Ancient Greek Mysticism
by Hannah M.G. Shapero
The Greeks gave us the very word for mysticism. The Greek word MUO
means, “to shut the eyes or mouth.” MUO is closely related
to the verb MUEO, “to initiate into the mysteries.” The
closed eyes and mouth in this context do not signify blindness or
muteness, but secrecy and silence, and the order not to reveal the
secrets of the initiation and revelation that one had received. These
Greek root-words have given us “mystic” and
“mysticism,” “mystery” and
“mysterious,” as well as “mute.” Every time we
talk about mysticism we speak a bit of Greek.
But what exactly is Mysticism? The word is often downgraded to mean
superstition, priestcraft, occultism or magic, or other things regarded
as irrational, all of which are somewhat related to mysticism and the
mystical life. But the basic meaning of “mysticism” has to
do with the relationship of human beings to a divinity or deity, or,
for non-theists, “ultimate reality.” Mysticism is about
direct contact between human beings and this divine reality. This
contact, when mystics try to speak about it, is said to be ineffable
and indescribable—yet for thousands of years, those mystics have
given us many exact and definite testimonies of their experiences.
Mysticism is “introverted.” It is an
“inner” experience, taking place within the consciousness
of an individual human being. The characteristic expression of this
individual “inwardness” is Plotinus’ famous phrase,
“the flight of the Alone to the Alone.” Yet there is also
an “extroverted” mysticism, which is found in ritual and
communal contexts, in liturgy, initiation into a group, and sometimes
in visions seen by many people at once. And though mysticism is thought
to be “irrational,” there is also a form of it, which I
would call “rationalist mysticism,” which builds systems of
ideas and symbols onto the base of an intuitive, mystical revelation.
Both kinds of mysticism occur in the ancient Greek world, though
the “extroverted” kind is more easily traceable. And in
most cases, the “introverted” and the
“extroverted” were both present in a mystical practice,
rite, or event. The practice of ritual or liturgy would, it was hoped,
lead to an individual experience of insight or a meeting with an
otherworldly and divine being.
The roots of Greek mysticism are very old, as old as the earliest
Greek expansion through the Eastern Mediterranean in the 7th century
BCE. A major scholarly chronicler of this encounter was E.R.Dodds, who
in the early 1950s wrote a book, which is now, a classic, called THE
GREEKS AND THE IRRATIONAL. This book counters the then-common myth
(which is still promoted by some scholars and philosophers) that Greek
culture was one of pure rationalism and non-mythological,
proto-scientific thought. Certainly those things were important in
Greek culture, but they are not the whole story. In his book, Dodds
shows how non-rational elements were integrated into the spiritual and
philosophical life of ancient Greece.
The most revolutionary contribution to Greek cultural studies in
this book is Dodds’ assertion that there is a shamanic influence
in Greek mysticism and mystical practices. Even though Dodds’
book was written before Mircea Eliade’s definitive study on
shamanism, anthropologists had already described shamanism,especially
as it occurred in central Asia and Eastern Europe. It was this form of
shamanism, which the Greek colonists met with when they colonized the
northern and eastern shores of the Black Sea, as well as in Anatolia in
what is now Turkey. As Dodds and other authors describe it, the model
of shamanism becomes the basic foundation for much of what becomes
Greek mysticism.
Shamanism, as Mircea Eliade describes it, is an “archaic
technique of ecstasy.” The shaman, who is usually a specialist in
this task, is able to enter into “another world,” a
non-physical world which is nevertheless considered to be
“real.” The shaman may enter into the other world using
mind-altering drugs, or by non-drug practices such as drumming,
dancing, and ritual performances. Shamans are often initiated into
their calling by a symbolic death, often through dismemberment. The
shaman is then “resurrected” and put back together, so that
he or she may become a spiritual benefactor for the people he/she
serves. Shamans enter into the other world either to explore for
themselves or on behalf of people. Often they go into the inner
world—or “underworld,” in order to retrieve the souls
of those who are in danger of death. Shamans are thought to have
magical powers of clairvoyance, healing, communication with animals or
with dead peoples’ souls, and blessing and cursing, among many
other abilities. And their words, or songs and poetry, are thought to
have magical powers as well.
