Philosophy—Greek Wisdom from

In an earlier instance, speaking from a less ultimate pedestal, Socrates insisted on balancing the Appollonian advice of “know thyself” with the dictum of temperance, “nothing in excess” (Protagoras 343a–b). All the same, such religio-philosophical introspective wisdom, on the one hand, and temperance, on the other, were pursued by Socrates and his companions on rather individualistic pretexts. Philosophy generally was pursued in small circles of student associates, under a single tutor. The subject matter of study generally was restricted, therefore, to that teacher's own personal soteriology.

Philosophical quests traditionally have engaged only small numbers of elitist minds, sustained by equally elitist egos. Moreover, those few minds rarely contemplated their subject matter in a time perspective much larger than could be scanned by the two generations that could be represented by a teacher and his students. Knowledge about truth was obtained from moments of intuition, moments that were expected to occur after traversing lengthy paths of formal reasoning. These mental journeys therefore tended to be dedicated to an ahistorical exploration of static eternal relationships and structures. Moreover, such personal quests for intuition, at abstract levels, seldom brought much enlightenment to large numbers of people, to those who struggled for survival in a world that contained many kinds of living beings.

With some glimpses of hindsight, cast on the entire history of Greek philosophy, Apollo's dictum of “know thyself” now beckons us to supplement philosophical with historical introspection. The expanded Apollonian dictum becomes therefore: Know thyself as one knower among many; know thyself as a changing participant in a larger changing tradition of knowing; and know your own tradition as a dribble that trickles alongside and interplays with other traditions of knowing! And not all traditions of human knowledge are philosophical. Our holistic historical introspection therefore must try to embrace, as a minimum, an extended history of Greek philosophy. We must find some evolutionary rootlets in philosophy's prehistory.

The contents and memories of human minds generally are more ancient than their containers can intuit by themselves or under the spell of some momentary fascination. Therefore, even while dwelling still nearer to the fountainhead of their tradition and while pondering a-historically at ease, Socrates and Plato nevertheless had great difficulty seeing just how much their own methods of reasoning still depended on an ethos that was rooted in mythos. Thinking of themselves as intellectual reformers, Greek philosophers generally disliked the Greek mythological substratum of more ancient mental habits. At the same time they were largely unaware of the motherland and mythology that had furnished the ontological substratum for their philosophizing.

Furthermore, Socrates and Plato would have been surprised to recognize how their philosophical analytic methods, as distinguished from their ontological assumptions, were still akin to the habits of destructive herder-bandit-warrior ancestors who, mounted on horses, had pushed out from the Eurasian plains a few centuries earlier. They would not have been any less astonished to learn how their aristocratic talent of analytic reasoning itself had evolved, as a mental substitute, from the predatorial aggressiveness of these early Indo-European intruders.

The analytic physical breakdown of prey and environment, by predators and hunters, gradually over millions of years has been enhanced beyond the basic necessity of biting and digestion. This exaggeration was accomplished most effectively by aggressive male members of the genus Homo who, over millions of years, evolved into scavengers and tool-using predators.

An updated Appollonian dictum of “know thyself” obligates individual lovers of wisdom, therefore, to seriously study the entire evolution and history of cultures and religions in light of recent anthropological discoveries. Of course, the more limited philosophical task of personal introspection remains, as it always has been, a good start in this direction.

Intercultural and interreligious understanding can succeed only in continuity with prior introspection into one's own cultural, philosophical, and religious preoccupations. Minds grasp to understand by contrast and comparison. Thus, a student who impatiently rushes toward understanding another culture or its concomitant religion still may lack the wherewithal for making valid comparisons. Without perception of historical depth, without awareness of time and the fact that all things are changing, our own cultural trends, philosophical and religious, will not come adequately into focus for us—nor will those of other peoples. We therefore must begin our introspection afresh, precisely at the point where the proponents of Indo-European glory advised us to begin—at the very beginnings of Indo-European mythology.

Hesiod

Centuries before Greek philosophers and scientists began to reduce divine functions to abstract categories and impersonal principles—nay, even before classical Greek sculptors began to incarnate old divinities in bodies of wood or weigh them down with the inertia of stone—the poet Hesiod penned “Theogony.” This powerful mythos was destined to provide ethos for practically everything philosophical and scientific that hitherto has been thought and achieved in Western civilization.

The mythic event, of the divine son Cronos castrating his Father Uranos (Sky-Heaven), at the bidding of Mother Earth, goes a long ways toward explaining how Oedipus complexes thrive in societies afflicted with patrilineality, under gods who themselves rose up against their fathers. It exposes problems inherent in aristocratic succession. And it even provides a few ancient clues about elementary stirrings in women's liberation movements.

But in addition, this myth also exposes the roots of Western philosophy, of Western science and Western culture. It reveals some ancient existential reasons as to why, in spite of the presence of philosophy, certain new religious movements have succeeded. Seen from the angle of Greek history, the dualistic Greek philosophers, Socrates and Plato, and to some extent even Aristotle, added little more than footnotes to this seminal theogonic myth of castration, to this archetype of Western progress. Philosophical advance and scientific progress required for their legitimation this ancient archetype of “progression” from virile theogony to emasculated cosmogony.

It behooves us to refresh our memories concerning this important tale and contemplate afresh its central plot.[2] We are told here, at the dawn of Greek literature, that Earth was primary and Heaven was secondary:

Verily at first Chaos came to be, but next wide‑bosomed Earth, the ever‑sure foundation of all… And Earth first bare starry Heaven, equal to herself, to cover her on every side, and to be an ever‑sure abiding‑place for the gods.

The mythic narrative, of how Mother Earth subsequently gave birth to hills and nymphs, to Pontus, Oceanus, Coeus, Crius, Hyperion, Iapetus, Theia, and Rhea; to Themis, Mnemosyne, Phoebe, and Thetys; to Cronos, the Cyclopes, and finally Cottus, Briareos, and Gyes, moves on speedily to a divine plot. This mythic incident, as has been hinted already, produced far-reaching results in the mental development of not only ancient Greece, but of all of Western civilization.

For of all the children that were born of Earth and Heaven, these were the most terrible, and they were hated by their own father from the first. And he used to hide them all away in a secret place of Earth so soon as each was born, and would not suffer them to come up into the light: and Heaven rejoiced in his evil doing. But vast Earth groaned within, being straitened, and she thought a crafty and an evil vile. Forthwith she made the element of gray flint and shaped a great sickle, and told her plan to her dear sons. And she spoke, cheering them, while she was vexed in her dear heart:

"My children, gotten of a sinful father, if you will obey me, we should punish the vile outrage of your father; for he first thought of doing shameful things."

So she said; but fear seized them all, and none of them uttered a word. But great Cronos the wily took courage and answered his dear mother:

“Mother, I will undertake to do this deed, for I reverence not our father of evil name, for he first thought of doing shameful things.”

So he said: and vast Earth rejoiced greatly in spirit, and set and hid him in an ambush, and put in his hands the jagged sickle, and revealed to him the whole plot.

And Heaven came, bringing on night and longing for love, and he lay about Earth spreading himself full upon her. Then the son from his ambush stretched forth his left hand and in his right took the great long sickle with jagged teeth, and swiftly lopped off his own father's members and cast them away to fall behind him.[3]

Herder Culture

In contrast to the indigenous Egyptian civilization of sedentary farmers, the Greek cultural heritage received it primary impulses from Euro-Asiatic herders. During much of its early history, Egypt had been sheltered from major movements of nomadic peoples. At most, it was obliged to respond to impulses from the Mesopotamian sedentary presence. In later times, especially after the arrival of Eurasian horses in Egypt with the Hyksos and after their expulsion, Egyptian dealings were destined to expand eastward and northward in the general direction from which came the Hyksos kings with their horse-drawn chariots.

For the sake of a broad overview the ancient Near East may be approached, elliptically, by way of its two very diverse ideo-cultural foci. Egyptian culture and religion, together with its reactionary Hebrew offshoot, may be seen as representing one focus. Hellas, a representative of Indo-European intrusions into the Mediterranean realm, may be seen as representing the other.

An approach to the ancient Near East by way of focusing on extreme cultural and religious postures may not do justice to all the ordinary people who, existentially, were living along their own spectrum of aggression-retreat possibilities. But then, an understanding of the broader and extreme ideological postures nevertheless may provide a useful shortcut for obtaining an overview on the scope of this study. Nothing during the third and second millennium B.C.E., in the Near East, stood in sharper contrast than the lifeways of sedentary farmers in Egypt, on the one hand, and the ways of nomadic herder folk, on the other. Fanatic devotees to the latter way of life kept pushing from Eurasia into the Fertile Crescent. They arrived with wagons, then with horse-drawn chariots, and finally as skilled warriors on horseback. They traded some of their animals and passed on their new arts of cavalry warfare to the peoples whom they touched—who then increasingly needed these means for their safety and defense.

When Eurasian herders succeeded in domesticating horses, they themselves were electrified by the power and speed of their subjugated animals. When herders perfected the art of riding on horseback, warfare became more fierce and was destined never to be the same again. When these Asiatic horse breeders then brought their animals to sedentary cultures in the Near East, those sedentary civilizations were transformed by cavalry-incited militarism. An equine-inspired cultural dynamic was set in motion that pulsated clear into our twentieth century. World War I was still ignited by it, and World War II erupted among its embers—only to be continued now with variants or “antitheses” of armored, so-called "horseless" carriages. I personally may have witnessed one of the last cavalry battles in human history, just a few kilometers from my boyhood home.

Nothing in this broad overview conflicts with Colin Renfrew's postulate, of a prior westward expansion of agriculture into Europe by carriers who spoke a proto-Indoeuropean language.[4] In fact, the equine-generated cultural explosion on the steppes of Eurasia might have forced the westward movement of farmers in the first place. After the southern European plains were emptied of farmers by waves of increasingly more spirited horsemen from the steppes, the latter sometimes became acculturated to the remains of the civilization that they failed to destroy completely.

As adaptive hunters in Asia, following remnant herds of grazing animals, they had become herders. As riders on horseback, they became herder-bandit-warriors; and as such they overtook farming communities and civilizations south of the Caucasus. Their kindred by profession caught up with and plundered those planters who had resettled farther west in Europe. They “domesticated” farmers and low-class herders after the manner in which they were accustomed to control herds of grazing animals. They thereby became “grand domesticators” and “over-domesticators,” depending on the value judgment that is being applied by objective observers.

In this discussion we are not concerned strictly with the problem of linguistic movements. The mythos and ethos of nomadic herder-warriors, as they vented their “glory and honor” aspirations in their lengthy epics, transcended tribal languages and could easily be retold in the media of any lingual configurations. In fact, they most probably have contributed to the formation of new languages. In any case, mythos and ethos rest foremost on life-style and the justification of livelihood. By contrast, individual languages function only as temporary carriers—and disposable vehicles at that.

Although the appellation cowboy in its modern Western sense may not be entirely appropriate for labeling the entire scavenger-hunter-herder-bandit-warrior mentality brought into bloom by Eurasian horsemanship, in this book we nevertheless will use this term occasionally. A “cowboy” may be the closest a modern Western reader will ever have come to the primitive Asiatic horse-oriented megalomania and cultural milieu. The term cowboy enables us to think about much of ancient Egyptian culture and religion by way of a contrast, or as a foil. The ancient land of Egypt represented sedentary farmers who would rather have been left alone by grand domesticators and empire builders to plant their fields and raise domestic animals.

In Hesiod's Theogony, earlier, we were told some interesting things about the behavior of traditional Greek “cowboy” gods. And all along we know that the quoted portion was only one conspicuous act of violence among many episodes in Hesiod's theogony. Prior to the significant castration incident, Father Sky tormented his offspring, and afterward Cronos, to whom the cruel deed of castration had been attributed, was defeated and imprisoned by his own son, Zeus.

* * *

What ought a historian make of this grand array of conflict theology? Should one agree with the philosopher Plato when he suggested, in the Republic, that storytellers like Homer and Hesiod should be censured on that account? Plato himself even went as far as to propose an effective method for silencing their literature forever. That literature, according to him, contained only lies.

There is, first of all ... the greatest lie about the things of greatest concern ... how Uranos did what Hesiod says he did to Cronos, and how Cronos in turn took his revenge, and then there are the doings and sufferings of Cronos at the hands of his son. Even if they were true I should not think that they ought to be thus lightly told to thoughtless young persons. But the best way would be to bury them in silence.[5]

And here is how Plato envisioned this silent burial. First, the audience should be restricted to a very few. A pledge of strict secrecy should be required. On top of that a large sacrifice should be given— not just “a pig, but some huge and unprocurable victim.”

Needless to say, Plato did not want those stories repeated, neither then, nor ever. He was convinced that they were lies and that the gods never waged war or did other cruel deeds. Plato was afraid that people who hear and believe these stories might want to imitate the violent deeds of their gods. And yes, the philosopher was right. Humankind, as a rule, does imitate, usurp, and absorb whatever appears greater than itself. Originally these myths were told to glorify, that is, to “justify,” past herder-bandit type behavior. Castration and killing belonged among their repertoire of skills. Bards like Homer and Hesiod peddled their warrior theologies among would-be warriors and aristocrats, for entertainment...in what would be equivalent to our “veterans clubs.” Comparatively speaking, it may be said that these mythic tales were functional equivalents to our blue movies that, in America, first have spread among veterans and warrior clubs as well. But then, because Hesiod's and Homer's epics were so well done, as works of art, they became, as such, regular school-book fare for Greece.

Hesiod by himself should not be blamed for the existence of his craft, nor for the existence of an epic tradition as such. His was a time-honored tradition already among prehistoric Eurasian hordes of horsemen. In fact, this epic tradition was so strong and has been so revered that in Central Asia it remains alive to this very day.[6]

For a better historical perspective on this hero-horse-and-glory religiosity of Homer and Hesiod we do well when we search for an Indo-European tradition that might be even older than theirs. And yes, we do have antecedent Hittite texts, perhaps over a thousand years older. These may have been derived from still older Hurrian sources.

The first God of Heaven of the Hittites, Alalus, was killed by Anus. Thus Anus was defeated by Kumarbis. And we are told that Kumarbis bit off the manhood of the vanquished god and swallowed it. Inside his belly the phallus of Anus grew into the Hittite storm-god. After he was born, this storm-god defeated Kumarbis at the instigation of Anus who, understandably, had remained angry and sore about his loss.[7]

Seen from the Hittite angle, Hesiod's version may not necessarily seem an improvement over this older version. The severed members of Anus matured into the Hittite storm god, a counterpart to Zeus. By contrast, those cut away from Uranos according to Hesiodic mythology were neutered some more, by being transformed into their sexual opposite, the female Aphrodite and goddess of love. One may surmise that for Hesiod, personally, the precise outcome of his tale was irrelevant. The transformation of Uranus' manhood into Aphrodite was simply a convenient way of disposing a still powerful masculine “abstraction.”

If from the land of the Hittites, about that time, we had traveled far enough north and east we could have come across some Aryan tribesmen who were in the process of descending southward upon the Indus civilization. Aryan poets, perhaps a millennium later in the Rig Veda, still ascribed similar cruelty to their chief warrior deity, Indra—such as slugging Dasyu fortifications like pregnant women who, as a result, aborted their black inhabitants.[8] This is the same genre of raw theological burlesque produced by herders who turned warriors. They were men who knew well how to kill and castrate, and who had set out to rob farmers' livelihood. By the systematic pursuit of these activities they became rulers and aristocrats, and they told tales of cosmic scope to ridicule the procreation- and generation-oriented religion of the natives they subjected.

The task of fair historical interpretation always is difficult. Because whenever in history one sees someone score as a great hero, glamorous enough to where that hero can afford to build palaces and other notable monuments or temples and churches for atonement, his most cruel deeds already have been done. As a rule, the scribes and historians arrive at the scene just in time for the whitewash—to be paid royally for their whitewashing labor. For understanding religions we therefore must find additional access to culture-historical data, that is, shortcuts directly to the minds of the people. All the while, we must keep an eye on the larger historical context. Our shortcut to the minds of these horse-and-glory warriors is precisely their shabby mythology of violence, their memorized epics, and marvelous recitations.

Poets as Reformers

The first intent of every genuine religious movement, as religion has been defined in this book, is to save and balance a corresponding culture. Religion constitutes a reorientation by retreat-oriented common sense that limits cultural aggression and thereby establishes, and justifies afresh, a limit of aggression. As has been sufficiently outlined in the introductory chapter, cultures and religions essentially are opposites.

As strange as it may seem, the predecessors of Homer and Hesiod, in their time, actually were spreading some religious sentiments, of a very weak sort. They began the long process of converting actual blood-thirsty bandits and warriors into spoiled aristocrats who, in time, would rather listen to heroism in the form of poetry than do the required cruel deeds on an actual battlefield.

But, of course, the poetic method of reforming cutthroats by means of artistic sublimation does work exceedingly slow. On that account, this method was no longer sufficient, or even decent enough, to be admitted into Plato's notion of an ideal state. Belief in God or gods, to the extent that such a belief is maintained religiously, indeed facilitates honest retreat behavior. But to the extent that belief in God or gods has become organized in line with the progressive appetites of culture, it could be used as easily to justify aggression and war-mongering. All peoples on earth have had experiences with those types of so-called religious postures.

