could attract migrant seers
as well as physicians. Before him, there was the legendary Karmanor, the priest
who purified Apollo after the god had slain the Delphic dragon. Karmanor
himself was later killed by Zeus with a thunderbolt. Walter Burkert notes that
the name does not appear to be Greek.[8]
Keep all of the above in mind when we
finally get to Epimenides a little further on.
Now, I will turn to Homer and Hesiod who
describe and define what ideas the philosophers would soon be dealing with.
Keep in mind what I have written before, that the world Homer and Hesiod describe
is not the world of the Greeks as we know and understand them.
Homer and Hesiod
The 19th century discovery of
the Mycenaean civilization by the amateur archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann,
and then the discovery of the Minoan civilization by Sir Arthur Evans in the
early 20th century, provided hard evidence for many of the
mythological details about the gods and heroes of Homer and Hesiod.
Unfortunately, the evidence is primarily monumental,
not written, since the Linear B script form of ancient Greek found there was
used mainly to record practical concerns of daily life such as inventories of
goods. Additionally, there are visual representations that are not known in any
literary source, so obviously a great deal was lost between the collapse and
the re-emergence of human societies.
Archaeology reveals that the earlier
inhabitants of the Balkan peninsula were agricultural settlers that appear to
have practiced a form of Animism that assigned a spirit to every aspect of
nature. At the time of the collapse, with the later appearance of new people,
probably driven by widespread unrest or political instability, a new pantheon
of gods appeared, probably reflecting the experiences of the northern peoples.
These were gods of violence, conquest, force and destruction, obvious evidence
of the trials and tribulations endured by the northern peoples of Europe and
central Asia at the time of the collapse and destruction of the Bronze Age.
The earliest literary survivals we have of
the foundations of Western civilization are Homer’s two epic poems, the Iliad and the Odyssey ( dated
usually to the 8th century BCE at least in oral form).. Hesiod is a
possible near-contemporary of Homer (750-650 BCE) and gives us the Origin of
the Gods in his Theogony. Hesiod’s Works and Days is a teaching poem about farming life and offers advice on how to survive in a world made dangerous by the gods. In this latter work, Hesiod
makes use of a scheme of Four Ages of
Man: Golden, Silver, Bronze and Iron, a clear exposition of repeating
cataclysmic destructions. These ages are separate ‘creations’, or time periods
of the reign of the gods, signifying the gradual break-up of the Giant Comet
and the disasters brought by the various ‘offspring’. The Golden Age belonged
to the reign of Cronos; the subsequent ages were dominated by Zeus. Hesiod
regarded this last period as the worst since it was overrun with evil. He
explained the presence of evil by the myth of Pandora, when all of the best of
human capabilities, save hope, had been spilled out of her overturned jar. He
also writes in such a way as to remind us of the possibility of genetic
mutation due to comets, as we covered earlier, and periods of utter horror
where cannibalism and human sacrifice were rampant practices devised by
pathological deviants who had taken control, supported by terrified
authoritarian followers.
All who came forth from Gaia and Ouranos, the most dire of children, from the beginning were hated by their own begetter; and just as soon as any of them came into being he hid them all away and did not let them into the light, in the inward places of Gaia; and Ouranos rejoiced over the evil deed. And she, prodigious Gaia, groaned within for she was crowded out; and she contrived a crafty, evil device… she sent him [Kronos] into a hidden place of ambush, placed in his hands a jagged-toothed sickle, and enjoined on him the whole deceit. Great Ouranos came bringing Night with him, and over Gaia, desiring love, he stretched himself, and spread all over her; and he, his son, from his place of ambush stretched out with his left hand, and with his right he grasped the monstrous sickle, long and jagged-toothed, and swiftly sheared off the genitals of his dear father, and flung them behind him to be carried away…[9]
Interesting imagery: darkness on the earth shattered
by a “monstrous sickle” that shears off the “genitals” which are “flung behind”
and carried away. Sounds a lot like the
breaking up of a comet possibly after impact with another cometary body, and
fragments drifting away in the tail.
Parts of Hesiod’s account reveal
parallelisms with the Hurrian account of the succession of the oldest gods
preserved in the Hittite Kumarbi-tablet dating, in its extant form, to around
the beginning of the Greek Dark Age. In the Hittite version, the first king in
heaven is Alalu, who is driven out by Anu and then Anu is deposed by the father
of Kumarbi. As Anu tries to escape into the sky, Kumarbi bites off and swallows
his genitals. After being told that he has become impregnated with the Storm
God and two other ‘terrible gods’, he spits it out but it is too late: he’s
pregnant! He eventually gives birth to the equivalent of Zeus, who deposes
Kumarbi and becomes king of heaven. However, the Greek version incorporates non-Mesopotamian elements. Another
possibility is that we see in the cutting off of the genitals, a physical interaction
with plasma components, discharging a comet and thereby dissolving its tail.