A basic assumption of shamanism is that the soul is independent of
the body, and can “travel” outside the body: it is
detachable. The shaman’s soul goes on a visionary journey, while
the body is suspended in a trance. The soul enters what modern shamanic
scholar and practitioner Michael Harner calls the “shamanic state
of consciousness,” in which a mythical reality, rather than our
material reality, can be experienced. A milder, less trance-like form
of this practice is sometimes called “active imagination,”
the directed use of the imagination in mental visualization, rather
than in undirected daydreams and fantasies.
The ancient Greek encounter with shamanism and its transformation
into Greek mysticism is described by W.K.C. Guthrie in his ORPHEUS AND
GREEK RELIGION, where he shows how shamanic motifs of the detachable
soul, soul-travel, ecstasy, dismemberment, and resurrection were taken
over by the cult of Dionysus, and then modified and refined by the
mysterious religious movement known as “Orphism,” named
after its mythical founder, the poet Orpheus. The myth of Orpheus has a
shamanic quality to it: Orpheus charms wild beasts with his songs, he
voyages to the Underworld in search of his lost wife, he fails to bring
her back (in some variants of the myth, he succeeds), and is later
dismembered either by Furies or by angry female followers (depending on
the variant of the myth). The religion, centered around this shamanic
poet figure of Orpheus, though it is not well-documented by
contemporary evidence, was highly influential in the development of
later Greek mysticism in myth, theory, and practice.
Orphism was an initiatory religion, rather like the folk religions
of ancient Greece such as the famous Eleusinian Mysteries. Orphic
worshippers revered gods and goddesses such as Dionysus, Demeter, and
Persephone, divinities of agriculture and natural cycles. Most of the
Orphic teachings are revealed only by much later writers, who despite
writing many centuries after Orphism flourished, seem to have preserved
its basic doctrines fairly well. For Orphics, the human soul is
immortal. It is part of a divine unity, or is divine in itself. But it
is imprisoned in a mortal, material body. The goal of the Orphic
devotee is to escape from the unspiritual body through initiation,
accepting the saving knowledge and practices, and performing, or
witnessing, the sacred ritual. Through these actions one could escape
from the sorrowful toils of the material world, and in doing so achieve
union with the Divine. Orphism, unlike the collective, civic religion
of mainstream Greek paganism, was an individualistic religion, in which
salvation came through individual intuition and enlightenment, not
through an impersonal “contract” between gods and men.
The Orphics believed in reincarnation—the soul was imprisoned
in a body from one incarnation to the next, in a great turning wheel of
lives. The goal of the Orphic was to end the cycle of births by earning
one’s way out. This concept of reincarnation and merit is
tantalizingly close to that of Hinduism and Buddhism—though
scholars have never been able to prove definitely that there was any
influence between the Eastern religions and the Greek. Reincarnation is
popularly thought to be an “Eastern” belief but in reality
it has been a feature of Western esoteric thought from the earliest
moments of Western culture.
The Orphic mystical movement, in its concern for the wandering soul
and the inner world, echoing shamanic myths in its teachings, could be
considered a Greek transformation of the more primal shamanism of
Central Asia. And this is the background for the first great Greek
mystical philosophers: Pythagoras, Heracleitos, Parmenides, and
Empedocles. These thinkers are among the group categorized under the
name of “Presocratic philosophers.”
One of the earliest, the greatest, and the most influential of
these was Pythagoras, who lived from about 570 BCE to 500 BCE. He was
originally from the Eastern Mediterranean island of Samos, near what is
now the Turkish coast, and he was educated in the sophisticated Greek
colonial civilization that had already been there for more than a
hundred years. These Eastern Greek colonies also absorbed many cultural
influences from the Middle East, whether from Mesopotamia, Egypt, or
Persia, and it is because of this influence on Pythagoras’
philosophy that legends about him say that he studied in Egypt or
Babylon. It is unlikely that he actually did so, but the Eastern
connection is there in Pythagoras’ teaching, gained in an
indirect way. In his adult life, he lived in the Greek colonies of
Sicily and South Italy.
