Mythical cosmogonies

The Ionian wisdom with its clear images is contrasted by the efforts undoubtedly made around this time to revive the favor of ancient mythical cosmogonies. Onomacritus, who lived in Athens with Pisistratus (died in 527), is said, but probably wrongly, to have collected these ancient legends; it is undoubtedly the remains of his compilation or compilations of this kind that we find in our oldest documents, which go back no further than Plato, Aristotle, and his disciple Aedemus. Each of these cosmogonies, as in Hesiod, presents a series of mythical forms derived from one another; but their fantastical nature surpasses that of Hesiod; we are dealing here with a true decadence; it is no longer a matter of introducing an order, but of striking the imagination. In Plato we see Heaven and Earth uniting to engender Oceanus and Thetys, from whom the couple of Cronus and Rhea are born, who in turn produce Zeus, Hera and their brothers[1]. In Aristotle, the theologians take night as their principle[2]. We know from Eudemus, a disciple of Aristotle[3], a whole lot of analogous cosmogonies, which moreover may be pastiches of a relatively recent period: less reserved than his masters, he shows us better the crudeness of imagination of these theologians; it is for example Hellanicus, according to whom the first couple, Water and Earth, engendered Cronus or Heracles, who is a three-headed winged dragon with the face of a god between a bull’s head and a lion’s head; he unites with Anangke or Adrasteus to engender in Aether, Erebus and Chaos an egg from which the world will emerge. Of these lucubrations, the one that Eudemus attributes specifically to the religious association of the Orphics (the Orphic rhapsodies), and which shows Chronos, the supreme being, engendering Ether and Chaos from which emerge the egg of the world and the winged god Phanes, has nothing that distinguishes it from the others.

But, taken as a whole, the theogonies of Eudemus offer a remarkable feature, which is the place they give to mythical forms such as Chronos, Time, or Adrasteus, that is to say to these semi-abstract forms which designate a law or a rule; these are the ones we have seen intervene under the name of Justice in the Ionian cosmogonies. On the other hand, it seems that these cosmogonies are gradually confined to the Orphic religious groups and form a body with the whole of their beliefs on the origin and destiny of souls. It is Plato who gives us the oldest and only reliable details on these beliefs: the soul imprisoned in the body as in a tomb must after death take its place at a banquet where it becomes eternally drunk[4]. Perhaps the golden tablets discovered in tombs of the 2nd century, in Magna Graecia, at Thurioi, at Petelia, at Eleutheme, on which are engraved, as in an Egyptian book of the dead, recommendations on the itinerary that the soul must follow after death and the formulas that it must pronounce, do not belong to the Orphic sect[5]. It is, anyway, to the cycle of Orphic myths and to the Dionysian cycle, which is linked to the legend, of uncertain age, of the divine origin of man, to which Plato alludes[6]; the Titans, enemies of Zeus, are pushed by Hera to kill his son Dionysus; Dionysus is torn apart by them, and they eat his bloody limbs, except for the heart which is swallowed by Zeus and from which a new Dionysus will be reborn; Zeus then strikes the Titans with lightning; from their ashes is born the human race where good, which comes from Zeus, is mixed with evil, with the titanic element. The poet Pindar, who flourished in 478, is a witness to the extension that similar beliefs took early on. “The body of all yields to all-powerful death; but, still living, remains an image of our being; for it alone comes from the gods[7].” We will find these beliefs among philosophers; but it will be far from Ionia.