What is evident in the above account is that much of this activity occurred in
daylight and brought deep darkness to the Earth.
Hesiod’s Theogony is not only the fullest surviving account of the gods, but also the
fullest surviving account of the archaic bardic function, with its long
preliminary invocation to the Muses. Theogony became the subject of many poems, including those attributed to Orpheus, Musaeus,
Epimenides, Abaris, and other legendary seers, which are now lost to us. It
seems that these were written accompaniments to ritual purifications and
mystery-rites designed to appease the gods, some of which must have included
sacrifice, but not necessarily all. Obviously, many groups in many places were
trying desperately to find the right formula that would bring the chaos and
destruction to an end. In fact, it can be said that Hesiod’s work not only
deals with the ‘genealogical’ relationships between the gods (the parent comet
and its ongoing disintegration), but also serves to demonstrate how, finally,
something seems to have worked and Zeus became the ultimate authority and
established order by ‘defeating’ (destruction via impact?) the Titans. Zeus
hurls thunderbolts at them and…
The whole earth boiled, and the streams of Okeanos, and the unharvested sea; and them, the earth-born Titans, did a warm blast surround, and flame unquenchable reached the holy aither, and the darting gleam of thunderbolt and lightning blinded the eyes even of strong men. A marvelous burning took hold of Chaos; and it was the same to behold with the eyes or to hear the noise with the ears as if earth and broad heaven above drew together; for just such a great din would have risen up…[10]
The heroic age presented in the Iliad and Odyssey
was more entertaining than the divine-focus of the Theogony and
therefore is better known. Homer’s tales were clearly set in a world that was
under the constant threat of bombardment and the relations between gods and
humans were rather clearly defined, though later interpreters have completely
misread and misinterpreted these things. Homer appears to be presenting a clear
formula of how to be in right relations with the gods, and the main focus was
Theoxeny[11] and hospitality. One needed to behave decently, even to strangers
and foreigners, because they might be gods in disguise, and bad hospitality
could bring the fires of heaven down on one’s head, literally. One of the
attributes of Zeus was ‘Xenios’, or the stranger. This relates back to the
evils of mankind decried by Hesiod. Theoxeny could demonstrate the character of
a man and thus determine whether or not he would be spared from destruction. A
good man will treat the aged and humble well; a bad man will abuse the helpless
and down-trodden. In the Odyssey,
this point is made abundantly clear with Odysseus taking the role of the god
and the story being mainly about the different forms of hospitality that are
shown to Odysseus and then, finally, how Odysseus, in the role of the god,
brought absolute and total destruction on the suitors who abused his
hospitality. This view is rather more interesting than one might suppose as it
appears that, increasing economic disparity, abandonment and abuse of the poor,
etc., are among the primary characteristics of a society on the verge of
collapse; and such collapse can ultimately include cosmic disaster.
As time passed, and things began to quiet
down in the skies, these tales gave rise to cults of heroes who were strictly
human, though associated with the gods as either offspring or close
affiliation. After a bit more time had passed, it appears that these works were
considered to be impossibly wild tales born from primitive imaginings, and
subsequent works on these themes became less narrative and more allusive
visions, leading to the vision of the world presented by the later emerging
philosophers. Certainly, there may have been heroic individuals during those
times; as I’ve already mentioned, such times refine both the best and the worst
in human beings. But reducing real, cosmic activity to the level of exaggerated
human doings amounted to a cover-up, whether it was intentional or not.
And so, we find a group of people –
obviously a minority – in the area of the furthest extent of the ancient Hittite
Empire, emerging from the darkness, building societies and trying to bring
order out of chaos. They read the myths and knew the stories of their immediate
forebears, but they did not see anything going on in the skies, or the world at
large, that would explain these things, so they assumed that the language
describing the doings of gods was really about forces of nature that had been
misunderstood. They didn’t have precise scientific terminology as we do today,
and they weren’t precisely scientific in the beginning, so they utilized the
only language they had to do this with: the language of myth. They were
concerned with the early history of the Earth, with its creation, its
structure, how it worked, and, of course, man’s place within it.