Pythagoras is famous as a mathematician and geometer, the inventor
(or at least the one who introduced it to the West) of the
“Pythagorean theorem” about right-angle triangles. He is
also renowned for his mathematical theory of musical notes. He was the
first Western philosopher to teach that mathematics, or number, is the
key to the universe—which is still the foundation of science as
we know it. And yet Pythagoras was also a religious figure and a
mystic; the “philosopher” in his era was not a specialist,
and could write and practice both material science and mystical
religion.
The mystical aspects of Pythagoras’ teachings, which inspired
the monastic communities he founded, are closely related to Orphic
doctrines and practices. Orphism was prevalent among the thinkers of
the Greek Italian colonies where Pythagoras lived and taught.
Pythagorean mysticism sounds a lot like Orphism: immortality of the
soul which is separate from the body, reincarnation (Pythagoras, like
many modern mystics, is said to have known who his previous lives
were), vegetarianism (because human souls may be reincarnated into
animals), asceticism, meditation, and ritual practices designed to
facilitate the experience of revelation and union with the Divine.
Disciples were initiated into Pythagoras’ sect, and Philosophy
was seen as the saving Knowledge, which set the soul on its upward path
away from the material world and the imprisoning cycle of incarnations.
Interestingly, both men and women were accepted as Pythagorean
initiates, in a society where women were usually strictly excluded from
intellectual and philosophical life.
Pythagoras himself achieved the status of a semi-divine founder,
whether he wished himself to be or not. He inherited from shamanic
traditions (and their Orphic transformations) the role of the
“theios aner” or “holy man” whose journeys into
the Inner world, and his magical incantations, put him in touch with
the Divine and gave him magical powers to benefit the world.
Philosophers, then and now, want to know about Being. They want a
“Theory of Everything” which can explain whether there is
any unity behind the visible diversity of the world. Is there an
Ultimate Substance from which everything proceeds? Nowadays, most of
this speculation is taken up by physical science, but in the
Presocratic era, a philosopher was also a scientist, and vice versa, so
philosophers always had something to say about Being and the origin of
the material world.
Before Pythagoras, Eastern Greek philosophers such as Thales of
Miletus had speculated that the Ultimate Substance was water;
Anaximenes, another Ionian philosopher, suggested Air. For Heracleitos,
who lived in Ephesus on the Ionian coast from about 540–475 BCE,
under Persian rule, the ultimate substance was Fire. Heracleitos is
famous for his theory of “all things in flux,” a vision of
the world in which all things are temporary and there is ultimately no
absolute but Change. All things are made out of primal Fire, and all
things will eventually return to that primal Fire. In a way,
Heracleitos’ ideas are closest to the modern view of Quantum
Mechanics, in which the “material world” is really composed
of whirling clouds of particles, which only appear to be solid from our
perspective. Heracleitos also remarked on the pervasiveness of pairs of
opposites in our world: night and day, light and darkness, birth and
death, good and evil—all of them subject to constant change. And
yet there was also an ultimate Wisdom which controlled all these
things, an impersonal cosmic intelligence, or “justice,”
(in the sense of cosmic order rather than legal or moral justice),
which he called the Logos. This concept of cosmic Logos—the word
means literally “word” but also “law,”
“reason,” or “order”—would have a vast
influence in the philosophy of the next two thousand years.
It is intriguing that Heracleitos dealt with the ideas of primal
Fire, dualistic pairs of opposites, and cosmic order during a time when
his homeland was under Persian rule. There are echoes of Zoroastrian
philosophy in all these ideas, though not exact mirroring. Zoroastrian
philosophy, as evident in the prophet Zarathushtra’s own hymns,
the Gathas, as well as later Zoroastrian thought, honor Fire as the
primal symbol of God, and associate Fire with a spirit of divine
Justice and Order called, in ancient Persian, “Asha.”
Zarathushtra also meditates on the dualistic opposites found both in
the world (Gathas, Yasna 44.4) and in the moral sphere (Yasna
30.3–4). Zoroastrianism is one of the “oriental”
influences, which can be seen, if sometimes only in faint traces, in
all of the philosophers of Greek mysticism.
