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sdiGood morning, everyone, and a Happy Thanksgiving to those of you celebrating it tomorrow. Let's pick the puzzle-box back up, shall we?
IV. That the species of myth are five, with examples of each.
Of myths some are theological, some physical, some psychic,* and again some material, and some mixed from these last two. The theological are those myths which use no bodily form but contemplate the very essences of the Gods: e. g. Kronos† swallowing his children. Since God is intellectual, and all intellect returns into itself, this myth expresses in allegory the essence of God.
Myths may be regarded physically when they express the activities of the Gods in the world: e. g. people before now have regarded Kronos as Time, and calling the divisions of Time his sons say that the sons are swallowed by the father.
The psychic way is to regard the activities of the Soul itself: the Soul's acts of thought, though they pass on to other objects, nevertheless remain inside their begetters.
The material and last is that which the Egyptians have mostly used, owing to their ignorance, believing material objects actually to be Gods, and so calling them: e. g. they call the Earth Isis, moisture Osiris, heat Typhon, or again, water Kronos, the fruits of the earth Adonis, and wine Dionysus.‡
To say that these objects are sacred to the Gods, like various herbs and stones and animals, is possible to sensible men, but to say that they are gods is the notion of madmen—except, perhaps, in the sense in which both the orb of the sun and the ray which comes from the orb are colloquially called 'the Sun.'§
The mixed kind of myth may be seen in many instances: for example they say that in a banquet of the Gods Discord threw down a golden apple; the goddesses contended for it, and were sent by Zeus to Paris to be judged; Paris saw Aphrodite to be beautiful and gave her the apple. Here the banquet signifies the hyper-cosmic powers of the Gods; that is why they are all together. The golden apple is the world, which, being formed out of opposites, is naturally said to be "thrown by Discord." The different Gods bestow different gifts upon the world and are thus said to "contend for the apple." And the soul which lives according to sense—for that is what Paris is—not seeing the other powers in the world but only beauty, declares that the apple belongs to Aphrodite.
To take another myth, they say that the Mother of the Gods‖ seeing Attis lying by the river Gallus fell in love with him, took him, crowned him with her cap of stars, and thereafter kept him with her. He fell in love with a nymph and left the Mother to live with her. For this the Mother of the Gods made Attis go mad and cut off his genital organs and leave them with the Nymph, and then return and dwell with her.
Now the Mother of the Gods¶ is the principle that generates life; that is why she is called Mother. Attis is the creator# of all things which are born and die; that is why he is said to have been found by the river Gallus. For Gallus signifies the Galaxy, or Milky Way, the point at which body subject to passion begins.Δ Now as the primary gods make perfect the secondary, the Mother loves Attis and gives him celestial powers. That is what the cap means. Attis loves a nymph: the nymphs preside over generation, since all that is generated is fluid. But since the process of generation must be stopped somewhere, and not allowed to generate something worse than the worst, the Creator who makes these things casts away his generative powers into the creation and is joined to the gods again.◊ Now these things never happened, but always are. And Mind sees all things at once, but Reason (or Speech) expresses some first and others after.↓ Thus, as the myth is in accord with the Cosmos, we for that reason keep a festival imitating the Cosmos, for how could we attain higher order?
And at first we ourselves, having fallen from heaven and living with the Nymph, are in despondency, and abstain from corn and all rich☞ and unclean food, for both are hostile to the soul. Then comes the cutting of the tree and the fast, as though we also were cutting off the further process of generation. After that the feeding on milk, as though we were being born again; after which come rejoicings and garlands and, as it were, a return up to the Gods.
The season of the ritual is evidence to the truth of these explanations. The rites are performed about the Vernal Equinox, when the fruits of the earth are ceasing to be produced, and day is becoming longer than night, which applies well to Spirits rising higher. (At least, the other equinox is in mythology the time of the Rape of Korê,❦ which is the descent of the souls.)
May these explanations of the myths find favour in the eyes of the Gods themselves and the souls of those who wrote the myths.
* Thomas Taylor translates these five kinds of fables similarly, but instead of "psychic," he calls that kind "animastic (or belonging to soul)."
† This is probably of interest to none save myself, but here and below, Taylor favors the Roman deities rather than the Greek: Saturn, Bacchus, Jupiter, Venus, Proserpine. Curiously, Gilbert Murray and Arthur Darby Nock retain the Greek deities from the original but nonetheless name Discord and Strife, respectively (rather than Eris).