The sky was seen as a solid hemisphere,
similar to a bowl. It was solid and bright, even metallic. It covered the flat
earth and the lower part of the space between earth and sky, up to and
including clouds, contained mist (aer);
beyond that, from clouds up to the starry sky, was aither, the ‘shining upper air’ which, interestingly enough, was
often conceived of as fiery. In the Iliad, Homer writes, in obvious comet imagery, “the fir-tree reached
through the aer to the aither.”[12] Below the surface of the earth, its mass continued far down, with
roots in Tartaros.[13]
Or seizing him I will hurl him into misty Tartaros, very far, where is the deepest gulf below earth; there are iron gates and brazen threshold, as far beneath Hades as sky is from earth.[14]
Around it [Tartaros] a brazen fence is drawn; and all about it Night in three rows is poured, around the throat; and above are the roots of earth and unharvested sea.[15]
So we see something like a big globe
surrounding the Earth, though the part that surrounds the world underneath the
flat surface, embraces a big mass of Earth’s foundations, as well as the
underworld, and is either brass or iron. Some conceived of the Earth’s
foundations as continuing on indefinitely, but that was a later idea of
Xenophanes.
Around the edges of the flat Earth ran the
vast river, Okeanos. However, in the Odyssey, a broad outer sea was described.
So the idea of Okeanos being a river of fresh water may be Mesopotamian. The
encircling river meant that the Sun, after finishing his transit of the sky,
sailed in a golden boat around the Earth in the stream of Okeanos and returned
to the place of arising the next morning. This may be derived from Egypt where
the Sun was depicted as traveling from West to East across subterranean waters.
Okeanos – along with Tethys or the earth
itself – was perceived as the ‘begetter of gods’ and the place where the gods
went to sleep. That is, it was over the horizon that the comets arose and then
subsequently set. Obviously, they could also go below the horizon to Tartaros
or could even be born from Tartaros.
There of murky earth and misty Tartaros and unharvested sea and starry sky, of all of them, are the springs in a row and the grievous, dank limits which even the gods detest; a great gulf, nor would one reach the floor for the whole length of a fulfilling year, if one were once within the gates. But hither and thither storm on grievous storm would carry one on; dreadful is this portent even for immortal gods; and the dreadful halls of gloomy Night stand covered with blue-black clouds.[16]
There are gleaming gates, and brazen threshold unshaken, fixed with continuous roots, self-grown; and in front, far from all the gods, dwell the Titans, across murky Chaos.[17]
We see that this may be an attempt to
describe the regions beyond and below the horizon, which are said to be
surrounded by night, and above it are the roots of the Earth and the sea.
Epimenides of Cnossos
At this point in our
more or less chronological account, we encounter Epimenides who was a
semi-mythical 7th or 6th century BC Greek seer and philosopher-poet. Diogenes
Laertius tells us that he was summoned to Athens in the 46th
Olympiad (595-592 BCE) to purify their city and thereby stop a pestilence. That
puts him as a contemporary of Solon (c. 630 – c. 560 BCE), both being contemporaries of Cyrus II of
Persia and Croesus of Lydia. It also
reminds us of Thaletas of Gortyn (Crete) who was called
to Sparta in 670 BC, for the same reason, 75 years earlier.
Epimenides was a
Cretan diviner and the following excerpts from Diogenes tell the story in
brief:
He [Epimenides] was a native of Cnossos in Crete, though from wearing his hair long he did not look like a Cretan. One day he was sent into the country by his father to look for a stray sheep, and at noon he turned aside out of the way, and went to sleep in a cave, where he slept for fifty-seven years. After this he got up and went in search of the sheep, thinking he had been asleep only a short time. And when he could not find it, he came to the farm, and found everything changed and another owner in possession. … At length he found his younger brother, now an old man, and learnt the truth from him. So he became famous throughout Greece, and was believed to be a special favourite of heaven.
Hence, when the Athenians were attacked by pestilence, and the Pythian priestess bade them purify the city, they sent a ship … to Crete to ask the help of Epimenides. And he came in the 46th Olympiad, (595 – 592 BCE), purified their city, and stopped the pestilence…
According to some writers he declared the plague to have been caused by the pollution which Cylon brought on the city and showed them how to remove it. In consequence two young men, Cratinus and Ctesibius, were put to death and the city was delivered from the scourge.
The Athenians voted him a talent in money and a ship to convey him back to Crete. The money he declined, but he concluded a treaty of friendship and alliance between Cnossos and Athens.