But is Heracleitos really mystical? The idea of an impersonal Logos
as the ultimate source of knowledge points to something more than just
empirical studies of the world. A fragment of Heracleitos’ own
writing sounds quite mystical, at least to our modern sensibilities:
“There is one logos, one reason for everything, throughout the
one cosmos, which is the same for all…” (Heracleitos,
fragment 20). Heracleitos’ teachings became very important for
later mysticism, especially that of the Stoics, a much later
philosophical school, who built many of their ideas on the concept of
the universal Logos and the primal Fire.
The Presocratic philosophers, in their non-mythological approach to
knowing about the material world, are celebrated as
“proto-scientists” or early rationalists. And it is true
that much of their speculation about the origins and working of the
material world forms a kind of pre-technological “science.”
But at the same time, this proto-scientific thought inspired much
mystical thought and experience as well. For many of these
philosophers, the material world was “alive,” endowed with
not only Logos-wisdom but also a kind of inner life and sentience of
its own. The mystical transformation of material speculation, or
mysticism inspired by science, is a philosophical process, which was as
active in the fifth century BCE as it is today, 2500 years later. The
philosophical “Theory of Everything” of one era becomes the
esoteric philosophy of another. In our era, as modern science explains
more and more about the material world and its origins, the ancient
philosophical theories survive nevertheless. They become what I
described at the beginning of this essay as “rationalist
mysticism,” a kind of mysticism which builds logically on
“data” which are the result not of scientific experiments
but of deduction, intuition, or revelation.
Another Presocratic philosopher whose work approaches mysticism is
Parmenides (c.515 BCE–450 BCE), who flourished in southern Italy.
Parmenides, up until recently, has been thought of as mainly a logician
who proved, with his logic, that all Being is essentially one absolute,
immovable, undifferentiated Unity—a conclusion that our own
“ordinary” perception of reality contradicts. Recently the
iconoclastic British scholar Peter Kingsley, in his book IN THE DARK
PLACES OF WISDOM, has attempted to prove, using evidence from
Parmenides’ own writing and also from inscriptions about
Parmenides’ background as a member of a “school” of
sacred healing, that Parmenides’ vision of Unity comes not just
from the intellectual exertions of logic, but from actual experience
gained in—surprisingly—what amounts to a “shamanic
state of consciousness.” If this is true, then Parmenides belongs
in the realm of Pythagorean “holy men” as well as in the
ranks of early practitioners of rationalizing logic.
The last of the great Presocratic philosophers was also one of the
strangest: Empedocles of Acragas (his home in western Sicily), who
lived from about 490 BCE–430 BCE. Empedocles was known even in
his own lifetime as a “holy man” and wonderworker who was
able to control the forces of nature and even avert a plague. He was
also famous as a natural scientist, investigating geology and
meteorology, and he was responsible, like a true philosopher, for
theories and writings both on scientific and social subjects.
Empedocles is the originator of the theory of the Four
Elements—Earth, Water, Air, and Fire. This concept continues to
be a mainstay of Western Esoteric thought, long after it ceased to be
“scientific” theory—though interestingly it does
approximate current classifications of the four states of matter:
solid, liquid, gas, and plasma. For Empedocles, a cosmic attractive
force he called “love” united the elements, and an opposite
repellent force called “strife” forced them apart. In his
theory, “like attracts like;” similar elements or
combinations of elements came together with the force of
“love,” and vice versa. Again, this “like attracts
like” concept would become a mainstay of esoteric and magical
theory, while superseded by more accurate scientific theories as a
descriptor of the material world.
Empedocles, like his predecessor Pythagoras, is firmly in the
tradition of Orphism and its philosophical heir, Pythagoreanism.
Empedocles, like the Pythagoreans, preached of reincarnation and the
entry into the Underworld. In his poetry, and probably in his own
preaching, Empedocles advertised the possibility of becoming immortal
and divine, even claiming that he himself had gone beyond the material
world to become a god. This is the background of the well-known myth
that Empedocles met his end by leaping into the fiery crater of Mount
Etna. Whether he actually did so or not, this action was seen as a
symbol of entering into the Underworld to be transformed and
resurrected as a god, and thus became a part of the legend of this
Greek holy man.