“As it was in the beginning [in God's behavior], is now, and ever shall be [in human behavior].” This is not only a Christian liturgical formula, it is the logic by which all cultures of Homines sapientes evolve, albeit at times only semiconsciously.

Philosophers as Reformers

Where does all of this leave our Greek philosophers in the ancient conflict between herder-dominated cultures and farmer civilizations? In Greek society they functioned approximately as prophets did in ancient Israel and Judah. Of course, Greek philosophers were necessarily different from Jewish prophets. They had no Egyptian imperial God of gods from under whom they needed to escape; they therefore needed no strong theology to upstage or to deny the reality of such a God.

Nevertheless, Greek philosophers were squaring off with their own Hellenic grand domesticator gods just the same. Had they acted like Hebrew prophets, Greek philosophers probably would not have survived very long in their own rough-and-tumble nation, that is, in a culture that still gloried in its old youthful “cowboy” ethos where Homeric cutthroats were still deemed aristocratic and noble.

* * *

It must be acknowledged at the outset that Greek philosophy is not entirely Greek. Its origin was in Miletus in Ionia, Asia Minor, a harbor city that at the time was the primary trading partner of Egypt. This should give us a clue. But trade in material goods is not our primary concern here; and the identity of carrier storytellers no longer can be traced. We therefore have to look for our evidence, concerning Ionia's indebtedness to Egyptian ontology, among the very ontological axioms of Greek philosophy itself. Common sense at that basic axiomatic level can be carried from harbor to harbor by ordinary folk. No exchange of leading thinkers between Egypt and Ionia was necessary for transmitting basic ontology from one place to another, though traveling scholars there surely were.

Regarding Greek philosophy, we must distinguish its method from its content, its analytic habits from its axiomatic ontology. The philosophers' analytical habits by and large have been the indigenous product of Greek predatorial herder intellect. From an evolutionary perspective, their analysis represents a sublimation of perfected physical butchering skills. There always will be a difference between the knife of analysis and the subject matter to which that knife is being applied. As of late I have permitted myself to become convinced that the ontology to which Greek philosophers have applied their analytical scalpels, all along, has been a residue of Egyptian theology.[9]

No matter how much the Greek philosophers disliked Hesiodic mythology, their own method of inquiry and thinking was still conditioned, all the same, by its very same basic “cowboy” ethos. And that ethos included the very notion of castration, and creation with the help of weapons.

Castration, in its raw physical form, is a condition that domesticators, especially herders, inflict on some of their animals to make them tame. In Hesiod's myth we obtain a glimpse of how such domesticator skills were magnified by Greek poets to the level of over-domestication cosmology and hype. When in the course of human evolution domesticators progressed to the level of grand domestication we find, in the records of history, how divinely mandated despots had their harems guarded by cut eunuchs. When finally this level of over-domestication needed religious justification, the theme of exemplary castration—as the gods themselves did it—provided a reasonable direction of theological-ascetic practice and philosophical speculation.

* * *

Up to this point the early prehistory of Hesiod's myth, in herder life, already has been sketched. What follows here as “history of Greek philosophy” will be the sequence of Greek rationalizations concocted on behalf of its sublimation.

Soon after Hesiod had postulated Father Heaven's castration, Greek sculptors transfixed the god's divine progeny into concrete and inert bodies of wood and stone. The fact that gods have been entrapped by skilled human hands in static and sometimes compromising humanlike postures proved damaging to their reputation in the longer run. In addition, ingenious playwrights also paraded the old Hellenic gods in some of these compromising postures, like columns of prisoners, to everyone's delight.

At last, when the time was ripe, came the philosophers. These men occasionally quoted the old names of Hellenic gods with an air of feigned piety. But all the same, the Greek divine names they mentioned no longer were related directly to anything basic in their personal world-views. These deities were not seriously expected to contribute anymore to ontology.

Analysis and abstraction are the mental counterparts to physical severance and castration. So, for example, that which survives after philosophical abstraction of, let us say, a Creator deity, remains no longer a personal deity. It is reduced to a static philosophical “principle of creativity.”

The realm of Platonic “ideas” has been conceptualized as an eternal but also static dimension of greater-than-human reality. About Aristotle's Prime Mover we are told that, although everything else moves because of him, he himself is an Unmoved Mover (Physics 5). The First Mover has no limit or magnitude and is situated at the circumference of the known world (Physics 10). Aristotle ruled out the possibility of having a Prime Mover create movement by either pushing or pulling. In his Metaphysics he therefore derived motion in the universe from the fact that the Prime Mover still represents “an object of desire” on account of which other entities move.[10] This finally implies that the First Mover is not only unmoved by someone else but in actuality, by himself, also may be impotent and unmoving.

Thus, all these famous Greek philosophical systems, and Western science subsequently, suffer from what one might call the Hesiodic castration syndrome or the Uranian predicament.

Of course, our Greek philosophers were not that negative toward all the gods. It would have been impossible for them to hope to reform their culture from the platform of an all-out atheism. In addition, Greek philosophers have appropriated, perhaps unknowingly, the primary ontology of ancient Egyptian monotheism, at least in its decayed form as monism. What is meant here by decayed form? This calls for a brief digression and explanation.

Human rationality proceeds like music, it shifts from one key to another, from a higher octave to a lower one, depending on a composer's inspiration, instrumentation, and cultural context. The language of experiential religion can accordingly be translated into the language of theology, theology into philosophy, philosophy into science, and science into technology.

Thus, genuine religious experiences naturally begin to decay by the yeast of rational theology. And this happens inevitably, because homo religiosus is homo sapiens as well. Analytic reasoning, an innate activity of the human mind, corresponds to teeth and digestive acids in an animal's physical body. Teeth and digestive acids both perform elementary analysis; that is, a kind of breakdown. Systematic theological minds, in a like manner, break down the subject matter of religion—gods or God—by way of distinguishing divine functions, aspects, and attributes.

Then processes, aspects, and attributes of some larger reality configuration are subsequently reduced by philosophers, to the size of more easily comprehensible and more manageable abstractions. Monotheism thereby becomes monism, and polytheism becomes pluralism. Sped along by the enzyme of analytic reason, the products of analytic theology continue to decay into philosophical abstractions and thinkable principles. It becomes possible to approach what used to be true greater-than-human realities without having to pray to them. Thus, philosophy by its very nature is a-theistic.

Philosophies subsequently decay into sciences. Principles are trimmed down to become even more applicable and manageable. For their part, the sciences decay into technologies, into institutions, and into hangovers for Earth and Nature. With fresh theophanies about World and Nature, as truly greater-than-human realities, with divine grace and a little luck, the process of analytic decay may be given a chance to begin anew with a mystic vision. Thus, inherent in Greek philosophy was not only the possibility of decay. There also was the possibility of redemption and reform, including religious retreats to divinely graced common sense.

Redemption, or religious retreat from analysis, was implied when Ionian philosophers paused long enough to think about substance or apeiron as something “divine”—divine in the holistic Egyptian sense. The Enneadean stream of life, or Atum's seminal emission, is what Anaxagoras fell back on when he envisioned Anaximander's apeiron as full of “seeds.” That same theology of flux and flow, which initially perhaps had been inspired by the living River Nile, still echoed in the philosophy of Heraclitus when he saw reality as alive and flowing. Plato returned to that same Egyptian theology when, in the Timaeus, he summed up his description of the cosmogonic process as God generating an “only-begotten universe.” And finally, that same theology of redemption was present when Aristotle struggled to overcome Plato's dichotomy—his static “realm of ideas” versus “objects of sense experience.” With his graduated theory of “form and matter,” the philosopher Aristotle succeeded in constructing a metaphysical halfway house between Platonic dualism and Egyptian holistic emanationalism.

Greek philosophy eventually won its skirmishes against the old imperialistic gods of the weapon-religion type. It left on its battleground the ruined reputations of old over-domestication cults. And it also left in its wake, mired in satire and disdain, the old burlesque myths that supported killing, castration, and other grand domestication tricks. The philosophers then arranged for fresh and cautious rapprochement with Egyptian dynamic monism.

Beyond that, perhaps without really knowing or trying, the Greek philosophers redefined the commonsense context and paved the way for a fresh kind of monotheistic vision. The conceptual decay of monotheism into monism was not irreversible. And behold, in the form of the Christian religion, Greek philosophy later found again a new mythological home—new life for its ancient formal skeleton and its abstract brittle bones. Booklet Five of this series will give important glimpses of that fresh turning point in the history of Greek and Western civilization.

Greek philosophy's final and most enduring flower, Neoplatonism, grew and blossomed in a situation similar to that in which the Greek quest for sophia had first begun—again in a peripheral Greek settlement. Though Platonic by subsequent appellation, Neoplatonism nevertheless was conceived in Egypt, in the afterglow of ancient Egyptian culture and religion. It took form in a more direct and more intimate relationship with Egyptian theology than even the beginnings of philosophy in Ionia had taken. Neoplatonism was taught by two Egyptian wise men in a Greek colony on Egyptian soil, surrounded by Egyptian culture and quiet ancient religion.

The Milesians

Thales

Thales (ca. 624-548 B.C.E.) gained great renown in Miletus for a number of scientific and technological accomplishments. He is remembered especially for having correctly predicted the year of a solar eclipse that happened on May 22, 585 B.C.E. Diogenes took great pains in telling us, secondhand, how most writers have described Thales as a genuine Milesian who belonged to a distinguished family. All the same, we read in Herodotus (1:170) that his ancestors were Phoenicians.[11]

Historical documentation that traces some of Thales' education to other places along the eastern Mediterranean is unavailable; nevertheless, for a family with Phoenician ancestry some such connections safely may be assumed. All the while, it may be surmised that a man of Thales' intellect, living in a foremost Mediterranean port city, scarcely could have remained ignorant of Mesopotamian and Egyptian thinking. Unfortunately, we have only scant direct information about the cosmogony that formed the backdrop for his philosophy. What we do have matches nicely the remnants that have survived of the teachings of his successors, Anaximander and Anaximenes.

Aristotle considered himself distantly related to the philosophical tradition begun by Thales. He credited Thales with having been the first thinker who postulated a “material principle” as underlying the nature or substance of all things. For Thales that “principle is water, and for this reason … the earth rests on water.” (Metaph. A, 983,b, 6ff)[12]

We can spare ourselves the remainder of Aristotle's commentary, by which he gave his own oblique rationalizations as to why the wise Thales might have reasoned the way he did. To the delight of a historian of religions, Aristotle showed himself in that treatise not entirely insensitive to mythological and theological modes of reasoning. But surely, Thales would have been amused by his proponent's loose references to Oceanus, Tethys, and Styx—unless, of course, these references permitted also some kind of overlapping among these divinities with an original Egyptian Nun or watery chaos. The larger context is fairly clear, it seems. Aristotle tried to give historical depth to his own discourses, and he invoked the wisdom of Thales as a convenient early Greek historical benchmark.

This is not to suggest that Aristotle was wrong in his overall assessment of Thales' analytic temperament. One may very much suspect, however, that in this particular instance Aristotle appealed to the wrong mythology. The Egyptian myth, of Atum rising from Nun, that is, of an earthen hill rising from watery chaos, matches Thales' world portrait far better than anything gathered from the disjunctive mythology of Greece. The Greek myths of Hesiod and Homer were ill-suited to support a monistic ontology. Indeed, they had very little material to contribute to the reductionistic attempts of the first Ionian philosophers.

Anaximander

Anaximander (ca. 611–546 B.C.E.) is remembered for having elaborated on the cosmogony of Thales. Like his famous teacher, he assumed a singular homogeneous and living substratum of reality, something unlimited:

it is neither water nor any other one of the things called elements, but the infinite is something of a different nature, from which came all the heavens and the worlds in them…. And from what source things arise, to that they return of necessity when they are destroyed; for they suffer punishment and make reparation to one another for their injustice according to the order of time, as he says in somewhat poetical language. (Simplicius, Phys. 6r; 24,26)[13]

Here we have arrived at a crucial point in early Greek philosophy; namely, at Anaximander's vision of the cosmogonic process whereby the ordered world had come into being. This process is a separating out that, in turn, is brought about by an eternal motion in the apeiron. All things come from and return to the apeiron, the infinite or boundless substratum of the universe.

Of special interest is information on Anaximander, provided by Theophrastus, as originally given by Eusebius:

He says that at the birth of this cosmos a germ of hot and cold was separated off from the eternal substance, and out of this a sphere of flame grew about the vapour surrounding the earth like the bark round a tree. When this was torn away and shut off in certain rings, the sun, moon, and stars came into existence.[14]

Thus, instead of the more concrete “first” in the cosmos, of Nun as the “water” to which Thales had reference, Anaximander has returned to a more vaporlike and less sensate conceptualization of the Egyptian Nun. From within it he derived the world and then the sun, moon, and stars. All these emanated from the center, successively contained within rings of fire. Indeed, in the orthodox Egyptian context these fiery emanational rings provide a rational pattern for visualization. Atum was the central primeval Hill-Sun from whence all lesser realities came. These successive emanations, spewing from the Hill-Sun center, puffed forth as rings of fire, like a playful smoker may blow smoke rings that emanate.

Anaximander thought of these emanations as some kind of a “seed” substance. This metaphor also can be linked with the Heliopolitan prototype of Atum's seminal emission. And this prototype is documented in the earliest stratum of Egyptian texts. There, too, the godhead's emissions are mentioned as fire or as the light of Ra. Thus, the elements of water, earth, air, and fire about which the Milesians reasoned “scientifically,” or “philosophically,” can be identified still as distinct divine realities that, in Heliopolitan theology, were present as Nun, Atum, Shu, and Ra, respectively. The dynamic link between Atum and Ra (earthy hill and ecstatic-fiery emanation) is in the later generation of Enneadean gods depreciated from Shu to Geb—thus down to Father Earth.

Egyptian paintings of the Heliopolitan hypostasis of Geb and Nut sometimes depict stars as decorations along the arching body of the sky goddess. Stars were places in the sky where light bursts shone forth and became manifest. Moreover, Anaximander's allusion to the cyclic return of all things to the original substratum, along a sequence of emanated worlds, personages, or things, nicely matches the full generational and soteriological cycle of the Heliopolitan system.

Anaximander's notion of “injustice” within the cosmological process had been judged and adjusted in Egypt by Mahet about a millennium and a half before Anaximander. Mahet was the same personal determinant who also ordered the remainder of the cosmos. She, who was the ancient goddess Tefnut renamed, represented order in cosmology as well as “justice” and “righteousness” in the sacerdotal monarchy. In ancient Egypt these two overlapped. Thus, terminology taken from jurisprudence in Anaximander's case was not poetic license, as Simplicius suggested in the first Anaximander passage quoted. These concepts were carried to Ionia part and parcel from Egyptian theology and political theory—by thoughtful travelers, it seems. But, be that as it may, the primary point for us is that these Egyptian notions have been found in Ionia.

The singular homogeneous and boundless substratum of Anaximander's All-being was deemed still divine. All those ancient philosophers who did not postulate other external causes, such as Mind or Love, assumed the divine nature of the apeiron, as Aristotle affirms:

and this they say is the divine, for it is immortal and imperishable, as Anaximander and most of the writers on nature call it. (Physics. 203,b,6)[15]

Thinkers who have not distinguished Mind or Love as agents independent from the apeiron, assumed that motivational energies resided within. Thus, any way one turns it, Anaximander's primal substratum of reality remains analogous to the Egyptian godhead's emanation. Egyptian theology thereby has lured, and aggravated, Hellenic analytic minds into a new millennium of mindful “civilized” reflection.

Anaximenes

Anaximenes was a younger contemporary of Anaximander who is remembered for having advanced an alternate cosmology. Like his elder dialogue partner, so too he embraced monistic Egyptian ontology. In this case it should be remembered that in the tailwind of Amun theology, during the New Kingdom, the Egyptian godhead continued to keep his name hidden. Accordingly, the elder Anaximander had contemplated a nameless apeiron.

By contrast, the younger Anaximenes has boldly identified the unbounded primal substance as air or breath:

Anaximenes of Miletus … calls it air, and says that it differs in rarity and density according to the different substances. Rarefied it becomes fire; condensed, it becomes first wind, then cloud, and when condensed still further water, then earth and stones. Everything else is made of these. He too postulated eternal motion, which is indeed the cause of the change. (Simplicius, Phys. 24.26,A5)[16]

Appreciative philosophers, such as W. K. C. Guthrie, have done what can be done to preserve Anaximenes' theory of rarefaction and condensation as something philosophically reasonable or even honorably scientific.[17] After all, a cofounder of Greek philosophy and Western science deserves to be remembered with respect. And it is not the intention of this book to detract from any credit that might have accrued to this ancient thinker along the science trail in history.

However, on behalf of Egyptian predecessors of Ionian philosophy, it is necessary to insist that a millennium and a half earlier some Egyptian minds had concluded that Shu, present as air, was sufficient to account for the entire plethora of Atum's masculine emanations. That tendency is clearly traceable in the Coffin Texts and has been delineated in Booklet Two of this series. It should be remembered that Shu was life-breath and was also understood, more concretely, as representing Atum's seminal emission; he continued the creative “spitting” of Atum.

