Foreword
This text was originally written for my English course last year. The subject was historical and geographical, so I wrote about Greek philosophers in order to talk about what fascinated me, which is the prisca theologia. It did not have to contain quotes and a rigorous academic structure. I was thrilled to write this text when I was studying sociology because I could talk quite freely about subjects that are dear to me. I’ve extended it a bit and added a few paragraphs at the end.
Introduction
As we know, our modern civilization owes much to the ancient Greek philosophy and political endeavors. I would like to lay down in this text the thread which seem to have been followed throughout history, from one of the most ancient and mysterious Greek cult to the Renaissance’s Alchemists.
It is known as the “prisca theologia”. It was already postulated by Plutarque in 70AD, but it was most famous at the time of the Renaissance in Florence, as the works of Marsilio Ficino and Giovanni Pico della Mirandola. When theology is out of the equation, it is called “perennis philosophia”. Agostino Steuco wrote his De perenni philosophia in 1540. In contemporary literature, Aldous Huxley wrote about it in his book The Perennial Philosophy in 1945.
It is defined as a thread linking all philosophies and theologies together, through the understanding of universal principles that were revealed in distant times. These revelations infused civilizations from ancient Egypt to the renaissance alchemists.
I believe that the Greek civilization, by passing down this knowledge at first in a secret and oral fashion, and then by writing, has allowed our own civilization to be nourished by this eternal wisdom, though I will not develop on this point in this text because of its shortness.
Orphic Cosmogony
I will begin by introducing Orphism, which was a mysterious religion originating around the 6th century BC. There are multitudes of Orphic cosmogonies, because everything about this ancient religion is scattered, written as quotes or summarized. Though this is what I found interesting in regard to my subject: they taught that man’s essence was twofold. The story of man’s origins is as follows: Zagreus, Zeus’s son and also first incarnation of Dionysos, was offered the empire of the world by Eros. The Titans, jealous and uplifted, seized him and devoured him. Zeus, horrified by this crime, killed the Titans with lightning, and from their ashes arose the first men.
Thus, in the Orphic cosmogony, Man is both emanating from the Gods and the Titans, having equal tendencies to being divine or monstrous. Orphism professes that Man is to be purified, by combining his divine part with his Titan counterpart in order to be uplifted. The Titan part allows Man to be audacious, and to confront the established order. His Divine part is to be remembered as its essence. It is this remembrance that allows Man to reach the divine world once again. Thus, initiation into the Orphic Mysteries was linked to promises of ending the cycle of reincarnation and rising to a kind of godly-hood, by remembering the divine essence of the intimate being. This topic of initiation into mysteries pre-dates Greek civilization, and meant a great deal throughout the ages and cultures.
Pythagoras
Following up with Pythagoras, which is one of the most influential philosophers in ancient Greece. According to him, the soul has three vehicles: ethereal, linked to the stars and infinite bliss; luminous, which suffers the punishment of sins after death; and terrestrial, the vehicle it occupies here on Earth. Pythagoras himself is said to have remembered four different previous incarnations of his. This is the doctrine of metempsychosis that he teaches: the soul of man is forever reincarnating into plants, animals and men alike.
He created a kind of school, or brotherhood, or monastery, or all three of them at once, now call Pythagoreanism. It was highly secretive and rested on an initiation process, commonly shared symbols and vows of secrecy as well as ascetic practices and rituals. Much of Pythagoras’s life is, as many ancient Greek philosophers and doctrines, scattered and volatile, which doesn’t allow much empirical statements and is a gate to a lot of creative discourse. What is most commonly known though is his sacred worship of numbers, as the source of all knowledge. He was professing the fact that the entire Universe is, as mathematics, a continuous harmony of the equilibrium between emptiness and form, the apeiron and the peiron. (These concepts were already coined by Anaximander)
The form “breathes” from the emptiness, which creates separation, and the whole universe as well as mathematics is thus a living being which is ever differentiated by this breath. This resembles some Eastern philosophies, and is quite frankly in my opinion, a great unraveling of universal principal laid bare in his doctrine, that we in our modern age have begun to touch with science through quantum physics and the realization that 99.9% of our surrounding is indeed “void”.