So he returned home and soon afterwards died. According to Phlegon in his work On Longevity, he lived one hundred and fifty-seven years; according to the Cretans two hundred and ninety-nine years. Xenophanes of Colophon gives his age as 154, according to hearsay. …
Demetrius reports a story that he received from the Nymphs food of a special sort and kept it in a cow’s hoof; that he took small doses of this food, which was entirely absorbed into his system, and he was never seen to eat. … they say he had superhuman foresight… It is also stated that he… claimed that his soul had passed through many incarnations… The Lacedaemonians guard his body in their own keeping in obedience to a certain oracle; this is stated by Sosibius the Laconian.[18] (Plutarch also tells a more elaborated version of the story in the parallel Lives.)
It is noteworthy that Epimenides (along
with Melampus), was alleged to have been one of the founders of Orphism which
apparently taught reincarnation. Curiously, Epimenides is quoted twice in the New Testament. The alleged poem of Epimenides goes as
follows:
They fashioned a tomb for you, holy and high one,
Cretans, always liars, evil beasts, idle bellies.
But you are not dead: you live and abide forever,
For in you we live and move and have our being.[19]
The fourth line is quoted in Acts 17:28:
For in Him we live and move and have our being; as even some of your poets have said, For we are also His offspring.
Then, in Titus 1:12:-
One of their number, a prophet of their own, said, Cretans are always liars, hurtful beasts, idle and lazy gluttons.
The "lie" of the Cretans is that
Zeus was mortal; Epimenides considered Zeus immortal.
We note from the brief biography, that
Epimenides apparently blamed this plague on “the pollution which Cylon brought
on the city and showed them how to remove it.”
Cylon was an Athenian noble and a previous
winner in the Olympics. Apparently, he plotted with his father-in-law,
Theagenes, the tyrant of Megara, to seize Athens in a coup in either 636 B.C.E.
or 632 BCE (which was quite a bit before the 46th Olympiad
(595-592 BCE) when Epimenides was called in!). Not much
is known about Theagenes except that he became a tyrant by way of his own coup
and Aristotle wrote in his Rhetoric that
Theagenes had first asked for a bodyguard: "he who is plotting tyranny
asks for a body guard." He is compared with Pisistratus,[20] "who when granted it [a body guard] became a tyrant."[21] What is curious about the episode of Theagenes is that Aristotle
mentions that he slaughtered the flocks
of the rich. "They would do this because they had the confidence of
the people, a confidence based upon hostility to the rich."[22] This is paralleled again by Aristotle with Pisistratus' leading a
revolt of dwellers on the plain. Aristotle comes out clearly in support of the
rule of the wealthy elite.
Anyway, back to Cylon: he married Theagenes
daughter and consulted the Delphic oracle who told him to seize Athens during a
festival of Zeus, which Cylon understood to mean the Olympics of 640 BCE.
However, the coup did not succeed and
Cylon and his supporters took refuge in Athena's temple on the Acropolis. Cylon
and his brother escaped, but his followers were cornered by Athens's nine
archons. According to Plutarch and Thucydides[23], they were persuaded by the archons to leave the temple and stand
trial after being assured that their lives would be spared. The Athenian
archons, led by Megacles, proceeded to stone them to death which was the “great
sin” that Cylon brought on Athens, not his attempted coup!
So, it seems, based on the dates, that
Athens was suffering a great deal for a considerable period of time before they
called in Epimenides. The seer made it
clear that Megacles and his whole wealthy and powerful family, the
Alcmaeonidae, had to be exiled from the city which is what happened to elites when things went bad for the society. Not only did they exile the
entire family from the city, they even dug up their buried ancestors and moved
them outside the city limits! (The later
Pericles and Alcibiades also belonged to the Alcmaeonidae.)
Alcman
Around 600 BCE there was a Spartan choral/lyric
poet named Alcman who apparently wrote a theogonical cosmogony. We only have a
2nd century AD papyrus commentary with limited extracts of the work.