Ancient priestly minds indeed have envisioned Atum's seminal emissions, or emanations, as radiating outward from an invisible center toward a periphery that had greater visibility and concreteness. Thus, it would not have been at all difficult for them to accommodate Anaximenes by simply referring to that emanational process, in the direction of greater visibility, as condensation.

And, inversely, anyone who now reconsiders the theophany of the sun god Ra, or an Egyptian soul's funerary rite for its return journey in the company of the sun god, also will have to grant that these ancient Egyptian thinkers were able to reason homeward; that is, about processes of “refinement” or about the “rarefaction” of visible substances, of air back into fire and light. These considerations point to the conclusion that Anaximenes, as much as Thales and Anaximander before him, still “lived, moved, and had his being” in Egyptian cosmogony and cosmology—as does anyone today, still, who understands this quote from the New Testament a little.

Pythagoras

Pythagoras (ca. 570–? B.C.E.) was a philosopher who came from Samos, an island facing the Ionian coast. We do not know how highly he thought of his three Ionian contemporaries; probably not overly so. But we do know that he shied away from their general tendency of materialistically objectifying aspects of the larger divine order. Instead he regarded numbers to be the key to understanding the universe and its contents.

In the course of human evolution, nouns and names have come into use to keep track of individual beings—things, animals, or people, and even gods. The application of numbers has permitted keeping track and taking possessions to a greater degree. A human mind that applies numbers to the world, selfishly, may claim many things as property without ever having to know their individual names or true characteristics. Numerology was invented as a tool for greater control, and numbers justify the depersonalization and extraction of many things from the greater whole of reality and environment.

In the actual struggle for human survival, numbers have been applied to many things. And once numbers were assigned, they sustained the illusion that all things so numbered are small enough to be manipulated by finite human hands; that is, owned harmlessly as numbers and therewith manipulated by proxy. Thus, the utilization of numbers constitutes the sharpest claw of analysis available to the rational human creature. By means of digital faceless labels, the human mind can snatch away many properties and things from what once was considered the domain of greater-than-human personages. And all the while human “con-science” is kept tranquil and under the euphoria of being mathematically correct, and thereby true and justified.

Nevertheless, extreme analytic or scientific “progress” in its reliance on a measure of rationality sooner or later necessitates its opposite—a religious “retreat” posture for balance and sane survival. Accordingly, the Pythagorean predatorial abstraction of the universe into coordinates and numbers, for its balance, demanded a more holistic faith in cosmic harmony. Into this aesthetically conceived larger harmony—into the “music of the heavenly spheres” where numbers also can be traced—the mathematician ego of Pythagoras withdrew for personal refuge, for balance and existential comfort.

Pythagoras and his religious brotherhood repented from their mathematical sins of mental progress by living ascetic lives. It is obvious that some greater-than-mathematics reality—that is, the God of cosmos and numbers—scared these mortals back into more restricted domains. All the while, their ennobled minds remained preoccupied with the hope of somehow escaping their mortality as immortal souls.

Whereas Milesian thinkers evolved their analytic claws, their brain-tipped teeth, for purposes of breaking down the divine visible cosmos into smaller impersonal units and elements, the Pythagoreans dedicated their minds to perfecting the ultimate mental fishing net of abstract mathematics. To the extent that they became aggressively successful they also became religiously frightened.

As frightened homines religiosi, the Pythagoreans were destined to develop for their mathematical “science” a matching religious “con-science.” This erupted among them especially in their personal eschatology. Practicing initiation and pursuing purification, they knew their souls caught up in a process of transmigration and reincarnation. This religious posture is what, on a personal basis, has furnished a check and balance, or an atonement, for Pythagorean mathematical ambitions and estrangement.

Comparative historians must remember that in India this was the time when the sons of priests began to doubt the Vedas and the efficacy of the grand domestication cult of sacrifices. This was the time when aristocratic warrior sons expressed their dissent even more adamantly, and when throngs of dropout hippie-monks refused to be fascinated any longer by external spectacles of the cultus. Instead, they opted for inward meditational piety. All their new religious ways, their yoga exercises and their philosophical contemplations, henceforth were defined against the backdrop of samsara; that is, against the cosmic process within which entangled souls must transmigrate after death. The souls of those who died anticipated successive rounds or reincarnation, new opportunities for purification in accordance with the law of karma.

It is quite likely, therefore, that Pythagoras had been touched directly by Hinduism. His doctrine of transmigration and reincarnation definitely points in that direction. It is also possible that, along with these religious tenets, some of his mathematics may have come from India as well. Physical as well as mental “progress,” and corresponding religious “retreat” behavior tend to accompany one another for survival balance. On the other hand, some of what is now known as Pythagorean mathematics well may have been inspired by Egypt.[18] But even at that, Pythagoras with his Hindu religion appears thus far to be the least Egyptianized Greek philosopher.

Heraclitus

Heraclitus (ca. 540–480 B.C.E.) lived in Ephesus, a short distance from Miletus that had become the cradle of Greek philosophy. His ontological inheritance was the same general Ionian-Egyptian monism we detected already among the first Milesian philosophers. Historians of philosophy, thus far, have not been very successful in linking Heraclitus to any known “school.” On that account, many of this man's aphorisms have been interpreted thus far on the assumption that he was a haughtily independent obscurant, a fabricator of riddles.

Surprisingly, however, when approached from the direction of the Egyptian ontological heritage, the aphorisms of Heraclitus make sense at least as much, if not more, than any of the fragments that survived from the teachings of his Ionian contemporaries. A good place to begin is the following concise summary of Heraclitus, by Diogenes Laertius:

fire is the element, all things are exchange for fire and come into being by rarefaction and condensation ... All things come into being by conflict of opposites, and the sum of things flows like a stream. Further, all that is is limited and forms one world. And it is alternately born from fire and again resolved into fire in fixed cycles to all eternity ... Of the opposites that which tends to birth or creation is called war and strife, and that which tends to destruction by fire is called concord and peace ... Change he called a pathway up and down, and this determines the birth of the world. (Book 4, 9, 8-12)[19]

The sequence of emanations that Diogenes attributed to Heraclitus begins, one easily can see, with the radiant fire of Ra. Along the downward path of “condensation,” fire transforms into moisture; moisture condenses into water; and water congeals into earth. The return path cuts across the same sequence in reverse. Anyone who has seriously contemplated Figure 10, in Chapter 2, will have no difficulty recognizing here the same basic orthodox Egyptian U-turn pattern.

We are also told, by Heraclitus, that “the sum of things flows like a stream.” He could as well have said that it “flows like the seminal emission of Atum.” The “fixed cycles” here, of course, do not refer to sequential disappearances and reappearances of entire divine hypostases or bodies. Rather, they are comparable to sectional swirls or eddies that become visible here and there along the total stream of life and being.

As soon as one considers this broader ancient Egyptian perspective the task of explaining some of Heraclitus' Fragments is made much easier. So for instance, what should one make of this?

(The earth) is poured out as sea, and measures the same amount as existed before it became earth. (Fragments 23)

This cosmogonic moment pertains to the turnaround point at the lower end of the emanational process. The stream of All-being was made visible to us already when moisture is precipitated into water. It was made more solid after water congealed into earth. And all the while the mass or energy of the divine emanation remains constant. For the broader Egyptian context, one should note how in the more distant mythological past, at the ontological center of All-being, Atum arose as a solid hill from amidst Nun, the latter of which remained watery chaos. All the while the total ka essence of Atum remained constant.

Human souls are caught up in the emanational outward currents, as they are in the homeward currents. So the question may rightly be asked: How is it that souls ever appear in material bodies? Any adult who ever has participated intimately in this procreative event of reincarnating a soul, and reflected on it afterward, knows that Fragments 72 explains it as well as can be done: “It is a delight to souls to become wet.”

Here is how a grandfatherly and patient Heliopolitan priest might have explained this Heraclitean puzzle to us, had we visited him in the heyday of his religion. Consider the experience of prospective parents. First they detect “fire” in each others' eyes; then they sense “moisture” welling up inside, and externally they exude sweat as well. Invisible sparks of their ecstatic ka souls—reflected as gleams in their eyes—swim onward in the aforementioned fluids to mingle and fuse; and amidst those fluids, in time, evolves and grows a tangible human being, a visible ba. How? and Why? Because “it is a delight to (ka) souls to become wet" in ba.

Of course, in the opinion of a Hellenic lover of wisdom, of the stature of Heraclitus, “a dry soul is wisest and best,” or, as viewed by a homeward bound soul, from a less personal beam of light that radiates from the greater Atum-Ra and All-being, “a dry beam is the wisest and best soul” (Fragments 74f) —which of course means "the purest ka." All this simply means that closer to the divine source of soul, at the hypostasis of rarified light and fire, even an individual soul spark beams brighter. At that refined level of Sun and fire a ka soul is less passionate, less visible, less wet, and less messy.

What is the intelligence that steers all things in and through all things? Or, what should the creative godhead be named? Religious Greeks have named him Zeus, whereas contemporary wise men in Egypt, of the Theban persuasion, probably would have refused to ascribe any name at all to Amun, the Hidden One. A similar agnosticism concerning the real name of the godhead speaks from Fragments 19: “it is willing and is unwilling to be called by the name Zeus.”

When Heraclitus spoke religiously about successive emanations of the godhead, about gods in plural form, he considered some of these emanations to be “gods” only in relation to hypostases still lower than they. Thus, whichever is higher can be thought of as “dying” when its dignity is being compromised; when it is lowered beneath a fellow equal or reduced to the level of an even lesser entity. In turn, an entity at a lower level of existence “dies” when it mystically surrenders to be absorbed by a higher one. And all this happens in full accord with the orthodox U-turn pattern of Egyptian theogony and soteriology. Of course, our wise man from Ephesus, as a diligent student of Egyptian priestly riddles, knew how to say all of this more profoundly and succinctly:

Gods are mortals, men are immortals, each living in the other's death and dying in the others' life. (Fragments 67)

Having thus commented on only a few samples near the core of Heraclitean ontology, it may no longer be necessary to puzzle about the famous Fragments 41, 42, or 81 at the usual elementary level: “In the same rivers we step and we do not step; we are and we are not.” It means that now we are, and that then we are not. Not only is the river going in and out of existence for us from one moment of perception to the next; we ourselves are becoming other kinds of beings by the time our minds and wills have readjusted to step into a river again. We thus concurrently are in two existential conditions—“we are and we are not”—determined by our own upward and downward movements within the larger two-way stream of life and All-being, which itself is flux.

Parmenides

Parmenides (ca. 515–456 B.C.E.) began his philosophical inquiries among the Pythagorean brotherhood at Elea, in southern Italy. Under the spell of Pythagoras, perhaps, he fell heir to a more shamanic perspective on Egyptian ontology. He became known in the history of philosophy for his alleged insistence on the permanence of all being; permanence defined vis-à-vis Heraclitus' fascination for flux and becoming. After reexamining both philosophers from the perspective of a possible common Egyptian ontology, this alleged difference now will have to be reconsidered.

Parmenides' insistence on the permanence of being appears to be no more than a semantic echo from his Pythagorean days when, in mathematical language, he habitually dealt with abstract and fixed principles. These eternal principles, supposedly, govern an equally fixed and impersonal system of numerology.

Our chances for understanding either Heraclitus or Parmenides have been severely impaired by interpretations generated by their latter-day progeny, by generations of materialistic philosophers and scientists. In the course of their respective hermeneutical fates, the integrity of Heraclitus was protected by his own obscurantism and love of Egyptian riddles. All the while, the bequest of Parmenides was severely distorted. If Parmenides had a weakness, it was the fact that he took his opponents too seriously. He invested altogether too heavily in the language of Milesian positivism.

Parmenides' religio-metaphysical poem, “The Way of Truth and the Way of Opinion,” was defended and fortified by his well-intentioned student Zeno, before the Athenian tribunal, in the very presence of Socrates himself. It was defended against a wrong set of nonreligious questions and on a battlefield already objectified by others. Its religio-ontological and epistemological message thus was permitted to dissipate in the dry dunes of analysis. Instead of recognizing the conclusions Parmenides had reached religiously—and his existential lesson from the depth of what he called his “mental paralysis”—philosophers exploited incidentals in his poem, to be able to imagine for themselves All-being as something inert, something impersonal or dead. By this distortion of Parmenides' philosophy, the predatorial minds of subsequent budding scientists hoped that All-being might become a fair and easier target for experimental control and devastation.

* * *

There is no essential conflict between the teachings of Heraclitus and Parmenides. They describe the same All-being from different momentary human perspectives. For the sake of an adequate comparison and contrast we must refocus our attention once more on Heraclitus, for the length of a paragraph at least.

As a living and a changing mind Heraclitus had remained conceptually within the All-being. Knowing himself as becoming, he participated in All-being's larger process of change and becoming. Heraclitus was fascinated by the dynamics of finite living, and apparently, he also enjoyed swimming and swirling about among the relative currents and eddies in the larger stream of life and being. All the while, Heraclitus was reconciled to his humble destiny of being a small changing bubble of thought, or hype, in the larger mind of God. Like Socrates later, who appealed to the dictum “know thyself,” so Heraclitus with a similar haughty sense of superiority, despised those who seemed unaware of this rational need for introspection and sense of finitude. All Greek philosophers have, as have conspicuous leaders in all cultures and situations, generated a contradiction between the surrendering of their inward egos and the assertion of their external or public egos. In the case of Greek philosophers one must keep in mind that their love of wisdom was an aristocratic brand of soteriology, meant to be shared with minds of similar haughty temperament and stature.

By contrast, the mind of Parmenides temporarily had wandered off on a transhuman shamanic journey, estranged and severed even from its own axioms and ontology. Temporarily the philosopher Parmenides was able to imagine, and achieve, some sort of visionary focus on objectified All-being. And momentarily this reality appeared to his playful analytic predator mind as a perfect sphere—it appeared to his playful kitten mind like an inviting ball of yarn.

At that point Parmenides had not learned, yet, how the All-being could play possum, feign death, when confronted by an analytic predator mind that had been impressed and numbed by its own activity of objectification. Such objectification implied mental fixation and abstraction—thus castration and killing. Heraclitus objectified All-being—and toward him All-being played possum.

We must ask the central question. How did Parmenides achieve his temporary state of transhuman objectivity, which led to the illusion that nothing moves? And what exactly happened when All-being played possum with him? His poem points to a rational method of usurpation on the philosopher's part. He assumed a posture as if to absorb into himself all imaginable motion and commotion. No wonder therefore when all being, apart from himself, seemed motionless by comparison! We must take, at all cost, the relativity of his testimonial very seriously.

A goddess who, we might assume, herself was born from within the divine All-being—someone like Isis—took Parmenides for a ride. She took him out on that same kind of glorious ride that, in the concrete material world, easily could have resulted in the destruction of cities and fellow humankind. Parmenides traveled on a war chariot drawn by horses and guided by the sun-ray daughters of Father Helios.[20] Entering thus the Egyptian realm of Ra's splendor, our philosopher tells how he left behind “retributive Justice” (i.e., Mahet), holding her key at the gate between darkness and light. Parmenides traveled onward with his personal guardian goddess as on a shamanic-philosophic trance journey. His divine female guide kept for him “horses and chariot straight on the high road.”

Amidst this personal visionary motion and commotion, and always in hot pursuit of enduring ontological glimpses, Parmenides was destined to learn his first ontological lesson about All-being. He experienced relative motion between observer and observed. From his fast-moving point of view, in a chariot somewhere out there in nowhere, Parmenides looked back and, objectifying, he beheld All-being. Thus he distinguished the “abiding essence of persuasive truth” from ordinary “men's opinions in which rests no true belief.” And the All-abiding essence of persuasive truth, being mirrored, held, and fixed as abstract concept in the mind of Parmenides, showed no sign of motion. Meanwhile Parmenides completely overlooked the fact that he himself was still contained within that same, now conceptually fixed and abstracted, All-being. And that fact, suddenly, invalidated the entire logic of his motion-packed trance journey. Not knowing that this was so was his tragic mistake.

Such forgetfulness, in the presence of the less forgetful gods, shows off human finitude with unforgiving severity. And it may safely be assumed that Parmenides' sun-maiden escort, his enlightenment mistress, succeeded by her divinely flirtatious demeanor to dull the otherwise sharp wits of this philosopher. Comparatively speaking, it may be worthwhile to contemplate how even in the ordinary world ordinary sun rays occasionally strike philosophically less gifted human brains with similar paralyzing effects.

The first lesson taught by the goddess seems simple enough. “Whatever is is.” All could have been well, amidst the splendor of all that light, had Parmenides not overvalued his own sense of sight and light. Had his mind at the moment been capable of interface with other sense data, such as touch, sound, taste, and smell, he could have heard and smelled that his horses and the chariot containing his own presence, were still part of a sensate swirl within All-being. But, as it was, in his state of super-visionary hype and sensual deprivation, the bubble of Parmenides' own thought mistakenly was perceived equal to All-being.