Pythagoras is depicted as a reformer of Orphic traditions. Through the prism of Orphism, I would like to link this reforming quality to the Titanic part in him, rebelling against the established order, in an evolutionary impulse. Purified by his Divine part, this rebellion becomes a quest for truths of higher realms and a will to spread the knowledge. Thus allowing his doctrine to uplift the minds of men throughout history by “updating” ancient practices to fit his contemporary nomos (culture) and personality, as we are doing now also.
He is also one of those who brought religion and philosophy into politics in ancient Greece, and developed a way of living to be given to his students who sought to understand the mysteries of the universe and live “the good life”. He left no writings himself, everything he did, taught, and was, we can only know of through the writings of his students and next-generation philosophers and historians. This is quite common at this period.
Socrates, Philolaus, Plato
One of the last philosophers who did not write was the famous Socrates, who was also following the ancient thread of the Perennial Philosophy which I am only showing a glimpse of. Pythagoras is said to have had a great influence on Plato through Philolaus, who had apparently written one or three books on the doctrines of Pythagoras, and which were strictly forbidden to be made public. Plato acquired the books, and thus were the sacred doctrines made public through his work. He was the first philosopher, or Initiate, to kind of break the vow of secrecy of the followers of the Mystery Schools (schools of Initiates).
I hypothesize that this is due to Socrates’s influence on Plato, because Socrates, as is known, had this particularity of having a way of life which rested upon accepting his own fallacy, his own ignorance, and talking to everyone, be it a politician, a slave, or an aristocrat, through a way of inquiry which sought to cause self-inquiry in everyone he talked to, in order to realize their own ignorance. Socrates is then responsible, in my opinion, for bringing philosophy to the doorstep of those who wouldn’t have thought of it without his innocent questioning. Plato brought this impulse further through his writings.
Kemet, Hermes, Thot, Thoughts
Socrates is said to have traveled to Egypt (or Kemet), which is where he received an initiation into the Greater Mysteries, like Pythagoras and Thales before him. Those teaching all originate from one mystical, mythical, historical figure. We can call it an archetype since it has taken many shapes and form throughout the ages. He is now called “Hermes Trismegistus”, meaning the Thrice Great, and is linked to the god Thoth in Ancient Egypt. The tradition around the prisca theologia revolves around this figure, as according to the tradition it is Hermes or Thot that formulated this antique wisdom for the first time, allowing all human cultures through dissemination backed up by secret initiation cults to be filled with the knowledge of the universe throughout the ages.
It is a fun fact (if one’s humor is sensible to playing with etymology between civilizations and ages, using the “language of the birds”, dear to the Renaissance’s Alchemists) that Plato dealt with Thoughts as the primary essence of the visible world, which is only a reflection, a shadow of the worlds of Ideas.
Thot is associated with Hermes in Greek mythology and Mercury in Roman mythology, which are both “messengers of the gods”.
Isn’t the realm of Thoughts what link us all to the non-material world, the world of Ideas which structure the material world we dwell in, and what enables us to deal with mathematics as well as everything linked to virtue, beauty, harmony, theology? Thus, Thoughts, or Thot, or Hermes, or Mercury, can be understood as being the “messengers of the gods”, the link between the human mind and the world of ideas of Plato. The link to the “gods” is within the mind of man, it is his inner talk and imaginative power, his thoughts. Neville Goddard, a famous modern metaphysicist and mystic, coins the concept as such: “The mouth of god is the mind of man”
The most ancient and ever present teachers of humanity are thus made known through a play on words, analogies and symbolism. This is how knowledge can be derived “hermetically”, following the teachings of the prisca theologia that was linked to the renaissance’s alchemists who used the language of the birds.
Conclusion, broadening
What I have tried to picture in this short text is the never-ending thread of the Perennial Philosophy. Dating back to ancient Egypt that was passed down in ancient and classical Greece through philosophers and their endeavor to discover, develop and protect the sacred mysteries of the Egyptians, and translate them into “right ways of being”. Using this knowledge for practical use. At first only through the oral discourse, as well as allegories and mythology, and then by writings with Plato, being in my opinion the first Initiate in Greece to spread those teachings and let those with “ears to hear and eyes to see” (a famous quote from initiates) have a glimpse of esoteric knowledge through his writings. The best example of this is the Allegory of the Cave, which, depending on the depth of anyone’s knowledge, and as any story or object, can be understood through ever deepening layers.