According to E.R. Dodds, and more recently Peter Kingsley in his
book ANCIENT PHILOSOPHY, MYSTERY, AND MAGIC, Empedocles is a classic
example of what the ancient Greeks called the
“iatromantis,” or “healer-prophet.” Dodds goes
so far as to call these figures “Greek shamans,” and cites
their similarities to shamans that were already evident in the figure
of Orpheus. But these “iatromantis” philosophers were
natural scientists as well as poets, and they were also magicians. This
is not the popular idea of “magic” as superstition and
trickery, but a philosophical magic, which aspired to achieve real
goals by symbolic action. This magic was connected with the search for
immortality and a perception of unitary, divine reality, whether this
was done through ritual, initiations, or techniques of inner
journeying. This magic is not “primitive” or
“regressive” as many scholars of Greek thought and
mysticism continue to describe it—it is actually a feature of the
“extrovertive” form of mysticism, which uses symbols and
rituals to do its work, and is oriented toward making changes in the
outer world. Indeed, magic of this sort works in its own form of
rationalist system.
From these religious and philosophical ancestors comes Plato,
perhaps the most famous of all Greek philosophers and certainly the
most influential for the development of Western mysticism. Plato (c.
428–348 BCE) taught the foundational Theory of Forms—which
was part of his own “Theory of Everything.” In the Platonic
Theory of Forms, (also called “ideas,”) the ultimate
Reality is situated in a supersensible, “intelligible
world,” above our material world; it is a place of ideal and
perfect forms, as it were archetypal blueprints, of everything here
below. This world can be accessed by the human mind, either through
philosophical work or through mystical intuition. According to Plato,
all of us are endowed with the knowledge of this inner world of
forms—but it takes work and dedication to know it. In fact, when
we do learn about the Forms, Plato says we are really
“remembering” them as a heritage of our ultimate unity with
this divine world, which we have forgotten once we took birth in the
material world. We have lost the memory of the World of Ideas by being
exiled into the world of matter, through many incarnations. But our
souls are immortal, ultimately made of the same stuff as Plato’s
Ideas, and so gaining knowledge, at least this Platonic knowledge, is
actually a recollection of the soul’s original knowing.
These ideas of reincarnation, initiatory philosophical knowledge,
and an inner, supersensible world sound familiar. In fact, Plato
visited South Italy and Sicily several times, and there he studied and
learned from Pythagorean schools the ancient sacred doctrine that the
Pythagoreans had inherited from the Orphics. And even the old shamanic
paradigm of the mystical life and the “holy man” or
“healer-prophet” can be seen in Plato, but abstracted and
made philosophical rather than religious or magical. In Plato’s
more mystical dialogues such as the SYMPOSIUM, PHAEDO, or the REPUBLIC,
the old visionary journey to the Underworld becomes a vision of the
World of Forms. This is explicitly described in the famous passage of
the ascent from the cave of illusions depicted in the REPUBLIC
(beginning of Book 7). In the SYMPOSIUM the metaphor is that of an
ascent to the World of Forms, motivated by erotic and aesthetic love.
But in these philosophical parables one can still see the shamanic idea
of the detachable soul rising above the corrupt body, escaping from the
prison of the material and radically separate from it, going through
the purifications of many incarnate lives, until by right living and
the practice of philosophy the soul can end its imprisonment and rejoin
the ecstatic divine world that is its true home.
Once again concerning Plato there arises the question of whether
there is a Zoroastrian influence in his thought. The PHAEDO especially
contains myths, which seem to imitate the “eschatology” of
Zoroastrian myth, such as the survival of an immortal soul, which is
then judged after death and “purified” by fire. The
Platonic “world of Ideas” has often been compared to the
Zoroastrian “menok” world of “mental” or
spiritual realities, intimated in Zarathushtra’s Gathas and
elaborated by later Zoroastrian thinkers. The myth of a visionary
ascent survives in Zoroastrian legends of both Zarathushtra’s
inspiration and other holy men who were able to cross by soul-travel
into the “intelligible world” and return with knowledge to
be shared with other souls here below.
But there are just as many differences as similarities in Platonic
and Greek thought. Zoroastrianism, throughout its history (except for
those Zoroastrians who came under Buddhist and Hindu influence) has
never taught reincarnation. There is for a Zoroastrian no sorrowful
wheel of incarnations to escape from—there is only one life, in
which moral choices for good or evil must be constantly made. For
Zoroastrians there is no sharp division between the soul and the body,
as there was for the Orphics and their followers; the physical and the
mental worlds are constantly interacting and influencing each other. In
Zoroastrianism, the human soul is not a fragment or an emanation of the
Divine which seeks reintegration; rather each individual soul is
accompanied by a divine spirit, known as a “fravashi,”
created by God, which embodies the highest potential of the individual
living soul. It is this fravashi which, according to some Zoroastrian
theories, unites with the human soul after death.