As formerly, during mathematical trance, the realm of numbers became a statically fixed All-being for Pythagoras—and as later for Plato the realm of “ideas” became static—so in this instance the mind of Parmenides has held on to All-being in an objectified state. An objectified mental world no longer is a world, and therefore it no longer lives and moves. This mental habit of freezing the world portrait, by fixation or objectification, has become commonplace among the many scientific descendants of this philosopher. Objectification serves foremost as the justification for experimenting with and controlling docile less-than-human things.

But let us not do unto Parmenides as his own friends have done to him—friends for whom his now motionless tongue is sufficient proof that, indeed, he must have taught the immobility of all things. This is no way to treat an ancestor whose legacy of words still speaks as clearly as our own contemporaries. We gladly grant him the ability to consider greater-than-human configurations of reality, among other things:

Therefore thinking and that by reason of which thought exists are one and the same thing, for you will not find thinking without the being from which it receives its name. Nor is there nor will there be anything apart from being; for fate has linked it together, so that it is a whole and immovable … (p. 117:94–99)

What then about the nature of All-being? Of its existence? Its multiplicity? Its immobility? Its completeness? Its homogeneity and unity? Has Parmenides really intended his words to be useful for a positivistic conquest of God and World, as if both together were an inert corpse? Midway during his statement, just quoted, while he contemplated last movements or twitchings, Parmenides achieved a very sharp focus of introspection on his habit of objectification toward All-being. He perceived the gentle movement of Fate, actively “linking together” into an immovable whole—not “immobility together with All-being” as commentators on Parmenides frequently tell us—but he perceived his own “thinking” as it encountered All-being. There is a tremendous difference between these two readings: a difference of life and death for either Parmenides or All-being.

And behold! Parmenides' individualized thinking and All-being, after being fused together, became instantly immobilized. Instantly, that is, as soon as his objective thought was brought in contact with the living presence of All-being. It was like a kiss of death to him. His analytic thoughts had the efficacy of serpentine venom.

But now we must consider the crucial point. Inasmuch as both sides, the philosopher's thought process and perceived All-being, seemed to have become immobilized together, the poor man had no way of knowing which of the two had actually fallen victim to the other. Nor, on the basis of his testimony, have we.

In its paralyzed condition, the dazed mind of Parmenides was barely able to finish the remainder of its poem. The man was reduced to where he had to finish his discourse with an admitted play on empty names and words. I shall continue Parmenides' statement, quoted earlier, by repeating its last phrase for the sake of better continuity: so that it is a whole and immovable. Wherefore all these things will be but a name, all these things which mortals determined in the belief that they were true....(p. 117:99–102)

Parmenides' first lesson had stunned his mind. How so? Did this happen because he gazed upon objectified reality? Of course not; rather, his mind was immobilized because it contemplated All-being as if it were an objectifiable reality. This kind of self-centered thinking could not help but overload and short out his mental circuits. He noticed himself gazing upon the whole All-being and discovered that while doing so he himself was missing in that objectified one-and-only realm of being.

Gazing on All-being from a constantly changing distance, as from a moving celestial war chariot, happens to be a very dangerous undertaking. The philosopher's sharp mind instantly sensed that it had fallen a victim to itself, into mortal danger; and for a supposedly immortal Greek mind to get into that condition was reason enough to become scared and freeze over. Having caught itself AWOL from All-being, arrested by his own conscience, Parmenides accepted for a moment his mind's own death sentence.

To translate this simple metaphorical assessment into philosophically respectable terminology one might say, summarily, that the very hype of Parmenides' own epistemology, which claimed for itself the status of ontology, is what has done him in. What Parmenides gave us was no longer legitimate existential ontology. Instead, it was epistemological paralysis.

It may be useful to recall how for similar reasons a man named Moses, who had come under the spell of Egyptian wisdom long before Parmenides' time, had learned that “man shall not see God and live” (Exodus 33:20). In Parmenides' case this meant that he who saw All-being, without seeing himself included in it, was doomed by his own logic to collapse into immobility and apparent nonbeing. Or still more precisely, his mind has chosen for itself a content of static notions, thus unverifiable nonbeing.

Fortunately, the goddess who initially had lured him into estrangement from All-being let Parmenides down gently. “Trust-worthy discourse” on All-being went blank in the philosopher's mind. Now, as a confessed and a finite mortal, Parmenides therefore was instructed to learn, instead, more about “these things which mortals determined,” thus, about opinions current among mortals. Pure monism was too much to ponder. Parmenides was given dichotomy as second best.

On the one hand there is the aethereal flame of fire, fine, rarefied, everywhere identical with itself and not identical with its opposite; and on the other hand, opposed to the first, is the second principle, flameless darkness, dense and heavy in character…. (p. 118:116-121)

With the extremities of ethereal fire and heavy darkness thus having been placed safely out of reach for human hands and minds, Parmenides proceeded to describe the range of emanational hypostases in between. He was fully aware that between his “one hand” and his “other hand” there extended the divine body of All-being. This body existed, nearer to its center, as circles or wreaths of rarefied fire. Toward the outer periphery it appeared increasingly mixed with darkness. Thus, All-being is surrounded by “the second principle” of solid darkness, according to the aforementioned quotation.

In accordance with this basic dualistic conceptualization, some Parmenidean specifics now follow that nicely match the Egyptian emanationalism with which we have become already familiar:

And the smaller circles are filled with unmixed fire, and those next them with darkness into which their portion of light penetrates; in the midst of these is the divinity who directs the course of all. (118:125–130)

This divinity who “in the midst of these” directs the course of all is the godhead of orthodox Egyptian theology. And inasmuch as this divinity still “directs,” it certainly is acknowledged here outside the realm of the proverbial Parmenidean inertia. Only the Egyptian gender emphasis is reversed here to accommodate Greek Hesiodic theography, or the primacy of Gaia over Uranos. What else can one expect of someone who does his thinking under the spell of a goddess! Parmenides knew that a “she” devised first love.

Elsewhere, in a more intense confrontation, we are given a hint to the effect that Parmenides might have thought of this central deity as Fate. In our present context this does not really matter, because we know, specifically, what this divinity did by way of continuous activity. She devised love. That same activity also was the first function of Atum's hand, and of Shu and Tefnut subsequently.

Parmenides had returned from his poetic trance journey on the high road, so it seems, reconciled to Egyptian ontology. He was ready to humble himself by learning less important notions about “the wandering deeds of the round-eyed moon” (the eye of Horus). He contemplated “the sky (Nut) surrounding all, whence it arose, and how necessity took it and chained it so as to serve as a limit (Tefnut and Nut) to the courses of the stars.” The writers of ancient Egyptian coffin spells definitely were better at describing these sorts of things than Parmenides. But he was a Greek who introduced Egyptian wisdom to his kindred secondhand. He did the best he could.

One interesting comparison remains to be made with the Parmenidean “cosmos devoid of motion.” As the hyperactive biblical warrior Joshua is said to have seen the sun stand still (Joshua 10:13), so too the mentally hyperactive Parmenides saw All-being motionless during a few moments of visionary trance. But then, finite beings who stop short of pari-nirvana must return to paradises of a lesser kind. Parmenides returned smack into orthodox Egyptian ontology. And there, in this cosmos among emanations between light and darkness, between invisibility and visibility, he moved about. From there he lived and died and rose. Or, as an Egyptian wise man might have said, he has had, he has, and he will have his being there. His moments of transient perception are of little consequence.

Human minds are caught up, together with all other creatures, in the same universal process of emanation—evolving and diversifying all the while. Animal instincts together still illustrate the root modes of hominid minds as these adapted and were shaped during the long process of evolution. Like most advanced predators on this planet still do, humans also do tend to chase after, and fetch, what previously has been perceived as moving. The inverse also is true inasmuch as human minds perceive and think by comparison and contrast. Possibly, the most archaic form of religious "freezing" was experienced by our ancestors when, suddenly, they were confronted by greater-than-human (divine) carnivores. Freezing or playing possum saved the lives of some—for a while longer. In like manner, Parmenides, by way of temporary mental paralysis, survived to think another day.

The Pluralists

For better or for worse, the philosophy of Parmenides and of his defender Zeno have left the impression on analytic minds that All-being is motionless and passive. Whereas such a conclusion would have been in line with Hesiodic castration theology, it would have been unthinkable, if not blasphemous, in the original context of Egyptian monotheism. As much as some later Greek philosophers protested the works of Hesiod and Homer, to the effect that poets have slandered the gods by ascribing scandalous behavior to them, they as philosophers were still children of the same great Mother Earth.

The scandalous behavior of Cronos became the archetypal method for Greek philosophy. It was Cronos who first “immobilized” and “depersonalized” the All-father Uranos; and it was the popularized version of Parmenides' philosophy that applied the analytic sickle to the remainder of All-being as well. Hesiod established the mythological archetype for all subsequent analytic or philosophical treatment of deity and reality, and all philosophers and scientists in pursuit of analysis and experimentation have subscribed to that approach ever since.

Analytic minds are like advanced predators, and advanced predator species, as a rule, shun potential victims that permanently lie still. For the sake of greater excitement, most predators prefer to hunt animals that still are alive and afoot. But then, having once sensed a potential prey as moving about freely, these predators will not rest until their victim is laid low—immobilized, butchered, and abstracted to suit their appetites and fancies.

With the upper half of the Greek cosmos having been neutered by Hesiod, the keen predator minds of the first Ionian philosophers directed their analytic curiosity toward a theology that, at the time, was being carried abroad from Egypt still somewhat alive. Greek analytic thinkers then dealt with the Egyptian All-being with mixed success. Parmenides abstracted from All-being, abstracted even his own moving self in the process. He did so even though his own self afterward was sorely missed in his ontological inventory.

Heirs of Parmenides, by not knowing themselves in relative motion in celestial chariots, have continued to subtract motion from All-being all the while. It took several generations of Greek philo-sophers to be able to explain this perceived absence of motion in All-being, alongside the obstinate apparent presence of motion in the sensual dimension of human existence. The prime years of Greek philosophy were spent on resolving this disparity between permanence and being, on the one hand, and flux and becoming, on the other. Egyptian theologians easily would have diagnosed debates of this sort as the futile life-and-death struggles of mortal humankind with the living God and within his own world-emanation. The Egyptian All-God, hidden and unknown, after all, was beyond the reach of Cronos' sickle, and beyond the abstracting scalpels of analytic humanoid predator minds. It was simply not possible to apply a sickle from outside this emanating All-god.

Historians of religions, who nowadays concern themselves with the larger evolutionary process, will have no difficulty seeing in the classical philosophical discourses an intellectualized repetition of ancestral hunters' guilt. Pluralistic philosophers, in the Parmenidean tradition, many times have reenacted the moments during which primitive hunters stood, after a stately animal has just been brought down, and contemplated the inflicted stillness of the carcass. Not many novel conflicts happen in the world of predators, nor among all the predator minds together under Helios! Such pursuits, bites, and balancing bites of conscience are of great antiquity.

The experience or the maintenance of life and motion, after Parmenides, needed no longer distract philosophers from “progress,” especially not those who came to be classified as pluralists; that is, Empedocles, Anaxagoras, Leucippus, Democritus, Epicurus, and Lucretius. They all invented different ways to analyze, divide, or to cut apart the All-being that the Parmenidean misperception had stunned—stunned sufficiently for a butchering feast—for modern warfare with science and technology, to have begun.

Empedocles

Empedocles (ca. 493-433 B.C.E.), in the paralyzed body of All-being, no longer could perceive any traces of divine life. He no longer could see, much less enjoy, those mysterious qualitative mutations from one wonderful hypostasis into a next. Since the onset of Greek philosophy, earlier divine manifestations had been analytically distinguished from their source, as well as from one another. They had become immutable “roots”; that is, root elements of fire, air, earth, and water. Though these elements had been depersonalized and abstracted, it is not difficult to recognize that the first three of these realities were original manifestations of the Egyptian godhead; that is, Hellenized theoretical “corpses” of three living Egyptian hypostases—Ra (as fire), Shu (as air), and Geb (as earth). By the same method of analysis, an inert liquid had been abstracted from the vivacious seminal flow of Atum. An impersonal element was postulated instead. It was water.

The attempt by Empedocles, to dignify his abstracted elements by identifying each again with an old deity of the Hellenic tradition, resulted only in the redefinition of these gods at some points closer to the philosopher's elements—and their implied demise. In the construction of such ontological equations, it always happens that the less understood is absorbed into whatever is better understood. Look at this!

Hear first [of] the four roots of all things: bright Zeus, life-giving Hera (air), and Aidoneus (earth), and Nestis who moistens the springs of men with her tears.

And a second thing I will tell thee: There is no origination of anything that is mortal, nor yet any end in baneful death; but only mixture and separation of what is mixed, but men call this “origination.” (Fragments 33–34)[21]

This half-hearted attempt by Empedocles to revitalize his basic categories, or root elements, by linking them to Greek polytheism seems almost pitiful. Monotheism for analytic minds defaults into monism (i.e., monism describes God from whom life has been abstracted), and polytheism defaults into pluralism. All modes of depersonalization in this universe, and all modes of human progress, are accomplished at the expense of the living gods, or of a living God.

What, in Empedocles' fourfold world, accounts for life and motion? What or who does the mixing and the separating of elemental roots? As efficient causes for this process he named Love and Strife. But what were Love and Strife apart from personal beings who now were mere aggregates mixed together? Set in an almost Buddhist context of “origination,” Love and Strife as analytically ascertained efficient causes were no more than the inert extracts of what used to be the living souls of Aphrodite and Mars. They had become abstractions that depended for their mobility on a new set of godlike beings—on philosophers who, alone among the world's intellectual beings, were left to ascribe efficacy or withhold it from the configurations of reality for which they had become managers and definers.

Anaxagoras

Anaxagoras (ca.500–428 B.C.E.) was an older contemporary of Empedocles, and to the latter he responded. He, too, denied the ontological status of “coming into being” and “perishing.” The general pattern he saw in the universe resembled the one Empedocles already had postulated. But a selection of only four elements, mixing and separating, seemed overly simple and crude to him. He therefore postulated a creative Mind that issued forth an infinite number—and watch this!—of first principles or “seeds.”

Over against the Egyptian heritage we can recognize instantly the “novelty” of this idea of Anaxagoras. Procedurally, he disagreed with Empedocles' dissolution of four hypostases of the godhead into four separate elements. But then, as a first aid remedy to this depersonalization of reality he attempted to return to basic orthodox Egyptian process theology. The stream of All-being still could be explained best by him as an infinite number of “seeds” flowing, joining, and separating—as if still within an unnamable Egyptian godhead's seminal flow.

From such a postulate, which is traceable to the land of the Nile, Anaxagoras deduced his ontology of “seeds.” But his aim was not to establish an Egyptian cult. On the contrary, he contributed to Greek philosophy and made his intellectual progeny ever more curious about what kinds of distinct small seeds actually do exist within All-being—seeds awaiting analysis by human minds and manipulation by hands.

The remaining pluralists, the atomists Leucippus, Democritus and Epicurus need not be discussed to provide additional perspective for this book. Their contributions lead off farther in the opposite direction from our interest. Once the principles of division and subtraction had been applied in philosophical methodology, scientific predator teeth and appetites could finish off what was left.

Philosophical debates, thereafter, needed to concern themselves only with analytic “scientific” questions, about how much smaller first principles, atoms, or seeds should be imagined for easier manipulation and experimentation. If they were imagined large enough to be still somehow visible, reasoning could proceed quantitatively. Whenever they were too small to be seen, philosophical discussion continued, just the same, on the basis of distinguishing qualities inherent in the next larger things. But then, qualities in turn could be quantified, abstractly, along numbered and arbitrary scales.

For down-to-earth industry and applied sciences, pluralistic thought was a blessing. It provided many more pieces and fragments that could be gathered, owned, and brought under control. Thus, the numerology of those religiously timid Pythagoreans has served philosophers and scientists well—as it had served ambitious domesticators and grand domesticators earlier.

Socrates

Socrates (ca. 469–399 B.C.E.), the principal founder of Greek philosophy in Athens, need be mentioned here only in passing. The fact that this discussion will pay less attention to Socrates than to some of his Ionian predecessors may indeed seem unfair. However, the motive for this abridgement is not to deprive Socrates of his rightful place in the annals of intellectual history. Nor has it been our aim to write here a full historical sketch of Greek philosophy or revise the biographical sketches of those who are considered to be philosophers. All these tasks have been done more thoroughly by other historians. Our aim here is to show enough of ontology, cosmogony, and cosmology to expose the ideological continuity between ancient Egyptian theology and what, in Ionia and Athens, became “philosophy.”

In his younger years the man Socrates, like most progressive minds of his time, was attracted to the study of natural science. This implies that he seriously concerned himself as belonging to the "Egyptian-Ionian" ontological tradition already sketched in the preceding chapter. But by the time Socrates finally became acquainted with the younger Plato, his social conscience already had matured to a point where he preferred to dwell on questions of ethics and socio-political reform.

Socrates placed his hope on the honest confrontational cultivation of logos; thus, on the direct rational struggle for truth. Of course, this is not to say that he failed to appreciate playfulness in his discussions. But, in comparison to the Confucian way, for instance, his was a more boisterous aristocratic puppy play.