It obviously puzzled the commentator.[24] What is important about it is that the fragment preserves a couple
of unusual terms: poros, as ‘paths in
the primeval sea’, and tekmor, as 'signs of direction through it', or
through the stars. This appears to us to be a description of a physical path or
passage through the heavens, described in terms of the background stars though,
as yet, there were no constellations named by the Greeks. The new terms are
neither oriental nor Hesiodic, so where did they come from? Alcman’s compositional dialect (Homeric mixed
with Doric Laconian vernacular) and many references to Lydian and Asian culture
suggests his origins. Aristotle said that that Alcman came to Sparta as a slave
to the family of Agesidas by whom he was eventually emancipated because of his
great skill.[25] The choral lyrics of Alcman were meant to be performed within the
social, political, and religious context of Sparta. Swiss scholar Claude Calame
suggests they are a type of drama connected with initiation rites.[26]
Pherecydes
Pherecydes was, according to one ancient
authority, a contemporary of the Lydian king Alyattes, i.e. 605-560 BC. He was
born on the Greek island of Syros[27], and is said by many scholars to have been the bridge between the
ancient myths and pre-Socratic Greek philosophy. According to Diogenes,
Pherecydes’ work survived into his own time, the 3rd century CE.
Diogenes recites miracle stories about Pherecydes, such as prediction of an
earthquake, a shipwreck, the outcome of a battle, and so forth. What is
problematical is that the same miracles were also attributed to Pythagoras.
Associations between the two were assumed only after the 5th century BCE, probably due to a passing
comment made by Ion of Chios[28] and recorded by Diogenes:
Thus did [Pherecydes] excel in manhood and honor, and now that he is dead he has a delightful existence for his soul – if Pythagoras was truly wise, who above all others knew and learned thoroughly the opinions of men.[29]
The confused association between Pherecydes
and Pythagoras suggests that there were few reliable details about either and
people could just make stuff up at will. Thus, it is probably best to be
skeptical of a connection.
In addition to Diogenes, there is a
reference to Pherecydes in the Suda[30], which says:
There is a story that Pythagoras was taught by him [Pherecydes]; but that he himself had no instructor, but trained himself after obtaining the secret books of the Phoenicians.[31]
There is another thing that is most
interesting that Diogenes has reported about Pherecydes:
There is preserved of the man of Syros the book ... and there is preserved also a solstice-marker in the island of Syros.
This may possibly be related to a line from the Odyssey:
There is an island called Syrie – perhaps you have heard of it – above Ortygie, where are the turnings of the sun.
The “turnings of the sun” would refer to
the summer and winter solstices when the Sun reaches its highest and lowest
points and appears to ‘turn back’ due to the angle of the Earth’s axis vis- à-vis the
Sun through the annual orbit. Kirk, Raven and Schofield add in a footnote:
…the only other place in Homer where Ortygie is mentioned is Odyssey V, 123, where Orion, having been carried off by Eos, is slain in Ortygie by Artemis. The implication is that Ortygie was the dwelling-place of Eos, the dawn, and therefore that it lies in the east. … since solstices would normally be observed at sunrise and in summer, and so in the north-east-by-east direction, that is what the phrase might suggest. Thus the intention may be to indicate the general direction of this probably mythical Ortygie. In fact the dwelling-place of Eos was often conceived as being Aia, commonly identified with Colchis; and Colchis does lie roughly north-east-by-east from the centre of the Ionian coastline.[32]
Kirk et al. also include comments, aka scholia, on the couplet from Homer written
by later scholars:
Aristarchus comment: They say there is a cave of the sun there, through which they mark the sun’s turnings.
Herodian: As it were toward the turnings of the sun, which is in the westward direction, above Delos.[33]
The comments show that two interpretations
(at least) of this couplet from Homer were being discussed in Alexandria. One
of them suggests that it was thought there was a solstice-marker that had been
used by Pherecydes; that is, that he was making astronomical observations. But
what is more interesting is that it appears that the existence of this marker
was known by Homer. One wonders if Pherecydes discovered it by following clues
in Homer which leads to the question: how did Homer know about it? But of course, this whole thing needs to be
taken with a grain of salt or two since, according to the scholars, there is no
other evidence that Pherecydes was a practical scientist, although, to me, the
evidence suggests he was making astronomical observations. Further, the fact
that many megalithic structures of northern Europe have been shown to be
designed to mark the solstices and/or equinoxes is very intriguing. Did Pherecydes have a northern source for his
information?
Pherecydes is said to have been the first
to write about the gods in prose as
opposed to poetry. That is, poetic works appear
to have had ritual purposes, while Pherecydes broke with this tradition;
perhaps he was attempting to write about these things in a pragmatic way. His
major work was entitled Heptamychos, or ‘the seven sanctuaries’ or recesses. Some sources say it was Pentemychos, which
is translated as meaning ‘five recesses’ and the later Pythagoreans were said
to have developed their pentagram and ‘spiritual purification’ system based on
the ‘five recesses’. It is assumed by some that Pherecydes was teaching
esoteric things via the medium of mythic representation, i.e. allegorically.