The philosophical way, for Plato and the Presocratics, was an
aristocratic way of knowledge. All of these philosophers maintain that
only the few, the initiates, and the privileged can travel this way.
Certainly it is true socially, since for most people the simple demands
of making a living and caring for a family make it impossible to spend
time on the pursuit of esoteric philosophical enlightenment. The
Pythagorean way of life is indeed a monastic way, lived long before
Christian monastics worked out a similar solution to the problem of how
to live the life of spiritual striving in a chaotic and corrupt world.
Plato’s mysticism is also more toward the
“introverted” type, which is less dependent on rituals and
less connected with mystery-cults or magic, and thus more acceptable to
intellectuals who disdain magic as popular superstition. This division
between an aristocratic “pure” tradition of
“introverted” philosophical mysticism, and a more
popularizing “extroverted” mysticism of cult, magic, and
easily accessible and workable esoteric formulae, became a standard
feature of the Western esoteric tradition; it is even visible today.
And yet throughout the history of mysticism, there have been those who
practiced both kinds—especially the “theurgists” of
later antiquity, whose practice reached from the heights of Platonic
abstraction to the smoky underworld of ceremonial magic. The division
has never been unbridgeable.
One generation after Plato, the western world changed irrevocably.
Once Alexander of Macedon (known in the west as Alexander the Great)
with his invading Greek armies conquered the Eastern Mediterranean
lands, and the Persian Empire all the way to the borders of India, the
world expanded. In the era of multinational empire that followed, which
is called the “Hellenistic era,” (from 330BCE to about 100
CE or the rise of the Roman Empire) the Western world became far less
isolated, and a general mixing of Eastern and Western civilizations
occurred. The “Oriental” influences which had up until now
been part of only the Eastern Greek world now flooded into the whole
Mediterranean, facilitated by the common language of Greek and lines of
trade and communication which spread throughout the new empire (or
successions of more local Hellenistic empires).
The intellectual world of the Hellenistic era reflects the
unprecedented mixing of cultures that went on throughout the
Mediterranean. This went on especially in the new city of Alexandria,
the capital of the Hellenistic world, where Greek, Egyptian, Iranian,
Mesopotamian, Jewish, and dozens of other traditions met and were
melded together to form various new philosophies and esoteric
practices. This mixture of traditions, which is known to scholars as
“syncretism,” will forever after be a feature in esoteric
and mystical philosophy.
In Hellenistic mysticism, which for the most part used Greek
language and Greek literary forms, the classical mystical stance
inherited from Plato was enriched with a new, cosmic, universal
emphasis. This reflects the transition from a religious world with a
local horizon and local gods to a cosmopolitan world where
everyone’s gods (or One God) were on view and people could
compare them. The individualism of Greek mysticism remained, but its
backdrop was now a world of impersonal empires rather than local
city-states.
Yet in the new forms of Hellenistic mystical philosophy, one can
still discern the ancient ideas which are the heritage of Pythagoras,
Empedocles, and Plato. This is sometimes the result of actual
migrations of philosophers and their schools; many Pythagoreans,
rejected in Sicily for political reasons, found a new home in
Alexandria, where they carried on their esoteric traditions in a new
atmosphere. More often, though, the development of Hellenistic
philosophy came through literary study and learned revivals. It did
not, as many modern esoteric schools would like to believe, come from
an unbroken chain of “secret initiates” whose traditions
have been handed on since the time of Atlantis (itself perhaps an
invention of Plato in his treatise TIMAEUS). Under the ideological
leadership of those who followed Plato, the Hellenistic complex of
ideas became what is known to us as “Neo-Platonism” (though
the term was unknown to the philosophers themselves, who simply called
themselves “Platonists”).