The philosophical method of Socrates was designed to educate leaders for a still youthful and confident Hellenic civilization, one that was not yet very far removed from the parent hunter-herder-bandit cultures that earlier on the prairies of Eurasia had developed a taste for horsemanship, adventure, heroism, and epic poetry. Sparks from the eyes of these ancestral horsemen, from their horse-and-glory ethos of heroism, still glowed in the eyes of Socrates and his contemporaries. His own confidence in the positive power of intellect, and in its direct applicability to the ordering of human society, still drew from the wellspring of that same positive fighting spirit.

The confidence Socrates placed on the ability of human reason knew few bounds. It remained unshaken to his death. To steer the Hellenic virgin intellect in the direction of a rational and humane political order, Socrates baited young aspirants with puzzles and enduring existential questions. He lured them into membership in his intellectual aristocracy. Admission into that circle of philosopher friends had to be earned by rational discourse, by a kind of mental dueling.

People from lower social classes, whose menial labors and struggles had numbed and humbled their spirits, generally had little appreciation for the Athenian philosopher and the progeny of wise guys who sought out his company. Yes, his methods of interrogation inspired some bright young men of leisure to intellectual competition, to self-confidence and the perfection of mental skills. But these same methods quite easily alienated ordinary folk. The haughtiness of philosophers inflicted intellectual defeat on ordinary slow-witted folk. Their embarrassments festered and frequently aggravated into hate. Enough Athenian people disliked Socrates in 399 when the death sentence was proposed at his trial, and the motion passed.

Plato

The primary aspect of the philosophy of Plato (427–347 B.C.E.) that needs to be summarized here is his famous theory of “ideas.” In addition we offer some statements from the Timaeus to suggest a few clues concerning his cosmological orientation.

Indeed, the theory of “ideas” is central to Plato's system. With its help he achieved a position of compromise between Parmenides' supposed insistence on permanence and Heraclites' emphasis on life as flux. Accordingly, Platonic “ideas” are, whereas things in the sensible realm are merely caught up in a process of becoming. The data obtained concerning objects of sense experience are known to fluctuate and change. These data only “share” or “participate” temporarily in the intelligible world, in the realm of the permanent “ideas.”

While contemplating the Socratic-Platonic theory of “ideas” from the point of view of a more nominalistic and process-conscious epistemology, a critical perspective is called for. All inclusive plurals or universal ideas, as these are abstracted from their concrete and specific associations in the visible world—that is, once they have been committed to memory and fixed as word symbols or as Platonic “ideas”—will be envisioned necessarily and self‑servingly by finite minds as worthwhile and eternally valid. Finite minds will grasp anything that promises them the prospect of owning something eternal.

In contrast to “ideas,” which in memory reappear as permanent and fixed, the sense-experienced world naturally appears transient, changing, and therefore less dependable. To mortal eyes and hands, who would like to grasp and possess eternity, the dimension of finite experiences will never satisfy completely nor lastingly.

Plato intuited his universal “ideas” as realities that transcend sense data. He regarded them as real beings that, themselves, participate in still greater units of permanence. Of course, Plato presumed that universal “ideas” were more than just inert (i.e., memorized) symbols. He postulated the notion that his ideas participate in the most permanent kind of reality. As all sense objects that come into human awareness “participate” in “ideas” at some lower level, thinkable by human minds, so all these same lower-level ideas themselves may be regarded as participating in more inclusive and greater, but equally permanent, ideas. And so this hierarchy of ideas extends to where it culminates on high in the still more-inclusive ideas of Goodness, Truth, and Beauty.

Within the domain of human recollection, these more-inclusive “ideas” can be traced further, metaphorically speaking, to ever larger accumulations of inert generality where, formally and logically, they may be envisioned as “sharing” or as “participating” in still-greater reality. The most inclusive and supreme, the most lastingly fixed sum of all goodness, truth, and beauty is the summum bonum, is the GOOD itself.

Looking back at Plato through the eyes of his younger contemporary, the philosopher Aristotle, the eternal Platonic “ideas” represent ontology by which life and motion could not be adequately explained. In response to this deficiency, Aristotle introduced his own doctrine of no less than four distinct causes: material, formal, efficient or motive, and final causes. Could one, five, or a hundred distinct causes, perceived through analysis, have gotten Aristotle's universe better into motion under the auspices of his unmoved and unmoving Prime Mover? Cosmogonically speaking, that seems doubtful.

Every historian of philosophy sooner or later will be confronted with the fact that the world of every Greek philosopher in the footsteps of Hesiod has tended to come apart at some seam: along some fine line of demarcation between heaven and earth, between being and becoming, between a conceptually fixed reality and the changing apparitions of still throbbing life.

In the Timaeus

The most elaborate textual source for Plato's cosmology is a dialogue named after its primary speaker, Timaeus. It generally is agreed that this character, who in the dialogue converses with Socrates, speaks as a proponent of Plato and so expresses the writer's own ideas. The dialogue format therefore was the philosopher-playwright's convenient way of raising a number of weak cosmological hypotheses without risking his personal reputation. Religious theogonies and scientific cosmologies from different ages, and of variable credulity, have so been given a voice in this treatise.

Whether Plato's speculations in the Timaeus are actually believable anymore, or whether they should now be discarded, is of no great concern for this historical task. For the time being we are interested in exploring the presence of Egyptian traces in Plato's ontology.

Posterity has made use of the Timaeus in a great variety of ways. The so-called Middle Platonists and Neoplatonists in Alexandria favored the Timaeus for what many modern philosophers have come to regard as its weakness—for its voracious variety. This loosely structured treatise enabled Neoplatonists to remain within the sphere of Greek philosophy and, at the same time, dip heavily into their long-lost substratum of Egyptian wisdom, to their hearts' content.

Christian theologians naturally preferred the Timaeus to other Platonic works. In the dialogue's underlayment of Egyptian ontology they discovered a natural affinity with their own christology and theology. After all, Christendom was born from, and overtaken by, the same Alexandrian-Hellenistic undercurrent of Egyptian theological notions that entrapped a Porphyry and a Saint Augustine. Both men embraced the Egyptian process theology under the guise of religiously neutral philosophy. Each did so for different reasons, of course. With its amazing openness toward the ancient Egyptian ontological core, which has puzzled students of Plato ever since, the Timaeus eventually provided materials for building a bridge, a rational bridge of rapprochement between Christian theology and Platonic philosophy.

Egypt Romanticized—The major dialogue portion of the Timaeus is introduced by a quaint secondhand tale; and that tale is traced to an old priest who served the goddess Neith, in Sais, Egypt. The significance is not in what Plato makes Timaeus communicate about Egypt. In light of the fact that the Egyptian priest shared only historicized Athenian conceit, that amount of communication seems almost negligible. The tale contains fantasies about the fabled glory of ancient Athens, nine thousand years earlier, and a thousand years before the city of Sais itself had been founded.

Such a tale, obviously, amounts to no more than a round of self-congratulation on the part of members of the Athenian philosophers' club. Moreover, the goddess Neith was deemed significant only to the extent that she could be identified with Athena. By the same token, Plato's knowledge about the Nile being Egypt's never-failing savior and about the fact that Egyptians know stories about many floods is of the superficial type, like the gossip of Greek tourists or traders.

Nevertheless, the intellectual dependence of Greece on ancient Egyptian tradition is implicit throughout this introductory tale. The assertion made by the very old Egyptian priest, to the effect that in comparison with Egyptian sages “Hellenes are never anything but children” and that “in mind [they] are all young” (Timaeus. 22b), is not contested by Socrates in the course of the dialogue, nor by anyone else. So, although specific evidence of Plato's familiarity with Egyptian culture and religion is lacking, the reader nevertheless is left with the distinct impression that, in Plato's own estimate, Egyptian wisdom preceded Greek sophia. And this fabled Egyptian prehistory, in all likelihood, was meant to vouch for what the character Timaeus was about to teach at the behest of Plato.

The Cosmogony—Even though he was introduced as an astronomer, Timaeus quickly comes around to one of Plato's own central concerns: the distinction between Parmenidean being and Heraclitean becoming, or, eternal “ideas” vis-à-vis “objects” of sense experience:

First then, in my judgement, we must make a distinction and ask, What is that which always is and has no becoming, and what is that which is always becoming and never is? That which is apprehended by intelligence and reason is always in the same state, but that which is conceived by opinion with the help of sensation and without reason is always in a process of becoming and perishing and never really is. (Timaeus 27d–28a)[22]

The method by which the universe was created is explained at the very outset. It assumes a generative process that, although mentioned repeatedly, never is questioned throughout the dialogue: “The creator made this world of generation” (Timaeus 29d). And, when the creator framed the universe, “he put intelligence in soul, and soul in body … the world came into being—a living creature truly endowed with soul and intelligence by the providence of God” (30b). The original universe is and was invisible; it “contains in itself all intelligible beings, just as this world comprehends us and all other visible creatures” (30c–d). Timaeus calls the realm that includes all intelligible creatures the “one only-begotten and created heaven” (31b), and thereby he specified this divine process of generation as essentially having been one of procreation.

True to the pre-Socratic tradition of Greek philosophy, Plato gives precedence to the “biological nature” of this living and only-begotten universe, over and above the need for clarifying astronomical structures. Ontological concerns predominate here over bare cosmological questions. Plato's relational density scale, applied to the four elements of his “bio-physics” so to speak, is the traditional Ionian one.

“As fire is to air so is air to water, and as air is to water so is water to earth” (Timaeus 32b). The universe is a “creature” spherical in shape, soul diffuses from its center throughout its body and represents “a circle moving in a circle.” As far as soul is concerned, “in origin and excellence” it or she “is prior to and older than the body” (Timaeus 34a–c). The creator has “formed within her the corporeal universe” (36d). And “when the father and creator saw the creature which he had made moving and living, the created image of the eternal gods, he rejoiced” (37c).

The actual arrangement of sun, moon, and planets in orbits around the earth was made by God for the establishment of time: “The sun and moon and five other stars, which are called the planets, were created by him in order to distinguish and preserve the numbers of time … he placed them in orbits … in seven orbits seven stars.” The moon was placed in the nearest orbit circling earth, next the sun, then the morning star and the star sacred to Hermes (Timaeus 38c–d). Over against these moving stars, for contrast, “the fixed stars were created, to be divine and eternal animals, ever abiding and revolving after the same manner and on the same spot” (40b).

Interlude—Two very interesting paragraphs follow here (Timaeus 40d–41a). Timaeus pleaded agnosia with regard to knowing something about “the other divinities.” As a mature individual he goes along with the folk wisdom to the effect that one “must accept the traditions of the men of old time who affirm themselves to be the offspring of the gods—that is what they say—and they must surely have known their own ancestors.” Subtle irony here is transposed, rhetorically and without wasting an extra word, into mild satire: “How can we doubt the word of the children of the gods?”

It appears as though the Greek gods, mentioned next, were added only for good measure. Oceanus and Tethys as children of Earth and Heaven, along with Phorcys, Cronos, and Rhea; Zeus and Hera. Together they seem almost as foreign to the cosmology of the Timaeus as the arbitrary insertion of an American Indian “Earth Diver” origin myth would have been. These paragraphs represent no more than a courteous bow in the direction of Greek mythology and religion. They were intended to excuse the writer from having to relate seriously to his Hellenic religious heritage. Plato hurried to return to what, earlier, we already identified as orthodox Egyptian ontology.

Toward a Hellenic Tefnut—Earth herself is first introduced as “our nurse” (Timaeus 40b). It appears as though Plato is careful here, so as not to present her as a potential equal partner of God the father. Earth is definitely situated at the opposite end along Plato's invisibility-visibility continuum. This reading is supported by the fact that later (49b) the “receptacle” or “nurse of all generation,” or “mother” (50c–d) embraces the entire creation, not only earth.

On that larger cosmic scale the receiving principle is mother, whereas the source and wellspring of all being is father. The entire creation is the creator's generation or offspring. If there was no castration plot in Hesiod's theogony it would be conceivable, up to this point, that this portion of Plato's vision of the universe could be traced to some Greek Father Heaven and Mother Earth mythology. But as the case happens to be, Plato's statements rest solidly on an Egyptian basis. We may suspect that he had an inkling about this. Why else, with all his Athenian pride, would he have Egyptianized this dialogue from the outset with an exotic tall tale about Athens and Sais?

The road back to Hesiodic theogony, or to general Indo-European religion, was efficiently blocked by Plato himself. The first mother he had in mind resembles far more the invisible and receptive Tefnut than Hesiod's concrete Mother Earth:

the mother and receptacle of all created and visible and in any way sensible things is not to be termed earth or air or fire or water, or any of their compounds, or any of the elements from which these are derived, but is an invisible and formless being which receives all things and in some mysterious way partakes of the intelligible, and is most incomprehensible. (Timaeus 51a–b).

This Platonic statement almost certainly earlier, at Heliopolis, would have passed as an adequate description of Tefnut and her matching polarity in relation to Shu. The amazing thing is that Plato does not even stop at this point of rapprochement to Egyptian orthodoxy. He does not let this postulated invisible mother dangle, so to speak, from his Platonic heaven of eternal “ideas.” Instead, Plato assures us that fire inflames her from time to time, that water moistens her, and that her motherly substance becomes earth and air (Timaeus 51b). She indeed is the full Tefnut, Atum's receptacle “hand,” and the All-Mother of the Heliopolitan universe.

Pythagorean Numerology—Traces of Pythagorean number mysticism and geometric structuralism are frequent in Plato's Timaeus, especially in sections 43–44 and 53c–57d. In all likelihood, Plato had his theory of “ideas” already in place by the time he exposed his mind to Pythagoreans in southern Italy. Moreover, their numerological key to the cosmos could be accommodated easily into his much broader “theory of ideas.” For Plato the invisible world of Pythagorean numerical abstractions became simply another dimension, another register or level, within the greater realm of eternal “ideas.”

The pragmatic continuity between numbers and words already was alluded to in the preceding chapter, in the section on Pythagoras and his place in the history of Greek philosophy. Ciphers or numbers correspond in their function to words or names; but they differ from words and names in that they have been subjugated more severely to the human mind and will. To be specific, numbers are "faceless names or words,” deprived of personal or individual characteristics, reduced and thereby grasped more easily, possessed and manipulated for manipulation's sake.

Number “ideas” do match Platonic word “ideas” quite nicely. But they furnish greater confidence and greater justification of human assertiveness vis-à-vis the cosmos—much more control than name “ideas” can provide. Inasmuch as numbers can help us reduce greater reality configurations to smaller manageables, they also can contribute significantly to shore up our otherwise finite philosophers' and scientists' egos.

In the same manner in which “numbers” in Plato's mind have become fused with “ideas,” so both of these were deemed to fuse in the mind of God. Therefore, “when the world began to get into order … God now fashioned them by form and number … as far as possible the fairest and best, out of things which [initially] were not fair and good (Timaeus 53b).

Souls and Salvation—The creator has delegated the task of creating mortal animate beings on earth to his first generation of offspring, the immortal gods. But before assigning this task to the firstborn gods, the creator himself made a great number of immortal souls, equal in number to the stars (Timaeus 41a–e). Lesser gods then created mortal bodies, and into these they incorporated the immortal souls that God himself had made. Not being the creation of a single Father throughout, the unions of immortal souls and mortal bodies are temporary arrangements. Moreover, the immortal principle of reason thereby is assigned the task of transforming or sublimating the mortal portion, or as Plato writes, “to draw in its train the turbulent mob of later accretions made up of fire and air and water and earth” (42c).[23] The immortal soul, guided by reason, thus is given the task of achieving some kind of victory over the sensate and irrational dimension of a human being. For its reward the soul is returned to its better and original divine state.

But then, Hindu notions about samsara and karma, introduced into the Timaeus perhaps together with a heavy presence of Pythagorean number mysticism and fueled by philosophers' intellectual elitism, left Plato with a rather twisted notion concerning soteriology for a total humankind:

He who lived well during his appointed time was to return and dwell in his native star, and there he would have a blessed and congenial existence. But if he failed in attaining this, at the second birth he would pass into a woman, and if, when in that state of being, he did not desist from evil, he would continually be changed into some brute who resembled him in the evil nature which he had acquired. (Timaeus 42b-c)

The Summary—A quick glance at Plato's concluding sentences in the Timaeus will help place his larger conceptual framework into the broader Egyptian-Hellenic perspective postulated by this book:

We may now say that our discourse about the nature of the universe has [come to] an end. The world has received animals, mortal and immortal, and is fulfilled with them, and has become the visible animal containing the visible—the sensible God who is the image of the intellectual, the greatest, best, fairest, most perfect—the one only-begotten heaven. (Timaeus 92c)

If contemplated for its ontology and structure, from the greater to the smaller, this summary statement recognizes an Intellect-God who is the greatest, best, fairest, and most perfect. No doubt, Plato associates with this Intellect-God his entire realm of “ideas”; that is, associates them at some point prior to where distinctions are made among strata or levels of these “ideas.” So far so good. But are the sensible and the intellectual manifestations of God, together, called the one only-begotten heaven? Separately as well as jointly, either of these implies a supreme begetter who exists beyond the static and sterile realm of Platonic “ideas.”