One ancient commentator wrote:
Also, Pherecydes, the man of Syros, talks of recesses and pits and caves and doors and gates, and through these speaks in riddles of becomings and deceases of souls.[34]
Well, sure, we could interpret this in view
of the many astronomically oriented megalithic structures and conclude that
there was some metaphysical or spiritual purpose to them, as well as a
connection between them and Pherecydes’ ‘recesses’. However, as we have seen
from our brief review above starting with Homer and Hesiod, particularly
discussions of gates and doors and so forth, this is undoubtedly incorrect; It
seems that Pherecydes was talking about regions of the sky exactly as did Homer
and Hesiod.
Pherecydes described a cosmogony based on
three ‘principles’: Zas (Zeus), Cthonie (earth) and Chronos. Pentemychos was about a cosmic battle taking place, with Chronos as the head of
one side and Ophioneus – the serpent – as the leader of the other. As we know,
the same story is elsewhere enacted with Zeus and Typhon/Typhoeus, Marduk vs.
Tiamat, and other parallels. The semen (seeds) of Chronos was placed in the
‘recesses’ and numerous other gods and
their offspring were the result. This is described in a fragment preserved
in Damascius’ On First
Principles[35] and we’ve read almost exactly the same thing in Hesiod, quoted
above in the story of the castration of Chronos.
With the understanding of giant comets, and
that they were perceived to arrive from certain areas of the sky with
regularity, as explained by the science we have reviewed, we can better
interpret the ‘recesses’ as being particular areas of the sky that were later
defined as constellations, created and named in accordance with the cometary
activity. This point can be understood by reviewing the development of the
history of astrological signs. John H. Rogers, in Origins of the ancient constellations[36], (in 2 parts), explains that the division of the zodiac into 12
equal parts was not done by even the Babylonians until between 600 and 475 BC,
around the time that zodiacal horoscopes were introduced. The 48 constellations
of the classical world were first described by Eudoxus and Aratus, and the
definitive list was not made until the time of Ptolemy (90-c.168 CE). Only a
subset of the classical constellations came from Babylonia – the zodiac and
four associated animals: serpent, crow, eagle and fish.
An idea of how the sky was divided for the
purpose of recording astronomical events can be gained by a review of
Stanislaus Lubienietzki’s (1623-1675) Theatrum
Cometicum[37], published in 1668
in Amsterdam, which contains 80 fabulous illustrations that accompany over 400
comet sightings. The book records the observations of such scholars as
Athanasius Kircher, Christian Huygens and Johannes Hevelius (plus others), and
each of them provided their own constellation
charts which reflect different sky-mapping traditions.
This first image is a comet observation by
R. P. A. Curtio. Notice how particular stars are designated in the grid he has
drawn so as to accurately place his comet in relation to those stars. Notice
the triangulation from Cygnus and Polaris to the head of the comet. In this chart,
we also see the oblique line of the zodiac crossed by the horizontal line of
the celestial equator. (Keep all this in mind; it is going to solve a great,
ancient mystery further on!) The next image is another way of mapping a comet sighting.
This is a more horoscopic type of map which
shows the symbols of the zodiac and designates which sign the Sun is in. The
little circle at the bottom probably designates the Earth from where the comet
is viewed and notice how the tail of the comet changed over the duration of the
observation (this is like time-lapse engraving!) in relation to the Sun. One
can easily imagine how the segments of the zodiac, before they were named
constellations, could have been thought of as ‘caves’ or ‘recesses’, especially
if the sky was alive with comet activity!
That’s just a couple of selections from the
Theatrum Cometicum that I have selected to make
my point that I think Pherecydes was either making direct comet observations,
or was studying the myths and legends and knew what they were and was
endeavoring to standardize locations in the sky where those terrifying events
took place. It is worth noting that a significant number of the comet maps in
the Theatrum Cometicum depict comets in the
area of the sky between Taurus and Scorpio, though along the celestial equator
rather than the zodiac. It isn’t difficult to imagine Pherecydes including just
such charts as illustrations to his idea about the ‘recesses’, ‘pits’, ‘gates’,
‘caves’, and so on.
A relationship appears to exist between
these recesses and Chthonie, which is another of the three first-existing
things. Chthonie has to do with the origin of the word ‘chthonic’; her name
means ‘underlying the earth’. That can be explained by the fact that the comets
either appear from, or pass below, the horizon, seeming to be either born from
the Earth, or to go ‘inside the earth’ or into the ocean from the constellation
‘recesses’ as in the following land oriented image.