‡ Nock notes, "As Wendland remarks, Berl. phil. Woch. 1899, 1411, this sentence, in which Greek gods are named after Egyptian deities, apparently as in the same category, is clumsy, but the clumsiness may well be due to the author."
§ Murray notes, "e.g. when we say 'The sun is coming through the window,' or in Greek ἐξαίφνης ἥκων ἐκ τοῦ ἡλίου ['exaiphnes hekon ek tou heliou'], Plat. Rep. 516 E. This appears to mean that you can loosely apply the term 'Osiris' both to (i) the real Osiris and (ii) the corn which comes from him, as you can apply the name 'Sun' both to (i) the real orb and (ii) the ray that comes from the orb. However, Julian, Or. v, on the Sun suggests a different view—that both the orb and the ray are mere effects and symbols of the true spiritual Sun, as corn is of Osiris.
‖ Taylor notes, "See more concerning this species of fables in my Dissertation on the Eleusinian and Bacchic Mysteries."
¶ Kybele.
# Here and below, Taylor translates "Creator" as "Demiurgus." Curiously, Murray capitalizes "Creator" below, but leaves it lowercase here.
Δ Murray notes, "ἄρχεσθαι ['archesthai'] Mr. L. W. Hunter, ἔρχεσθαι ['erchesthai'] MS. Above the Milky Way there is no such body, only σῶμα ἀπαθές ['soma apathes']. Cf. Macrob. in Somn. Scip. i. 12."
◊ Taylor notes, "This explanation of the fable is agreeable to that given by the Emperor Julian, in his Oration to the mother of the gods, my translation of which let the reader consult."
↓ Nock notes, "As Praechter explains, W. kl. Ph. 1900, 184, what is ever present to the nous is projected into the succession of historical events."
☞ Nock notes, "As for instance pomegranates, dates, fish, pork (H. Hepding, Attis, 156 f.)."
❦ Persephone.
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Date: 2021-11-24 01:28 pm (UTC)Regarding last week's discussion of "like" and "unlike," I would be remiss if I didn't note that Taylor's translation of Julian's Oration contains the most delightful footnote: "I have observed that the most vulgar and gross part of mankind are remarkably fond of pork; and this very properly, since like rejoices in like."
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Date: 2021-11-24 02:27 pm (UTC)Axé
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Date: 2021-11-24 04:43 pm (UTC)It occurs to me that essentially every offering I've ever made to my deity is associated with (the planet) Venus in some way: wine, apples, origami, etc. I didn't set out to follow a pattern, but it seems appropriate enough (both because of the nature of the deity, and because my natal Venus is in my eighth house, of things given away).
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Date: 2021-11-24 01:29 pm (UTC)Taylor gives a very helpful interpretation of Cupid of Psyche in his translation of The Golden Ass.
This interesting article by Simo Parpola gives the sketch of a mythic interpretation to Gilgamesh.
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Date: 2021-11-25 03:37 am (UTC)I appreciate how these posts tend to open up all sorts of interesting avenues not before seen, so…thank you!
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Date: 2021-11-26 06:43 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-11-24 02:01 pm (UTC)Kybele is called "the generative principle" and Attis "the creator"; in what way are these distinguished? (I would normally equate the two.)
I hadn't realized the Greeks has a creator god? I was under the impression that they believed the cosmos was, as a whole, more or less eternal.
The first time I read Sallustius, his description of the Milky Way as the place "the body subject to passions" thoroughly confounded me. In the months since, I've found other references to this: Mesopotamian mythology and astrology, Hamlet's Mill, and The Secret of the Incas all talk about the point, which is evidently that the Milky Way—particularly where it intersects the ecliptic—is the bridge between the heavens, the earth, and the underworld. The nature of this connection shifts as the equinoxes precess. (Some astrologers have made attempts at using the intersection point as a fixed marker for sidereal astrology.) It seems that the association was made by the Romans in their festivals, too—while we moderns need to search long and hard among esoteric texts to learn such basics. Ah well!
I couldn't find much information on the Gallus river itself, other than it is in modern Turkey and one of the sources of the Euphrates. If it had special significance outside of this interpretation of the myth, I was unable to find it!