I doubt whether Plato knew very much directly about ancient Egyptian theology. But he inferred enough from the implied “living” or “divine cosmos” that had been presupposed by most of his Greek predecessors in philosophy. When the inertness of his abstract “ideas” disappointed him, Plato, like everyone else, was forced to think of the remaining cosmos as being somehow alive. In this manner the philosopher ended by assuming a godhead who could “beget” intelligent as well as living offspring.

Of course such a conclusion, obtained while reasoning from the God's offspring, is ontologically inverted. Nevertheless, in the context of concrete existential living, the philosopher Plato, like everyone else, comfortably inferred the greater from the presence of the lesser; and then, he told his tale of deduction forward from the greater cause to the lesser effect. What human mind can be faulted for succumbing in this manner to the necessities of its finitude!

The visible universe that Plato contemplated was a God; that is, one that was begotten by the higher invisible Intellect-God and creator of souls. In turn, that visible universe “conceived” its animals with all the implied philosophical-zoological ambiguity: “Of the divine, he himself was the creator, but the creation of the mortal he committed to his offspring” (Timaeus 69c).

Subsequent Gnostic prophets and teachers, especially those inclined toward Iranian dualism, made much of Plato's ever so slight Hesiodic separation between God and his mixed and mortal offspring. Plato's profane metaphor portrays God as mixing immortal souls with lesser elements, as in an ordinary “bowl"—as if he had arbitrarily been taking souls and lesser elements from separate realms. The unity that existed in Heliopolitan emanationalism, between the godhead and derivative humanity, seems to be assaulted by this careless metaphor.

"Conception" somewhere between the Intelligible and Sensible realms can be read, in the philosophical sense, as “conceiving” ideas. At the next lower or sense-object level the same word can be applied to mean the conception of bodies. Both belong to the same process of divine emanation, procreation or begetting. The presence of this dual meaning of conception in our English language may be appreciated, still, as a trace of our Egyptian-Platonic heritage.

Aristotle

A half a generation later the philosopher Aristotle (384–322 B.C.E.) has attempted, somewhat half-heartedly, to heal the Hesiodic wound in his own learned way. This former student of Plato was dissatisfied with the gash his mentor seemed to have cut, as a line of separation, across his entire ontology between the static reality of “ideas” (the sterilized Father Heaven) and the realm of transient sense experience (the fruitful Mother Earth).[24]

Between Earth and Heaven

With the healing hand of a physician, Aristotle arranged Plato's "ideas" along the vertical continuum of a hierarchy. He arranged them as convertible "forms" that, individually, could be seen as imposed on inversely convertible stratified "matter." That is to say, a higher "form" (formerly a Platonic “idea”) contains a lower form as its “matter.” For example, an entity such as a “chair” constitutes matter (i.e., content) in relation to the larger form “furniture,” whereas “chair” at the same time also provides shape or form to the “wood” it contains. Thus, in this next context of a lower order, “chair” is form whereas “wood” is matter. Furniture, chair, and wood are so interrelated hierarchically, participating as entities in some next higher form and embracing a next lower as matter. They may be so distinguished from one another as belonging to different levels of reality—to different degrees of potentiality or actuality—but as form and matter they are interrelated.

Levels of reality are so knitted together in a hierarchy from the highest to the lowest. Pure matter, the lowest, is pure potentiality, whereas pure form, the highest, is actuality. In Aristotle's astronomy these designations are applied to a single geo-centric universe—to a single cosmic hierarchy of beings that range from matter and earth here below all the way up to pure actuality, the Prime Mover.

By this stairway of forms and matter Aristotle attempted to subdivide the primary line of ontological separation—the line which divides Plato's realm of ideas from his realm of sense experience, or, the old slash by which Cronos cut apart Heaven and Earth—into many smaller and therefore less gruesome incisions. His conceptual stairway, paralleled with the attributes of potentiality (for matter) and actuality (for form), extends so from earth to the outer perimeter of the universe, to the Prime Mover.

However, the famous student of Plato was unable to heal the Uranos wound by his analytic method. By substituting many smaller analytic cuttings, even the best analytic mind cannot subdivide a larger cut back to its former state of uncut wholeness. A human mind can imagine how to divide or to “cut up” a larger wound, hypothetically, into smaller wounds. In real life, a wound treated in this manner invariably is being enlarged, at least for the duration that predator minds continue to gnaw at it analytically.

By way of his questionable science of astronomy, not by way of his surgical metaphysics, the philosopher Aristotle most showed his Hesiodic hand. His model of a perfectly circular universe had earth at its center, with earth representing the low level of matter and potentiality at the same time. This Earth is encircled by spheres that, like her, all contemplate in succession some higher moving celestial body, some higher epicycle, or some higher orbit of motion. Inasmuch as Greek philosophers disliked infinite regresses, it seemed reasonable that there should be a farthest circling star or sphere that has no concrete and moving celestial entity left to contemplate. Beyond that outer sphere, surrounding and extending beyond, is the Prime Mover.

Though everything else moves beneath him and on account of him, Aristotle assures us that the divine Prime Mover is himself an Unmoved Mover (Physics 5). This First Mover has no limit or magnitude and is situated at the circumference of the Eudoxian-Aristotelian world (10). Aristotle ruled out the possibility of having the Prime Mover create movement by either pushing or pulling. Thus, in his Metaphysics he derived motion in the universe from the fact that the Prime Mover still is “an object of desire” on account of which other entities move.[25] This finally implies that this God not only is unmoved by someone else, but he himself also may not be moving.

As a mental First Cause who himself is thought of, here, as contemplating after the fashion of an armchair philosopher and who exists beyond the planets, this First Mover demonstrates no physical motion. Being “pure form” and mind he only can contemplate motion. He thinks about motion unencumbered by the uncertainties being displayed at the lowest matter‑laden earth or by her physical rhythms of commotion and productivity.

The Legacy of Hesiod

Centuries before philosophers pondered these matters abstractly, the Greek heavenly Father, "mythologically" if you like, lost his ability and his desire to be an active participant in creation. The celestial inaction of Aristotle's First Cause of the universe resembles, remarkably well, the condition of Hesiod's once forcibly retired Father Heaven. At least since the days of Hesiod the Greek Father-god of Heaven no longer was able to actively affect the productivity and the life of Mother Earth, or life upon her. All contemplation of celestial motion that leads to responsive motion on Earth, in Hesiod's as well as in Aristotle's system, happens from desires awakened in lower regions.

All the while, a dynamic Earth still moves and continually renews her landscapes and generates fresh life. She produces mortal nourishment for her mortal offspring to thrive on. In contrast, the anciently castrated Greek Father of Heaven is left by Aristotle to contemplate the motion to which his paternal energies no longer can contribute actively. He seems to have barely enough energy left to contemplate what motion might be, apart from himself.

The epistemological fact of the matter is that, in a self-centered philosophical perspective, the human activity of thinking conveniently presents itself as the cause of all motion. Modeled after the contents of a human mind, Aristotle's farthest celestial reality thereby is dedicated to the comprehension of ideas. Motion, after all its associations with matter have been subtracted, is motion at its purest, pure form and actuality. Indeed, only a divine mind, and just possibly yet a philosopher's mind, can comprehend that kind of “motion.”

Eudoxus of Knidos

Of course, there is more to Aristotle's story than a Platonic education and Hesiodic mythology. Aristotle also has learned a few things from the astronomer and mathematician Eudoxus of Knidos (ca. 400–350 B.C.E.), a teacher who once went to Egypt and shaved his head. He lived with Egyptian priests for sixteen months in order to learn from them.[26] It can be assumed that a man of the caliber of Eudoxus, while undergoing such inconveniences, sought out Egypt's most prominent thinkers to make his efforts worth his while.

Unfortunately, we can trace the teachings of Eudoxus only indirectly by way of the imprint they have left on Aristotle. So, whatever value still can be attributed to the geocentric astronomy of Eudoxus and Aristotle, two and a half millennia later, it will necessarily have been reduced to what their doctrines appear to have added to Western intellectual history.

Based on what already is known about Egyptian theology, it no longer should be difficult to envision how something like the geo-centric astronomy of Eudoxus could have been concocted in Egypt. Nor should that feat have seemed unreasonable to a Greek materialist who dabbled in Egyptian theology. All he needed for a start was Heliopolitan orthodox theology. When astronomical observations are added to the emanational Atum theology, the Eudoxian astronomy comes nicely into focus. It comes into focus together with Aristotle's metaphysics of “forms and matter” that was based on, or at least harmonized with, that same hybrid of emanational astronomy. Over against the Egyptian theological background, surprisingly, even Aristotle's astronomy begins to make some sense. Heavenly bodies move as they can be observed, and creative thought-power still somehow can be traced back through its levels of emanation to a distant Atum-like source. A semblance of harmony between Egyptian theology and Greek scientific observation thereby has been achieved.

But obviously, there is also a problem associated with Eudoxian geocentric astronomy when it is contemplated in relation to its orthodox Egyptian setting. Egyptian ontology with its Atum-Ra or “Hill-Sun” synthesis was geocentric as well as heliocentric. By contrast, the cosmology of Aristotle and Eudoxus was only geo-centric. Eudoxian astronomy lacked the creative motion of the Egyptian model according to which motion, as well as intelligence, emanated together from the same source and direction. Motion in Heliopolitan theogony was accounted for as the central godhead's seminal emission, in his radiation, his spitting, and later in Memphite theology in his speaking of commands.

The Greek mythico-philosophical background, however, which had inherited Hesiod's castrated or immobilized Father Sky and which assumed that motion originates from Earth and her son Cronos and from her remaining progeny, blocked the full Egyptian two-way path of reasoning for Aristotle. It distorted Egypt's larger mythology of emanation for him. This much is certain, that without some concrete mythological underpinnings the abstract foam of any analytic philosophy, or science, dissolves into nothing—deprived of ontological foundation as well as of ethos.

Egyptian Metaphysics

Let us nevertheless consider for a moment the positive side of Aristotle's thought. What made him want to heal the Hesiodic wound? We may never know the full answer to this question. Long before Pascal's ditty was being recited—to the effect that the heart has reasons of which reason does not know—the “heart” of an Egyptian thinker had reasons of which Greek “reason” understood relatively little. But Greek minds nevertheless were attracted to Egyptian thoughtful “hearts” (compare the Memphite theology in Booklet Two).

We therefore must restate our question: Was Aristotle's metaphysics of “form and matter” perchance also a philosophy born from an Egyptianized heart? If Aristotle's starting point is seen as a confrontation with Plato's implied ontological dualism, then we can truly say that in response he set out on a path of reasoning toward orthodox Egyptian monistic process theology. The challenge to reconcile his philosophy with Eudoxian-Egyptian astronomy could have stimulated him to think along the line of this implicit rapprochement. Even though Aristotle ended up building a metaphysical stairway of forms and matter—with many steps to match the progression of genus and differentia in his scheme of classifications—he nevertheless also managed to restore therewith some sort of continuity that superficially resembled the Egyptian emanationalism.

Inasmuch as Aristotle characterized Earth and “matter” together as “potentiality,” and the Prime Mover and “pure form” together as “actuality,” he insisted implicitly on some ontological cohesion from heaven on high all the way down to the dark earth. Thus the only important difference that remained, between Aristotelian and Egyptian cosmology, was the assumption that the first cause of motion in the universe was not at the center of the universe. For Aristotle this first cause was diffused along the outskirts of his known world. He obviously was led to this conclusion in an attempt to still conform to the whereabouts of the Hesiodic impotent Uranos.

But then, if no real life energy was emanating from Aristotle's Prime Mover, at least thoughts of motion were being inspired beneath him by his sheer benign presence. Somehow this retired sky deity has remained an object of desire, in conformity to the Egyptian godhead. Somehow the universe still moved, if no longer by divine desire from above, then at least by creaturely desires from below.

It seems as though Aristotle struggled, even yet at this point, to repair his inverted structure of Egyptian ontology and cosmology with a genuine glimpse of Egyptian soteriology. The nostalgia expressed by lower entities toward the distant Prime Mover, as toward pure actuality and an object of their desire, still reminds us of the homeward yearning of Heliopolitan ka souls toward Atum. Only—the celestial bodies in Aristotle's universe do not return home to the Prime Mover, as Egyptian ka essences did. This demonstrates the fact that cosmology, by itself, does not a complete soteriology make.

The final victory of overcoming the spell of Hesiodic separation, in the history of Greek philosophy, was left to two other men who were not only Greek philosophers but also Egyptians: Ammonius Saccas and Plotinus.

The Neo-Egyptian Philosophy of Plotinus

Plotinus conceptualized the Supreme Divinity as a trinity that manifests itself in three hypostases: as One, as Mind, and as Soul. The prototypes of these hypostases still can be traced in the history of Egyptian thought to the first three divinities who make up the basis of the Heliopolitan Ennead: Atum-Ra, Tefnut-Mahet, and Shu. These correspond in the philosophy of Plotinus to the One, Mind, and Soul. To designate each of his three hypostases Plotinus had recourse to a number of synonyms. Inasmuch as some of these designations will occur frequently throughout this chapter, they must be introduced here.[27]

Plotinus in Brief

The One

The Greek term to proton is translated most simply as the One. It also is called the First, the Good, the Simple, the Absolute, the Transcendent, the Infinite, the Unconditioned, and sometimes even the Father, and the God. The One is unknowable, beyond evaluation, and transcends our concepts of ordinary being. What can be predicated about its existence is only that “nonexistence” would be a wrong ascription. The One also is beyond thought, because thought implies analytic distinctions; and analytic distinctions, in turn, imply the presence of parts and therefore also the possibility of deficiencies and imperfections.

The Mind

MacKenna translates nous most often as Intellectual Principle. It is also given as Divine Thought and Universal Intelligence; or, as the first something of which existence can be predicated. It is the act, the offspring, as well as the unseen “image” of the One; it is a mediation with the unknowable One. Its function is to know. Nous or Mind is the highest something knowable or approachable by human minds. In that sense it also may be named Spirit or Supreme Soul.

Together with the Divine Mind, with Divine Intellection, or with the Divine‑Intellectual‑Principle, plurality alongside complexity and multiplicity, have their beginning. Mind is the Intelligible Universe or the totality of Divine Thoughts. The content of the Divine Mind is the “ideas” of Platonic philosophy.

Like the One from which they emanate, so too the Platonic “ideas” are real beings, eternal originals, archetypes, and intellectual forms of whatever exists in the lower spheres. The Intelligible Universe extends to, or encompasses, all particular minds and intelligences that—metaphorically speaking and still unseen—are the images, representations, phantasms, or reflections of the invisible Universal or Divine Mind. All the progressively degenerate beings, which emanate from the One on down in the direction of lowly matter, which happens to be the faintest presence of Real Being, nevertheless are more realistically present, concurrently, as archetypes or Platonic “ideas” within reach of the hypostasis of Divine Thought.

Divine Intellection operates two‑directionally. Downwardly or outwardly it generates creative power that, in turn, displays Thought with increasing degrees of visibility; whereas upwardly it contemplates its still more invisible source, the One. The visibility or concreteness of the Mind hypostasis increases thus along the path of emanation or descent. At the same time, Mind generates such Real Being as can be found, still, in conditions that prevail within the reaches of the next hypostasis.

The Soul

The lowest hypostasis of the Plotinian trinity is psyche or Soul, the All Soul, Universal Soul, or Soul of the All. After the manner in which Mind is an emanation of the One, so Soul is an emanation of the One and Mind together.

In the same manner of a two‑directional orientation as the aforementioned hypostasis, of outward and return flow within the range of Mind, so too the Soul has its dual tendencies. Its high‑soul aspect contemplates the Intellectual Principle or Mind, whereas its low‑soul aspect may be identified as the effective Logos or Creative Word of the Universe.[28] At the level where humankind exists, the low‑soul aspect generates body as a temporary home; but following its embodiment, that concretely situated human soul experiences a desire to return homeward. Nostalgically the soul contemplates or retraces its way, homeward, first toward the Intellectual Principle all the while longing for closeness with the One, and then returning beyond, merging into the One.

The All Soul, which is downward oriented, creatively with involvements along its low-soul dimension, becomes involved along its high-soul dimension in upward contemplation. In the downward or outward dimension, soul is the cause of all visible movements and forms. It is the cause of the visible cosmos and world, of everything that can be experienced by the human five senses. The All Soul comprises all emanating sparks of high and low soul together.[29]

* * *

Thus, the Plotinian trinity is an entirety that is manifest in three hypostases. Within these hypostases a singular stream of generative creativity or vitality flows outward from the One, all the way toward meon or matter, which shows off the outer edge of Real Being in general and Soul in particular. Along this outer edge the souls, elements of the All Soul and Real Being, turn inward upon themselves to initiate a counter current that flows homeward again into the One.

For conceptualization, using the metaphor of light, it may be helpful to visualize the outward flow of “generation” and the homeward flow of “contemplation” together along a luminous and shiny spectrum ranging from light to darkness. The One is represented in that spectrum as the source of all light—of light so bright that the human eye is unable to distinguish content. Psychologically speaking, the One can be said to transcend all human faculties of perception and knowledge. At the opposite or darkened end of the spectrum, Soul as Real Being fades out into sluggish materiality by way of becoming visible and creating body. Soul, at its lowest or outermost extremity, stops itself just short of non-Being.