Ophioneus and its brood of serpents are depicted as ruling the birthing cosmos for some time, before finally falling from power thanks to the arrival of the cavalry in the form of Zeus who ‘orders and distributes’ things, i.e. kicks most of the comets out of play like a massive bowling strike. The story describing this has Zas making a cloth which he decorates with earth and sea and presents as a wedding gift to Chthonie, wrapping it around her as a wedding garment. In another fragment it is not Chthonie, but a winged oak that is wrapped in the cloth. The winged oak in this cosmology has no precedent in Greek tradition but, thanks to Ballie, Clube and Napier, we certainly know of trees of life as comets, with their attendant ion tails and other electrical activity, and the World Tree is typical of northern cosmogonies. Nevertheless, we perceived something of the decorated cloth wrapped around the earth in the quote above from Hesiod: “Great Ouranos came bringing Night with him, and over Gaia, desiring love, he stretched himself, and spread all over her…” And, since the topic is on the table at the moment, I should mention here that many of these sexual images that were used to describe the activities of the comet gods, were later used to justify such things as incest and pederasty. After all, if the gods do it, why can’t we? That’s due, of course, to the ‘astralizing’ influence taken to an extreme.
Back to Pherecydes story; apparently, the
chaotic forces – or comets, as we know them – are eternal and cannot be
destroyed, so Zeus takes possession of the sky, space and time, and throws
Ophioneus and the gang out from the ordered world and locks them away in
Tartaros. As noted, Hesiod described Tartaros as being “in a recess (mychos) of broad-wayed earth”, i.e. they
disappeared below the horizon.
The locks to Tartaros are fashioned in iron
by Zeus, and in bronze by Poseidon, which could mean that some of the comet
fragments came to Earth and others plunged into the ocean. Judging from some
ancient fragments, Ophioneus is thrown into Okeanos, but not into Tartaros. In
one version, it is Kronos who orders the offspring – the comet fragments – out
from the cosmos to Tartaros. In short, they were flung off into space, i.e.
were probably moved into different orbits, passing from view below the horizon
or, more intriguingly, passing out of the plane of the ecliptic into other
regions of the sky. The question is: do they still exist in these orbits?
We are told about chaotic beings put into
the Pentemychos, and we are told that the
Darkness has an offspring that is cast into the recesses of Tartaros. No surviving fragment makes the connection,
but it is possible that the prison-house
in Tartaros and the Pentemychos are ways of
referring to essentially the same thing.[38] Was Pherecydes dividing the sky into 10 segments with five of them
always being below the horizon? Notice that the image drawn by Hevelius below
does exactly that, though with six ‘recesses’ based on the 12-sign zodiac and
the sexagesimal circle later obtained via the Babylonians.
A comparatively large number of sources say
Pherecydes was the first to teach the eternity and transmigration of human
souls, i.e. reincarnation.[39] Both Cicero and Augustine thought of him as having given the first
teaching of the ‘immortality of the soul’[40] and Hellenic scholar Hermann S. Schibli writes that Pherecydes “included
in his book [Pentemychos]
at least a rudimentary treatment of the immortality of the soul, its wanderings
in the underworld, and the reasons for the soul’s incarnations.”[41] One gets the impression that this ‘astralizing’ of the behavior of
perfectly astronomical comets was the origin of the idea of reincarnation
itself, derived from the reappearance, at regular intervals, of the Comet Gods
from their ‘wanderings in the underworld’ beyond the horizon of the Earth! And
that isn’t to say that reincarnation isn’t an idea worth exploring; I’m just
pointing out that there is a far more rational explanation for what Pherecydes
was talking about than reincarnation.
Finally, the material that comes to us from
Pherecydes is dotted with original terms and imagery that strikes me as 1)
possibly derived from northern sources, and 2) a quasi-scientific attempt to
depict real events, not myth. The flying oak with the marriage cloth that
covers Earth is just fascinating!
Pherecydes was said by Diogenes to have been the student of Pittacus (640-568 BC) who was a Mytilenaean[42] general who defeated the Athenians and was named as one of the ‘Seven Sages’.
According to the story, when the Athenians were preparing to attack, Pittacus challenged their General to single combat to decide the war and avoid senseless bloodshed. He won and was chosen ruler of his city.