Is a nymph, in this context, assumed to be a "created" being? That is, are we talking about Attis forsaking a god for his creation?
Where does Sallustius derive the assumption that there must be a "worst" and thus than generation must be stopped somewhere? I would have assumed that the generative process could go on indefinitely, just as numbers can grow without bound.
Why does Sallustius' explanation leave out where Attis went mad? I would have considered this to be a crucial point of the myth!
It took me quite a few re-readings to make any sense at all of the last couple paragraphs. It seems Sallustius is describing a particular holiday in the Roman calendar? I found searching for this online to be pretty difficult, but my best guess is that this is a reference to the Hilaria? (I apologize for the Wikipedia link, but I wasn't even able to find another source that described the festival in any depth at all!)
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Date: 2021-11-24 04:17 pm (UTC)Hrm. If so, it occurs to me that Attis cuts off his creative ability, gives it to creation, and thus creation keeps on perpetuating itself. Thus, in a sense, this seems to foreshadow the "mechanistic" interpretation of the universe, in which is seems to just continue on following fixed rules as if the gods made it and went away.
I feel like I'm misreading something here, as this seems to have one set of belief systems (Neoplatonism, as I understand it, sees the world as in an every-blossoming process of the gods becoming) interpreting a myth to fit a very different set of belief systems (where the world is explicitly created and left).
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Date: 2021-11-24 06:38 pm (UTC)But my takeaway from this one is that there are different ways of viewing the myths beyond the surface reading.
Axé
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Date: 2021-11-24 06:40 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-11-25 12:26 pm (UTC)In the Timaeus, Plato speaks of a Demiurge, a divine Craftsman who fashions the universe, including a strata of "younger" gods who fashion the natural world. It's not clear, to me, that this Demiurge is equivalent to "The One" as spoken of in Neoplatonic terms (I would argue they are not one and the same), nor is he given a specific name. In other versions, the universe seems to simply arise.
Alternately, the Orphic hymns seem to celebrate different gods as having overarching control over the universe. In 20, Astrapaios Zeus is acclaimed as "the begetter of all," Apollon holds "the master seal to the cosmos," Kronos is "the progenitor." And so on.
As with many things in the Greek myths, there seem to be multiple versions of things with no obvious agreement. So, how to resolve these apparent contradictions?
One way of approaching this, per the "henadological" approach of
Happy Thanksgiving to all who partake in it, and a cornucopia of blessings on this day of Sommo Giove.
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Date: 2021-11-26 06:46 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-11-26 06:42 pm (UTC)The physical myth example posits Kronos as time - and this is physical because time affects all physical things or is a condition of the physical plane? Also, I'm not totally sold on the differentiation between physical and material myths because he doesn't actually reference myths when discussing the Egyptians' ascribing of divinity to material objects - perhaps he's actually saying that this is a type of myth-making and not just heavy-handed metaphor?
The "psychic" myths aren't really given equal attention here, so I'm a bit hard-pressed to know for sure what Sallustius is referring to - maybe this is just a nod toward myths' utility in understanding our own inner workings?
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Date: 2021-11-26 07:34 pm (UTC)Maybe an example might be more appropriate? One of my favorite Egyptian myths is the birth of the gods. Primordial Chaos separated into the elements, and Air and Water came together and gave birth to Earth and Sky. They lay together, and Sky became pregnant with quadruplets. Earth feared that his children would overthrow him, and so he cursed Sky so that she could not give birth on any of the 360 days of the year. Intellect got word of this and wished to help Sky, so he went over to the ever-shining Moon and challenged him to poker. After letting Moon win a few hands, Intellect began to raise the stakes and cheat mercilessly, eventually getting the Moon to wager—and lose!—half of his light. Intellect fashioned this light into five extra days and added them to the end of the year. Sky, who was way overdue by this point, gave birth to her children—Life, Love, Conflict, and Death—on the first four of these five days, and rested on the fifth.
Sallustius is saying—I think!—that those backward, foolish Egyptians took this myth literally, and that the year really was 360 days long, that the moon really was always full, etc. etc. until all these things happened, but we enlightened Greeks know better than that and treat our myths as having an esoteric side, kept apart for wise philosophers. Myself, I see no reason not to treat the Egyptian myth as being any less pregnant with symbolism than, say, Hesiod.
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Date: 2021-12-13 05:25 pm (UTC)