What, in the larger context corresponds then to the hypostasis of Mind? It is present along the intermediate portion of the total spectrum, extending between the unknowable One and the visible Soul. The contents of Mind are invisible, but still knowable.

If radiation of light, as it affects whole mortal persons, is to be chosen as the metaphor for our discourse, then intellectual enlightenment at the level of mind transcends, but corresponds analogically to the enjoyment of visible light rays in the lower realm where soul has become visible through involvement with matter. At the outer reaches of this radiation, souls become visible and involved in sensate bodies. In that lower realm, the experience of light is brought within the range of vision by the “shadows” of darkness and nonbeing. Souls, at that level, therefore are enabled to sense the purer light rays of luminous bodies in contrast with the shadows of nonbeing in which they themselves have become existentially involved.

Thus, whereas for Plotinus there are three hypostases, there is only one source, one essence, and one movement that along its outer reaches coils in unto itself, defensively. There is only one reality, one godhead, one process. All of being, or, All Being, which makes up this process, is considered good. Only the absence of detectable being, the happenstance of void or nonbeing, from a transient human perspective can be experienced or described as apparent evil. In this context the category of “evil” therefore indicates merely directionality for the soul. If the soul were able to continue further in the direction of matter and nonbeing, presumably it would vanish forever. But that will never happen. Soul is a manifestation of All Being. As such it will adhere to Being and will keep returning.

Samples from the Sixth Ennead

The extant writings of Plotinus are fifty-four essays or treatises that have been gathered by Porphyry into six Enneads—six volumes containing nine essays each. It is clear that these essays initially had not been written to make sense in their present sequence as Enneads. Any one Ennead, and even certain portions within an Ennead, may be approached as an independent unit. Individually and taken together, all of them attempt to explain a single reality. They represent variations on a single theme, on the All Being and its emanation.

This book has limited aims and therefore provides commentary on only two Enneads. The Sixth Ennead will be utilized here as a wide-angle lens, to assist our focus on the larger ontology and total process. The Fifth Ennead will be consulted for a more specific view on Plotinian trinitarianism.

To begin our readings somewhere in the Sixth Ennead, we shall take a hint from Emile Brehier who, in a lecture on “The Orientalism of Plotinus,” in 1921–1922, suggested that “the fourth and fifth treatises of the sixth Ennead … can be easily read without any reference to Greek philosophy.”[30] Similar observations can be made regarding other Enneads. In any case, we begin with a quick preview of the climax endings of the treatises that Brehier has singled out.

An Egyptian Clue in VI,4

A discussion of the omnipresence of Soul, in the fourth treatise of the Sixth Ennead, concludes with statements that easily could pass for meditations on ancient Egyptian funerary liturgy:

As for the entry into the World of the Shades, if this means into the unseen, that is its [the soul's] release; if into some lower place, there is nothing strange in that, since even here the soul is taken to be where the body is, in place with the body … (Enneads VI,4,16)[31]

This afterlife anticipation offers comfort for the time when funerary rites must be performed for deceased mortals. What follows after these words of assurance does reintroduce a dualism of souls that is not foreign to Egyptologists; namely, the distinction of authentic soul (the ka) and image soul (the ba). Elsewhere Plotinus has identified these as high soul and low soul.

But on the dissolution of the body?

So long as the image-soul has not been discarded, clearly the higher will be where that is; if on the contrary, the higher has been completely emancipated by philosophic discipline, the image-soul may well go alone to that lower place, the authentic passing uncontaminated into the Intellectual, separated from that image but none the less the soul entire.

Let the image—offspring of the individuality—fare as it may, the true soul when it turns its light upon itself, chooses the higher and by that choice blends into the All, neither acting now nor extinct. (Enneads VI,4,16)

The ka ascends, and as it does it returns to blend with the All, all the while approaching and seeking its future in the direction of the One. The high soul's former association with a soul, the soul-generated body, the body's condition as corpse, and even all ghostly or “prehuman flux” ba apparitions following death remain behind to disappear eventually in the shadow play of nonbeing, of which they are temporary instances. Body and corpse were never more than temporary images. After light is withdrawn no reality is left in what used to be a shadow. The authentic ka energy therefore reunites and blends with divinity, the ka of the All.

An Egyptian Clue in VI,5

Looking for a moment to the culminating sentences of the fifth treatise of the Sixth Ennead that Brehier has mentioned as reflecting an extra-Greek origin, we find the same theory of soul. Only nonbeing, we are told, is abandoned as the authentic high soul travels, purified and whole, toward the hypostasis of Mind and homeward beyond.

you become an All. No doubt you were always that, but there has been an addition and by that addition you are [were] diminished; for the addition was … from non-Being. It is not by some admixture of non-Being that one becomes an entire, but by putting non-Being away.

Visibility and apparitions result from turning away from All-being, and from looking toward its opposite, nonbeing. Plotinus then moved on to illustrations concerning general folk religiosity. It must be kept in mind that he does not rationalize here the existence of lesser gods, as if he were pursuing philosophical apologetics. On the contrary! The philosophy of Plotinus becomes more relevant, here, by its capacity to make its basic tenets agree with those of popular religion. Apparitions of lesser popular gods happen, as Plotinus concedes, under well-known circumstances.

the gods who “in many guises seek our cities”; but there is That Other whom the cities seek, and all the earth and heaven—Him who is everywhere self-abiding and from whom derives Being and the Real Beings [i.e., Ideas] down to Soul and Life, all bound to Him and so moving to that unity which by its very lack of extension is infinite. (Enneads VI,5,12)

One cannot help but be impressed by the summary statement of the seventh treatise. The emanational process of the All is explained, there, as a sequence of dependent hypostases:

Soul dependent upon Intellectual-Principle and Intellectual Principle upon the Good, all is linked to the Supreme by intermediaries, some close, some nearing those of the closer attachment, while the order of sense stands remotest, dependent upon soul. (Enneads VI,7,42)

Inasmuch as no attribute pertaining to the Supreme Good is thinkable—inasmuch as it extends beyond ideas and attributions—all relationships and dependencies must be explained from the perspective of the lower hypostases. Sense experience happens in the domain of soul. Then Soul is dependent on Intellectual Principle or Mind; whereas Intellectual Principle is dependent on the Good or Supreme One. Envisioned objectively, the continuum, which from the One extends down and outward to some lowly sensate soul, in the Enneads repeatedly has been characterized as emanation, radiation, or flow. The beginnings of this conceptualization of the total dynamic process can be traced, convincingly, to ancient Heliopolitan mythology.

Does not the aforementioned passage also make reference to Plato's supreme Idea of the Good? Indeed it seems so. But does this mean that Plotinus borrowed his total ontological vision from Plato's Dialogues? The more one contemplates the words of Plotinus in their Egyptian context, the more obvious it becomes that Good was used here to communicate the orthodox Egyptian notion of the godhead—of Atum, Ptah, or Amun—to Greek minds. The writings of Greek philosophers, together with their specialized philosophical vocabulary, for Plotinus foremost, were a tool for dialogue. With their help he was able to communicate with the intelligentsia of Graeco-Roman colonial culture. Although he so shared his basic Egyptian ontological orientation, Greek philosophies were of only limited use to Plotinus.

Samples from the Fifth Ennead

Greek ontology is built largely on nouns. Platonic ontology, in particular, has contributed to this idolatry of nouns by its habit of elevating many nouns to the status of eternal “ideas.” Plotinus' ontology, we now can see, has not been shaped so much by contemplating the static nouns or “ideas” —that Platonic philosophy left inertly on a bier—rather, it has been affected by the way an inherited Egyptian theology could be paraphrased in the idiom of Greek philosophy. Inasmuch as the godhead of Egyptian orthodoxy always has been beyond the reach of human conceptualization, and inasmuch as Egyptian theologians have always viewed descriptive names or nouns with playful suspicion by Egyptian theologians, the process verbs have become more significant.

At the same time, verbs that describe the divine process of emanation ordinarily have escaped notice among Plotinus' critics who, all along, had been predisposed toward “Hesiodic” Hellenism. This is not to say that Plotinus taught theology underhandedly. As far as his religious openness is concerned, he was not even afraid of pointing to the godhead as an “All Father.” In addition, Plotinus never hesitated to describe this All Father's creative activity as a virile process of engendering.

No further discussion of this basic feature is necessary, at this point, except to say that some emphases in italics will be added to the quotes from the Enneads that follow. Our purpose is to highlight some significant verbs or verbalizations that specifically characterize the emanational activity of the godhead as a process of engendering and bringing home.

Ennead V,1,1

Porphyry placed the treatise “On the Three Principal Hypostases” at the beginning of the Fifth or “theological” Ennead. This treatise is perhaps the most important among those that have paved Neoplatonism's inroads on Christendom. Eusebius of Caesarea, Basil, Augustine, Cyril, and Theodoret all quoted from it.[32] Plotinus began his discussion at the human level of existence; that is, with the fact of divine creation or our soul's estrangement from God. Throughout Part One of this book the reader will have found that this was a favorite theme in the ancient Egyptian funerary cult as well.

What can it be that has brought the souls to forget the father, God, and, though members of the Divine and entirely of that world, to ignore at once themselves and it?

The evil that has overtaken them has its source in self-will … (i.e.) desire for self-ownership … drifting further and further they came to lose even the thought of their origin in the Divine. (V,1,1)

The epistemology implied by these sentences describes, accordingly, the existential upward and homeward yearning of Plotinus' own estranged soul. His epistemology and ontology are the road map for his return journey to God. His philosophical doctrines, in fact, are soteriology.

Ennead V,1,2

After the existential position of his soul has been determined and plotted, soteriologically and epistemologically, Plotinus focused on his position in life as the starting point for his ontology.

Let every soul recall, then, at the outset the truth that soul is the author of all living things, that it has breathed the life into them all, whatever is nourished by earth and sea, all the creatures of the air, the divine stars in the sky; it is the maker of the sun; itself formed and ordered this vast heaven and conducts all that rhythmic motion … (all these living things) gather or dissolve as soul brings them life or abandons them, but soul, since it never can abandon itself, is of eternal being.

Continuing with this postulate of the soul's eternal and divine nature, the discussion that follows moves from the smaller human souls to the presence of still greater souls, to such who have not succumbed to the downward lure that bewitched and estranged the souls of ordinary humankind. Without soul, in Plotinus's words, there would be only “stark body—clay and water—or, rather, the blankness of matter, the absence of Being, and, as an author says, `the excretion of the Gods.'” In search of that greater Soul and to better understand its nature and power, Plotinus contemplated the heavenly system in the upward direction:

By the power of the Soul the manifold and diverse heavenly system is a unit: through soul this universe is a God: and the sun is a God because it is ensouled; so too the stars; and whatsoever we ourselves may be, it is all in virtue of soul; for “dead is viler than dung."

This, by which the gods are divine, must be the oldest God of them all: and our own soul is of that Ideal nature … (it is) honorable above all that is bodily. For what is body but earth …?

Plotinus still points here from the human condition to higher divinities, such as the universe, the sun, and the stars. These are divinities to the extent that Soul empowers them. Of course, the statement also implies that these cosmic divinities, to the extent that they have become visible, still are somewhat tainted by matter. Plotinus does not hesitate to inject here momentarily, for contrast, a scatological metaphor that classifies human corpses as being somewhat lower than dung. In the same impressive manner of basic speech, matter in general and when devoid of soul is likened to “excretion of the Gods.” The metaphor of divine “procreation” thereby temporarily is replaced with an even more vulnerable metaphor, divine “alimentation.” One is reminded of the Heliopolitans who shifted from “masturbation” to “spitting.”

The presence of ultra-earthy metaphors in lofty philosophical discourse provides a reliable clue to the wider range of dynamic experiential data with which Plotinus felt comfortable. Only a mind that has been nurtured in a rich mythological background can achieve such a wide scope of ease with concrete imagery. In the evolution of human thought, one must not forget, mythological events and figures preceded philosophical principles. Mythological beings preceded philosophical generalities and abstractions. Mythological reasoning always has been, and remains, the earthly parent of philosophical reasoning.

Occasionally some of Plotinus' mythological background shows through his thinly woven, and sometimes worn, fabric of Hellenic philosophical discourse. Ancient deities appear then only slightly veiled under the masks of abstract “hypostases.” One may wonder why Plotinus ever classified the godhead simply as another hypostasis.

Plotinus introduced hypostases for pragmatic reasons, for the sake of communication. They are the philosophical abstractions, the single picture frames or abstract veils, projected unto the three “personae” of Plotinus' supreme Egyptian trinity. Without these “abstractions”—or shall we call them intentional acts of memory fixation?—the mental subtraction of personhood and virility from mighty divinities would have been unthinkable. Without these hypostases Plotinus could not have held discourse with fellow philosophers who dealt in Greek analysis and abstraction.

Nevertheless, during moments of greater inwardness and honesty, Plotinus placed himself mystically inside the All that he described. This is what happened very early in the Fifth Ennead when, seeing himself situated at the lower end of the hypostasis of Soul, he introduced—as he often did—his epistemological perspective as personal soteriology.[33]

Ennead V,1,3

The recognition of one's own soul, by faith and mind, implies upward contemplation and the approaching of God by finite minds. Above soul is a more divine and prior source—another hypo-stasis to be recognized.

Soul, for all the worth we have shown to belong to it, is yet a secondary, and image of the Intellectual‑Principle: reason uttered is an image of the reason stored within the soul, and in the same way Soul is an utterance of the Intellectual‑Principle: it is even the total of its activity, the entire stream of life sent forth by that Principle for the production of further being: it is the forthgoing heat of a fire which has also heat essentially inherent … Sprung, in other words, from the Intellectual‑Principle, soul is intellective, but with an intellection operating by the method of reasoning: for its perfection it must look to that Divine Mind.

The interrelationship of source and image, of Intellectual Principle and reasoning that enlivens Soul, Plotinus has explained with an Aristotelian type of “form‑and‑matter” progression. If Plotinus had chosen to apply his scatological metaphor this high up on his scale, he as well could have referred to Soul as “excrement” that issues from the Intellectual Principle. But, of course, Plotinus reserved his scatological process metaphor to explain the lowest transition in the larger emanational process; namely, the downward drifting of Soul toward visible matter and nothingness.

Ennead V,1,4

The Divine Mind, or Intellect, can also be approached by contemplating the world with its myriads of sense experiences, indirectly of course, by contemplating the archetypes of all creatures. Above all particulars presides unsoiled Intelligence and unapproachable divine wisdom.

Thus, another paragraph of Plotinus represents a proverbial “bone thrown” to Greek philosopher minds who, long ago, lost touch with their own Hellenic mythological tradition. For the rhetorical purpose at hand, Plotinus' allusion to a non-Egyptian mythology, and to linguistic analysis, needed not be very precise. Judge for yourself:

That archetypal world is the true Golden Age, age of Kronos, whose very name suggests (in Greek) Abundance and Intellect. For here is contained all that is immortal: nothing here but its divine Mind; all is God; this is the place of every soul.

The sermonette on mystic bliss in the true Golden Age of Cronos nevertheless sobers up to a description of the process of intellect infusion into the hypostasis of Soul:

Soul deals with thing after thing—now Socrates; now a horse: always some one entity from among beings—but the Intellectual Principle is all and therefore its entire content is simultaneously present in that identity: this is pure being in eternal actuality; nowhere is there any future, for every then is a now; nor is there any past...and the total of all is Intellectual Principle entire and Being entire.

Ennead V,1,5

The divine Intellectual Principle exists above the Soul. However, both Mind and Soul together constitute a single continuum. Even at the lower end, all souls stand fused as members with the higher divinity—unless estranged by deliberate apostasy. From this basis, established earlier, the upward contemplation proceeds from the Dyad of Soul and Divine Mind, toward immersion in the One.[34] Inasmuch as Plotinus is here contemplating, onward and upward against the creative current that overflows from the One, he tightens his conceptual net. The number of permissible attributions to deity become more scarce. Thus, rather than letting the complicated text speak for itself in this instance, it may be useful to exegete and paraphrase small steps and sentences:

1. The Intellectual Principle exists above the Soul.

2. Contemplating upward, the Soul brings itself closer to divine Intellect.

3. The Soul unites with the Intellect, as a Dyad, and the Egyptian question is asked: What Being has “engendered” this twofold God?

4. The Soul contemplating divine Intellect is a number quantity, or member, of this divine Dyad.

5. This Dyad of Number (i.e., Soul) and Intellectual Principle is undetermined; it represents, so to speak, the underlayment or “matter” for the Mind.

6. The Dyad is shaped in two ways: by Ideas rising within it, and by the presence of the One.

7. The Dyad in this homeward intellection is subject; the One from whom Mind emanates is object.

8. Within this current of creativity and countercurrent of nostalgic intellection, the subject and its object become identical.

Thus reunion of Soul with Intellect is achieved by the wholesome homeward yearning of the individual souls. The subsequent reunion of the Dyad (of Intellect and Soul already reunited) with the One is a process of a more advanced mode of intellectual homeward contemplation. In a diluted mode, at a lower level, this same kind of philosophical contemplation has with the incitement of souls to yearn homeward only begun.