In Protagoras, Plato has his character, Prodicus, refer
to Pittacus as a barbarian because he spoke Aeolic Greek derived from Boeotia,
one of the earliest inhabited regions of Greece, the home of Oedipus, Kadmus,
Ogyges, the legend of the Deluge, etc. So, that may be one of the sources of
information available to Pherecydes. Hesiod was also born in Boeotia.
[1] The name, if it is significant, signifies "black foot".
[2] Herodotus, Histories 2.49.
[3] Robert Graves, The Greek Myths 1955, s.v. "Amythaon".
[4] Odyssey, XV.223-42.
[5] Robert Fagles's translation, 1996:326-27.
[6] Walter Burkert, Homo Necans, tr. by Peter Bing, 1983:170 note 12
[7] Plutarch, Mus. 42.1146 b-c.
[8] Burkert (1992) p. 63.
[9] Hesiod, Theogony 154.
[10] Hesiod, Theogony 695.
[11] ‘Theoxeny, the belief that strangers had magical powers or were
deities themselves. From 'theo' meaning 'god' and 'xeno' meaning 'alien',
'strange', 'guest'.
[12] Iliad, XIV 288.
[13] In Greek mythology, Tartarus is both a deity and a place in the
underworld. Hesiod asserts that a bronze anvil falling from heaven would fall
nine days before it reached the earth. The anvil would take nine more days to
fall from earth to Tartarus.
[14] Iliad VIII, 13, Zeus
speaking.
[15] Hesiod, Theogony 726.
[16] Hesiod, Theogony 736.
[17] Hesiod, Theogony 811.
[18] Diogenes Laertius I, 109-120.
[19] Epimenides' Cretica found in the 9th century Syriac commentary by
Isho'dad of Merv on the Acts of the Apostles, discovered, edited and translated
(into Greek) by Prof. J. Rendel Harris in a series of articles in the Expositor,
Oct. 1906, 305–17; Apr. 1907, 332–37; Apr. 1912, 348–353.
[20] Herodotus reports that Onomacritus, a compiler of oracles who lived
at the court of Pisistratus, was hired by Pisistratus to compile the oracles of
Musaeus, but that Onomacritus inserted forgeries of his own that were detected.
As a result, Onomacritus was banished from Athens by Pisistratus' son
Hipparchus. After the flight of the Pisistratids to Persia, Onomacritus was
reconciled with them. According to Herodotus, Onomacritus induced Xerxes I, the
King of Persia, by his oracular responses, to decide upon his war with Greece.
[21] Aristotle. Rhetoric, 1357b.
[22] Aristotle. Politics, 1305a 22-4.
[23] 1.126
[24] Kirk, Raven & Schofield (1983) The Presocratic Philosophers, pp. 46-49.
[25] Huxley, Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Studies 15 (1974) 210-1 n. 19
[26] Calame, Les Chœurs de jeunes filles en Grèce
archaïque, 2 vols. (Rome:L'Ateneo and Bizzarri),
1977; translated as Choruses of Ancient Women in
Greece: their morphology, religious roles and social functions (Lanham,
MD:Rowman and Littlefield), 1996.
[27] Greek island in the Cyclades, in the Aegean Sea, located about 144
km south-east of Athens.
[28] Ion of Chios (c. 490/480 - c. 420 BCE) was a Greek writer, dramatist, lyric poet
and philosopher.
[29] Diogenes, I, 120.
[30] A massive 10th century Byzantine encyclopedia of the ancient
Mediterranean world, formerly attributed to an author called Suidas.
[31] Suda, s.v. Pherecydes.
[32] Kirk et al., p. 55.
[33] Kirk et al., p. 54.
[34] Kirk et al.
[35] Ahbel-Rappe (2010) Damascius'
Problems and Solutions Concerning First Principles. Damascius was head of
the Neoplatonist academy in Athens when the Emperor Justinian shut its doors
forever in 529. His work, Problems and
Solutions Concerning First Principles, is the last surviving independent
philosophical treatise from the Late Academy.
[36] Rogers (1998) Origins of the
ancient constellations, Part I: The Mesopotamian Tradition and Part II: The Mediterranean Tradition.
[37] http://www.polona.pl/dlibra/doccontent2?id=643
[38] Kirk et al. (1983).
[39] Schibli (1990) Pherekydes of
Syros.
[40] Encyclopedia Britannica,
9th edition, Volume 18: Pherecydes of Syros.
[41] Schibli, ibid., p. 108.
[42] Mytilene is a town on the Greek island of Lesbos.
Both kinds of "reincarnations" make eternity cyclic where that paying attention to reality left and right can be more important than it might seem; not that I'm overly perfect at it.
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