This deepening of life’s understanding might be made possible by remembering our ‘Divine essence’ and penetrating our ‘Titan core’, infusing it with the depth and harmony of the divine essence. The process of Initiation sought in the schools can be likened to a second birth, occurring within one’s own psyche (ψυχή, soul). The greek word metanoia (μετάνοια, of Mind, a change in the trend and action of the whole inner nature, intellectual, affectional and moral. Treadwell Walden 1881). By analogy, we can view it as the same process that a caterpillar goes through to become a butterfly. It is linked to the making of the Alchemist’s Philosopher Stone (the inner one), as well as the Individuation Process described by Carl Gustav Jung. The latter has made a great stand on the importance of understanding archetypes, intuition, symbolism, the psyche as the basis for all fields of knowledge.
The prisca theologia itself is symbolic, subtle, archetypal, but also philosophical, historical and very practical. The use of analogies to derive understanding is a common practice of hermeticism. The understanding of man’s purpose and inner composition is still an ever burning question for our societies. It would be wise from our modern wise to look upon those mythologies with great understanding, without dismissing them as pure historical information, but grasping the symbolic and archetypal essence of the teachings in the light of our modern day consciousness.
[From here on, I’ve extended the spectrum of what I talk about in order to correlate this previous work with my personal convictions]
The thread from Orphism was linked to the Egyptian civilization, whose esoteric knowledge infused the works of Pythagoras, Socrates, Plato and many others, whom we still study today as great minds. It can also be found in Gnosticism and early Christianity, as well as in middle east civilizations which translated the Greek writings. The thread seems to have then been vivified by the renaissance’s alchemists, scientists and philosophers. Pouring into the beginning of the new age spirituality and Theosophy in the end of the 19th century. And we can follow it up to now in the rise of the study of psychedelics, cognitive sciences, quantum physics, and the discreet but powerful thread of new age spirituality growing in the mainstream culture through the internet.
This Perennial Philosophy will continue to influence and be rediscovered by mankind forever, as it lies in the depth of our psyches. In my opinion, this is why esoteric or occult knowledge carry that name. The fact that it is indeed occult in the external world is just a reflection of the fact that it is hidden within the mind. Every culture has pondered upon the same subjects, although in a different fashion. It’s obviously the case, since the human mind or his psyche, his soul, is structured in its essence in the same way in any man at any time period.
Flowers all need soil, water and sun to grow. Human beings all have a spirit, a soul and a body, and each part has relevant nutritional needs. We’re just not on point, as a global species, or western society, as to what the correct way of nourishing our spirit, soul or body are, just as we have no idea, as a western civilization, on the importance of breath compared to the eastern tradition. Breath in the material realm is a symbolic manifestation of the dance of the apeiron and peiron, thus it represents existence itself, just like the rise and fall of the shore of the sea, or the water cycle of the earth.
For us, scholars of the western world and mindset, it would be quite a repetition of the past ethnocentrism than to consider that anything distant cultures in space and time have to say about the mind, or the very specific working of those minds which are different from our own (because language and culture structure the minds), is “rubbish” or need not be studied. Or worse, to deem it interesting but to study it in a very narrow minded perspective.
This kind of scientific dogmatism has produced one of the greatest act of obscurantism in the 20th century in my opinion, with the global banishment of psychedelics from the scientific realm. Becoming a social taboo, these substances were left unresearched for decades, whereas they might be keys to unlock deep understanding in many fields, and especially in cognitive sciences. The same can be said, for example, about the said “junk DNA” that is now at the center of the new epigenetic paradigm in biology. In my opinion, the prisca theologia and esoterism in general is the “junk dna” of all fields of human knowledge. It’s perfectly normal, since it is hidden in plain sight.
The structural subordination to the neo-liberalism madness of the academic and scientific social fields (P. Bourdieu) through the political field makes it difficult for scholars’ endeavors to step out of servitude to the economic system, and reignite culture with true inspirations of humanism. The structural biases of the fields put a great hold on the true quest for knowledge, for they limit the spectrum of productivity to endeavors that serve agendas that are polar opposites to the pure deontology of the greatest minds like Hippocrates. But in my opinion, and in regards to many ideologies throughout the ages, truth and understanding will prevail against falsehood and separation.
Qilin Egostasie 