Olympianism and Platonism

A while back—I want to say it was on sanepolytheism, but I can't find it now—some folks were talking about Greek religion, and I made the point that it seemed to me like Olympianism and Platonism were completely different religions and that Socrates really was killed for "introducing foreign gods" (rather than it being a empty accusation). (Part of the reason I felt like this is the case is that Ælius Aristides—a worshipper of the Olympians in general and Asclepius in particular—is quite hostile to philosophy, despite being a very smart cookie himself.)

Well, I'm currently reading Journey in Truth and Pathways of Philosophy by Manly P. Hall, which together form a whirlwind tour of Western philosophy (particularly idealist philosophy) from Orpheus to Emerson. (Spoiler alert: Hall is a hardcore Neoplatonist.) In contrast to most scholars I've seen—who say that Platonism grew out of and was a mature form of Greek folk religion—he emphasizes that it's a different religion entirely, like I intuited.

His claim is that Orpheus was a real person (or a mythic aggregation of several real persons) of Asian extraction—Orpheus means "dark," as in "dark-skinned"—who introduced a cult to Greece some generations before Homer. This cult was never large, but it was immensely influential through Pythagoras, who was initiated into it by Pherecydes of Syros and introduced many of its doctrines, such as metempsychosis, into the Pythagorean cult. (Pythagoras also imported a great many other foreign influences, including Egyptian, Babylonian, Persian, and Vedic.) The Pythagoreans were under heavy political persecution and also remained underground, until Plato—obsessed with philosophy thanks to Socrates—was initiated into the the tattered cult and incorporated what remained of its doctrines into the Academy.

Consequently, despite sharing a geographic region, Hall claims that Platonism is descended from Orphism and various other Asian spiritualities and adapted to Greek culture, rather than being descended from Greek folk religion proper.

Let me hasten to note that I don't say this to start a this-is-better-than-that argument—all divine revelation is divine, doofus—but simply to say that there seem to be very real distinctions between Greek paganism and the more spiritual end of classical philosophy, despite a lot of crossover, and those distinctions should be kept in mind lest confusion result.

Enneads V 7: Is There an Ideal Archetype of Particular Beings?

I feel like I have misunderstood or butchered this tractate, but I do not wish to get hung up on it; here is my best guess for the moment, and I'll have to return to it some other time when my understanding is deeper.

(That's true of every tractate, I suppose. I'm just saying it's extra true of this one.)

V 7: Is There an Ideal Archetype of Particular Beings?

Where does a person's characteristics come from? We hold, of course, that bodies are reflections in matter of souls, so the soul must contain that information—but we also hold that soul contains the entire scope of possibility in the Cosmos, so this isn't much help.

Since an individual doesn't resemble all possible individuals, only some of the characteristics latent in the soul must be active at a time; further, since children resemble their parents, the characteristics active must come, in part, from those parents. This does not imply that the parent's souls exist prior to the child's or that the parents are more archetypal than the child, for if this were the case there would be a degeneration over time and we have already established the eternity of the Cosmos. No, it simply that some amount of communication or deference to their the parent's souls is held by the child's for a time.

But what of twins or the many puppies of a litter—they appear to be the same, so do they have the same soul? No, that cannot be: even if they superficially appear to be the same, they have different bodies and thoughts and actions and so on. We suppose that the Intellect, working out all the unique possibilities in the world, produces a soul unique to each of those possibilities, and those souls are what inhabit the bodies.

That there could be limitless possibilities and therefore unlimited souls should be of no concern to us, as the Intellect is the definition of limit: this would simply imply that the Intellect is unlimited in scope, too.