Ennead V,1,6

With this section Plotinus completes the sketch of his contemplative homeward journey; he anchors himself again in cosmogony and theogony. Wrapped into the receptive Dyad, as a soul that is in the process of penetrating the Intellectual Principle or Divine Mind, Plotinus as a sharp‑witted mystic contemplates the question of his relatedness to the Divine Mind:

But how and what does the Intellectual Principle see and, especially, how has it sprung from that which is to become the object of its vision?

The mind demands the existence of these Beings, but it is still in trouble over the problem endlessly debated by the most ancient philosophers: from such a unity as we have declared The One to be, how does anything at all come into substantial existence, any multiplicity, dyad, or number? Why has the Primal not remained self-gathered … ?

The contemplative journey of the soul of Plotinus reaches its happy goal. He lays aside philosophical objective description and then humbly, as a soul knowing itself already enveloped in the Dyad, prays as religiously and humbly as very few philosophers who followed in his steps have dared to do:

In venturing an answer, we first invoke God Himself, not in loud word but in that way of prayer which is always within our power, leaning in soul towards Him by aspiration, alone towards the alone. But if we seek the vision of that great Being within the Inner Sanctuary—self‑gathered, tranquilly remote above all else—we begin by considering the images stationed at the outer precincts, or more exactly to the moment, the first image that appears. How the Divine Mind comes into being must be explained.

A few additional statements generated by this prayer complete the sketch. Everything moving needs an object toward which it advances—motion is relative—therefore, motion cannot be ascribed without such a goal. Movement is an attribute of the second hypostasis. But then again, how does multiplicity result from the Supreme unmovable One? Plotinus answers that it must be happening through “circumradiation.” The creative emanation from the static and unaltering Supreme “may be compared to the brilliant light encircling the sun (as it is) ceaselessly generated from that unchanging substance.”

With the static process of the One's creativity thus defined as circumradiation, Plotinus would have been set to narrate the story of his journey in the outward and downward direction, traveling on or trailing the rays of creative radiation. He could have dwelt on the Mind reaching out to become radiantly manifest as Soul, and thence he could have flirted with matter and surfed along the shadow play of nonbeing. But, true to orthodox Egyptian theology, having invoked the narrow Atonistic metaphor of solar circumradiation, Plotinus in honor of the total Atum-Ra quickly returned to the larger metaphor of creation by begetting:

all that is fully achieved engenders: therefore the eternally achieved engenders eternally and eternal being. The offspring is always minor...the Divine Mind. The offspring must seek and love the begetter; and especially so when begetter and begotten are alone in their sphere; when, in addition, the begetter is the highest Good, the offspring is attached by a bond of sheer necessity, separated only by being distinct.

The philosophy of Plotinus is soteriology, not fatalistic resignation. Theoretical philosophy for him was the handmaiden for redeemed living; it was never an end in itself. It therefore seems safe to say that what has held Ammonius and Plotinus together, for eleven intimate years, was their mutual preoccupation with soteriology—the orthodox Egyptian doctrine of salvation.

Ennead V,1,7

Plotinus began Section Seven with an exhortation to himself and to his readers: "We must be more explicit." It seems significant that although he described his soul's entire journey homeward to the One he referred to Hellenic mythology only once—that is, the Golden Age of Cronos (V,1,4)—and very imprecisely at that. Now that he promised to be more explicit he added nothing more than ordinary commentary. He simply undertook to rationalize the sketch of his homeward journey in greater detail, which for Greeks meant to have recourse to philosophical jargon.

If Greek philosophy had been Plotinus' actual starting point, why would he not have begun with Greek philosophy and ended his treatise with some kind of a concluding synthesis? The answer to this question is simple, indeed. Plotinus has given us Egyptian religion, theology in the linguistic garb of Hellenic philosophy. His philosophical and Greek linguistic cover and his scarce links with Platonic philosophy sufficed to hold the attention of a few Greek students of philosophy. From his personal "Sitz im Leben" Plotinus wrote orthodox Egyptian theology and apologetics, first and foremost.

Neoplatonism: Ammonius and Plotinus

Neoplatonic Scholarship

As the name implies, Neoplatonism has traditionally has been studied as a natural offspring of Greek Platonic philosophy, taking into account a reasonable amount of stimulation from other Hellenic philosophical schools. The first suggestion, that “oriental” influences might be present in the philosophy of Plotinus was offered by Franz Brentano in 1876. Thirty-eight years later H. F. Mueller refuted Brentano's assertions. More recently, in an essay prepared for an international conference on Neoplatonism and Indian Thought, which was held at Brock University in Ontario, Albert M. Wolters surveyed this “orientalism” controversy up to the year 1976.[35] He traced the primary stimulus, for the Ontario conference lead question, to the well-known Plotinus scholar Emile Brehier.

During the winter of 1921-1922 Emile Brehier gave a series of formal lectures at the Sorbonne, which were published six years later. In his seventh chapter he discussed the orientalism of Plotinus, whereby he observed that the fourth and fifth treatises of the Sixth Ennead easily can be read without reference to Greek philosophy. He concluded, cautiously enough it seems, that the non‑Hellenic place of origin for these “oriental” ideas could have been India. Unfortunately he omitted, in this lecture, to name any specific literary or historical points of contact. Wolters observed in his survey that Brehier's thesis has found almost no support among other Plotinus scholars.

Also indicative of this mood were the presentations made at the 1976 Ontario conference itself. As a rule, the papers remained non-committal about specific Indian influences on Plotinus, and most of them roamed within the safe realm of topical and a-historical comparison.

For the English translation of his lectures, Brehier wrote a new Introduction.[36] He concluded that statement with an evasive apologia:

And we have deemed it legitimate and even necessary to advance a hypothesis of the relations of Plotinus to India which others who are more competent will perhaps want to investigate and verify.

An additional curiosity emerges from Brehier's new Introduction. In preparation for his defensive finale he appealed to a bit of historical common sense:

After Alexander the Greeks, without doubt, did “Hellenize” the Orient; but, inversely, Egypt, “the land were gods are invented” [Brehier quoted here Asclepius], stamped its powerful imprint not only upon the customs but upon the ideas of the Greeks, in spite of the efforts of the rulers of Egypt to keep the Egyptians in a subordinate state. But we have come to believe, as will be seen, that it is necessary to look beyond Egypt in order to render the thought of Plotinus intelligible.

Brehier has not told us whether, before voicing his conclusion, he ever searched among Egyptian sources for precedents. Nor are we told why he abandoned searching in Egypt so quickly to hurry on toward India—to come up empty-handed there as well. But then, what else could be done? His lectures by that time were several decades old, and he had to introduce what was at hand and what was about to be released in English. Moreover, Brehier shared with many Neoplatonism scholars the peculiar lumped notion of “Orient.” Presumably several centuries of Hellenistic expansion, of Greeks reaching Egypt and India, have obliterated most essential cultural differences in the lands traversed by Alexander's armies.

In the case of real historical situations, and on considering the conservative nature of human cultures everywhere, such thorough obliteration of local traditions is well nigh unthinkable. On the other hand, had Brehier wanted to pursue this issue a little further, his momentary one-sentence hunch about an Egyptian cultural backlash against the Hellenizers would have been realistic and very much on target.

Ammonius and Plotinus

Ammonius Saccas (ca. 175-242 C.E.), or Ammonius the Porter, is acknowledged as being now the most shadowy figure in the chronicles of Hellenic philosophy. He left no written work, and most of what we can still infer about his philosophy must be gleaned from the teachings of his students, Plotinus and Origen the Christian. Moreover, we depend for information about Plotinus on the writings of his student Porphyry, and concerning Origen on Eusebius and Hierocles.[37]

Posterity has remembered Ammonius as a theodidaktos; that is, as one who was taught by God. So, apparently he had never studied formally under a recognized Greek teacher of philosophy.[38] Whenever he commented on the writings of earlier Greek philosophers he seemed to have followed the biddings of his own mind.

We know from Porphyry that his teacher Plotinus (205–270 C.E.) had been Ammonius' most devoted and famous student and had developed a similar habit of commenting on philosophical works.[39] As a result of knowing this, all references in the Enneads to the writings of earlier Greek philosophers can be read in conflicting ways. Those who presuppose that Plotinus was foremostly a Platonist, generally use these references to claim his primary dependence on Greek philosophy. On the other hand, those who approach him without this presupposition will discover that, even if all references to Greek philosophers were removed from Plotinus' fifty-four treatises, they would still teach the same ontology.

Ammonius probably would have been amused about the credit given to him by Hierocles, in a text by Photius, to the effect that “Ammonius reconciled the doctrines of Plato and Aristotle.”[40] Indeed while approaching this elusive teacher of Plotinus, as we shall attempt, from his home background of Egyptian theology, we easily can see how Ammonius could have generated all his commentaries without himself becoming overly indebted to the ontologies of either Plato or Aristotle. To say that “Ammonius bypassed the doctrines of Plato and Aristotle” probably would be more correct.

The fact is, no one knows exactly how much he actually learned from these Greek masters. It could have been little, or it could have been a little more. In light of the dependence of Platonic and Aristotelian philosophy on ancient Egyptian ontology, demonstrated a little earlier, it no longer matters as much as it once did in the earlier booklets of this study.

The “reconciling doctrine” which Ammonius taught was older than the teachings of Plato and Aristotle, even older than those of Thales and Anaximander. It was Egyptian orthodox emanationalism, ancient enough to have nourished Greek philosophy in its infancy, with almost two millennia to spare. Why, then, should anyone who has seriously reviewed Greek philosophies still be surprised to find how nicely an Egyptian intellect could harmonize, whatever he found in Hellas, with his native Egyptian common sense!

Ammonius remained true to the long-established tradition of Egyptian priests: he left no writings. Beyond that, his students were obligated to him by some vow of secrecy not to publish their mentor's lectures. Porphyry of Tyre (233–304 C.E.), who for a time became Plotinus' editor and biographer, accused Erennius and Origen of having broken that agreement. Supposedly these men published Ammonius' teachings under two titles: “On the Spirits” (Origen) and “That the King is the Only Maker.”[41]

Although most commentators nowadays doubt the Ammonian authorship of such titles, the fact remains that both titles can be reconciled easily with a background in ancient Egyptian theology. The first could have been a general theological treatise on gods in relation to the All-God—written for Greek students, whereas the second could have been a takeoff on the enduring Egyptian question about a monarch's identity with the creative godhead, such as Amun or the Heliopolitan Ennead. This possibility makes unnecessary Armstrong's severe judgment—to the effect that the second of these titles amounts to a “fulsome piece of court flattery.” An identification of divine Creator and King was clearly developed in Memphite theology, as it was also explicit in Akhenaton's haughty exclusivism. Unfortunately, the Ammonian works themselves are lost, and a discussion of them beyond this paragraph therefore would be a waste of time.

In an essay, “Ammonius der Lehrer des Origenes,” Willy Theiler followed Fritz Heinemann (in Hermes 61 [1926]: 1ff) in believing that much of Ammonius' philosophy is still extant in written form.[42] He postulated a line of succession that began with Ammonius Saccas and led through Origen to Plutarch, and thence to Hierocles. We then are advised to look for the lost teachings of the founder of Neoplatonism among the legacy of Hierocles, of two centuries later (pp. 2ff). Theiler thus proceeded to reconstruct for us an Ammonius Saccas who conveniently matches the profile of a typical Greek Platonist.

But then, unfortunately, this reconstruction of Ammonius, based on quotes from the two century younger Hierocles, left the better-known founder of Neoplatonism, Plotinus, stranded “like an island in the stream of Platonic tradition,” as Theiler himself observed (p. 42).

Such speculative tracing of Ammonian texts, over several generations of students and teachers and across a major religious fault line, indeed seems farfetched, too farfetched for comfort. I personally remain convinced that a historical refocusing on Ammonius Saccas, in the absence of the philosopher's own writings, will fare better by first having a closer look at the bequest of Plotinus.

One may object that Plotinus himself published nothing and that his editor, Porphyry, is a generation removed from Ammonius. In that regard we may note that the relationship between Plotinus and his editor seems fairly well documented. And as far as Plotinus himself is concerned, he remained a student of Ammonius over twice the time that Origen spent in his vicinity, assuming for the moment that we can be sure as to which Origen that student of Ammonius actually was. Beyond this, Plotinus began his studies a year after Origen had left, about 232, and he therefore benefitted from Ammonius' more mature years.

We are told by Porphyry that, on coming to Alexandria, Plotinus listened in on the lectures of all prominent philosophers who could be found in that city at the time. He was summarily disappointed by all. Only after listening to Ammonius the “Porter,” somewhere along the periphery of the Alexandrian establishment, was Plotinus' enthusiasm for philosophical learning rekindled. When Plotinus, an Egyptian, finally found this teacher, a fellow Egyptian by all indications, he remained his faithful student for eleven years. Such a long span of time suggests that the student was determined to absorb nothing short of the teacher's total ontology.

The Enneads of Plotinus therefore still appear to be the best window through which one may see a reflection of the mind of Ammonius. And, in turn, the philosophies of both men are still best understood as mirrors that, in the twilight of antiquity, reflected the ancient theology of their homeland civilization. It now appears as though the Greek philosophical tradition, in itself, for both men has been never more than a convenient modus operandi for intellectual and intercultural discourse.

It is significant that Porphyry of Tyre was unable to elicit from his Egyptian master, Plotinus, any information “about his race or his parents or his native country.” And it is indeed remarkable how Porphyry, the man who thought of himself as one of Plotinus' closest friends, was kept completely in the dark about his teacher's family and religio-ethnic background. Yet, in spite of Plotinus' silence about these matters, the profile of his relationship with Porphyry emerges surprisingly clear.

Porphyry was the industrious student who succeeded in prodding his master into doing more systematic writing. In turn, Plotinus responded by letting Porphyry take the lead as his personal editor. Their friendship therefore primarily was a pragmatic one. Porphyry had a superior command of the Greek language and Plotinus, whose native language and thought structure were Egyptian, depended on someone like him. That pragmatic friendship endured to the end, even after the master had politely persuaded his student to take a permanent vacation.

The fact that Plotinus never entrusted information about his cultural, religious, and family background to his student Porphyry need not seem surprising, after all. As an Egyptian who sought the company of colonial Greek philosophers in Alexandria, from somewhere along the sidelines, Plotinus was dedicated to his mission as a bridge builder between the two cultures. He accepted the challenge to communicate more effectively nearer to the apex of Greek high society. To that effect his Greek students needed to be assured about his Hellenic authenticity and compatibility. On that account he also was obliged to quote occasionally from prestigious Greek philosophers. He knew quite well that haughty Hellenic minds easily would lose interest in him had they seen through, all the way down, to his deep Egyptian religio-ethnic roots.

In other words, Plotinus, whose status as a teacher rested on the pretence of Hellenic authenticity and competence, had nothing to gain, and much to lose, by chatting about his Egyptian background. On the other hand, given what else we know about the kind and saintly nature of Plotinus, it is almost impossible to imagine that he himself was emotionally cut off from his Egyptian family. Rather, we may assume safely that, aside from protecting his intercultural role, Plotinus also regarded it as his duty to protect his Egyptian kin from his own Greek friends. They needed to be protected from the local stigma that would have resulted from the presence of gawking foreign tourists, of tourists from the outer empire. In addition, it even is conceivable that a proud Egyptian family had severed its ties with their son when the latter began to associate with the Greek intruders at Alexandria.

Nevertheless, secrets about ethnicity, home, and family are not as impenetrable as studious men of the type of Porphyry have reckoned them to be. Such family secrets are standard material for gossip among common folk everywhere. Accordingly, a certain Eunapius told someone that the birthplace of Plotinus was Lyco or Lycopolis. Two towns at the time were known by that name, one in Upper Egypt and another in the Delta.

Perhaps more than any commentary thus far published on Ammonius and Plotinus, this discussion focuses on the manner in which both men have appeared and operated along the periphery of Alexandria's academic community. An analogy from Western civilization may help illuminate this situation. For instance, the dual bridge builder roles played by both Ammonius and Plotinus are being replicated, in our days, many times by American Indian intellectuals who interact and communicate with the dominant Anglo-American civilization. Very few among them are equally conversant in the dominant civilization and in their home culture, and all must apply and navigate between relational double standards.

A rather obvious clue about the background of Ammonius Saccas has been consistently overlooked by earlier commentators—his name. Ammonius was a common Egyptian name at the time, and this fact testifies to the persistence of New Kingdom Amun religion. The man Ammonius had been dedicated, as a child, to the Egyptian hidden godhead Ammon. This means that the boy grew up under parents who, at least, explained to their curious offspring the meaning of his name or who, more likely, were able to explain to him portions of orthodox Egyptian theology as well. An inquisitive lad like Ammonius, whose intellectual curiosity eventually drove him to investigate the company of Alexandrian philosophers, surely has first visited the Egyptian wise men that he could locate back home.

Thus, after taking into account the strong rational-mystic impulse Ammonius was able to impart to Plotinus, it appears on average that this shadowy founder of Neoplatonism somehow had been reared in accordance with devout Egyptian patterns of piety. It remains doubtful that these patterns were for the most part Christian, even though Eusebius has quoted Porphyry to that effect.[43]