Neo-Platonism and its related philosophies show many of the same
ideas as their predecessors, transformed in their new multicultural
home. Most of the Hellenistic mystical philosophies think of the
Universe, or Cosmos, as one living being, whose parts are in an organic
relationship with each other and which possesses a cosmic sentience,
sometimes called the “World-Soul.” We have met with this
idea as early as Pythagoras. For the Hellenists, all things in this
sentient Cosmos are connected by what is called
“sumpatheia,” (from which our word “sympathy”
comes). This literally means “feeling-with” but it actually
means “correspondence” or “active similarity;”
it is the mechanism by which “like attracts like.”
Centuries ago, Empedocles had taught much the same thing.
Another major feature of Hellenistic philosophy is what might be
called “emanationism.” The seed for this derives from the
old philosophical quest to figure out how one single divine Unity could
create our world of visible multiplicity. Already in Plato’s
thought there is the divine world of Forms and then the material world
created from those Forms. As Platonism develops in its Hellenistic
home, the layers of reality multiply. Neo-platonists, possibly
influenced by monotheistic religions such as Judaism and
Zoroastrianism, propose a single, ineffable, indescribable God who then
emanates an Intelligible World, from which then, in yet another stage,
flows the multiplicity of the visible world. This threefold system
blooms into systems of seven emanations, and then more; full-blown
emanationist systems can contain myriad layers of worlds, reaching from
the totally abstract Divine at the top to hellish underworlds below.
The Hellenistic innerworld is a very complex place.
This “multiverse” is not always ruled by a benevolent,
provident God or by the impersonal but morally upright rule of Logos or
Law. The Hellenistic era sees the rise of deterministic philosophies,
which teach that all is ordained by Fate and Destiny. Ancient Greek
philosophy and religion had its ideas of Fate, often personified as a
goddess; Hellenistic Fate extends to the whole cosmos. The word for
Destiny or Fate in Greek is “heimarmene,” from the the
Greek “meiromai” which means, “to receive one’s
portion.” But here, the “portion” is not allotted by
a god, but by an impersonal, irrevocable mechanism driven by the
movements of planets and stars. It is in the Hellenistic world that
astrology, derived from Greek interpretations of very old Mesopotamian
star-lore, becomes a major factor in intellectual life. The seven
ancient planets (sun, moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn)
are the agents of Destiny, often depicted as hostile. It is a
reflection, perhaps, of life lived no longer in a village or a
small-scale city-state but in a great empire where the government is
inaccessible and the ruler may well have proclaimed himself a divine
being. “Heimarmene” or Destiny becomes the ultimate arbiter
of peoples’ lives—and bears the weight and oppression of
the overbearing multiverse.
How can we escape our grim, astrologically determined Destiny? This
was a burning question for the thoughtful Hellenistic intellectual. How
can we flee from our figurative dungeon in the lower reaches of a
many-storied cosmic skyscraper? There is an audible echo here of the
ever-ancient shamanic “soul journey” away from the material
through the inner worlds to the place of knowledge and salvation. For
some philosophers, that escape would come, as it did for the
Pythagoreans centuries earlier, through the initiatory possession of
the sacred secret Knowledge which would set one free. For those who
were more magically inclined, the chains of Heimarmene could be broken
by the proper rituals, done at the proper time and place. And many
people who were not philosophers put their trust in prayers for the
soul after death, inscribed on gold foil and placed lovingly on the
bodies of their dead. As modern archaeologists have discovered, these
popular prayers for the dead contain some of the same ideas about
transcendence, freedom, and divinization that the Orphics and
Empedocles had preached almost a millennium earlier.
The story of ancient Greek mysticism, then, is one of continuity
through different cultures. There is something about the archaic
shamanic paradigm of soul-journey, secret knowledge, and inner worlds,
which will not go away. It cannot be suppressed, only transformed.
Under the sway of rationalistic philosophies, or of monotheistic
orthodoxy such as was later imposed by Christianity and Islam, it does
not die; it simply goes underground. The mysticism of symbols, magic,
visionary techniques, innerworld journeys, and esoteric
“science” is cast into the ideological shadows and
denigrated as “primitive,” “retrogressive,”
“occultist” or “superstitious,” but it
continues to exist with its own special power, which attracts souls
from one civilization to another, from age to age, a calling which
continues to sound even to this very day.
