Poseidon Beyond the Sea (Part 1 of 2)

Why does Poseidon, who seems to have enjoyed, if not primacy, then certainly much greater prominence within the pantheon during the Bronze Age, judging from his occurrences in the Linear B texts, play a lesser role in the classical organization of the pantheon? More to the point, is Poseidon primarily a God of the sea as such?

 

Clearly, Poseidon is not a God of the sea in the same way that Pontus or Nereus are. They are Gods of the sea in the most unproblematic fashion. They are ‘elder’ Gods, as befits those closely identified with forces of nature. Poseidon is not a God of the sea in this sense at all; rather, he is a ‘young’ God, relatively speaking, and primarily a divine sovereign, sovereignty being a ‘younger’ principle in the order of things. Poseidon is the king of one third of the cosmos, together with his brothers Zeus and Hades, who each rule their thirds. This is the primary division of the cosmos embodying the Olympian order, which does not succeed the Titanic order temporally—mythic time is not historical time—but is rather superimposed upon it.

 

One will generally find this division described as sky for Zeus, sea for Poseidon, underworld for Hades; but this is not the way to think of it. Rather, start from a working model of the cosmos as a whole, divide it into thirds in some meaningful fashion, and then work out the terms.

 

This is pretty much how the Platonists approach the matter. For them, Poseidon is the demiurge (craftsman) of the plane of soul-being, the plane of life and change, as Zeus is the demiurge of the plane of intellective being, the plane of ideas and ideals, and Hades the demiurge of the plane of images, shells, as it were. (Note the centrality of demiurgy and sovereignty, specifically kingship, for the Platonists, and their convertibility.)

 

Two factors make this reading immediately appealing to me as something more than philosophical exegesis. First, it helps to explain why Poseidon is also the God of horses, because horses are demonstrably a symbol for the soul-vehicle from archaic times. As the horse conveys the chariot, so the sea conveys the ship; we find the same association between ships and horses in the Dioskouroi and the Vedic Ashwins, and the Twins are strongly associated with the soul.

 

Second, it makes Poseidon's role in the Odyssey, which I read as a psychagogia, more meaningful, because the demands Poseidon places upon Odysseus concern the conditions of psychical being, which cannot be circumvented without impoverishing the whole plane of embodiment.

 

In this respect, we might interpret the prominence accorded to Zeus later as part of the increasing importance Greek civilization accorded to reason and the ideal in the management of personal as well as collective affairs; but Poseidon was never deprived of his honors (timai), and some vestige of the broader sway of his powers can be seen from the observances in his honor at the Winter Solstice, where he seems to preside over everything having to do with the entry of souls into bodies. On this, see especially Noel Robertson, “Poseidon’s Festival at the Winter Solstice,” Classical Quarterly, 34.1 (1984), available from JSTOR if you have access. I suspect that the Homeric tradition about Poseidon’s annual journey to be feasted among the Ethiopians, “who dwell some where Hyperion [the Sun] sets and some where he rises,” (Odyssey I 24-5) has some solstice significance.

 

But what about Poseidon’s specific relationship to the sea? For the Platonists, the sea functions here as a symbol of instability, of a constantly shifting ‘ground’, which is why, for them, Poseidon is also associated with earthquakes. Poseidon presides over the plane of being that is all about mutability, change, and flux. The sea here is also elemental moisture, which for the Greeks is about two things, solution and condensation, the solve et coagula of the later alchemical tradition. It is where things spiritual become more concrete, and where concrete things become more spiritual.

 

One way to think about Poseidon’s nature is to try to recollect a relationship to the sea that was originally dyadic: there was this world, the land, and the other world, the sea, and that was it. The sky perhaps becomes the other world originally by analogy with the sea—as in Egyptian theology—because the sky isn't a place you can be, but the sea is. Recent discoveries have pushed the dating for Mediterranean sea voyages well back into the Paleolithic. To grasp the spiritual significance of these early voyages, one needs a concept of the sea far beyond our own narrow, physical sense of it. This is harder, I think, to do with the sea than with the sky. Note how Odysseus is directed to take his oar to a place where people have no relationship to the sea, and establish Poseidon’s worship there; in a way, we need to transcend the very notion of Poseidon as ‘God of the sea’ before we can return to it.

 

The symbolism of the horse, as well, is not just that of the domesticated animal which can pull a chariot, the vehicle of the intellect’s purposes—this is the more ‘Zeusian’ perspective—but in an older sense, a powerful, chaotic being (compare, in Egypt, the attitude toward large wild mammals like the oryx or ibex). The first person to jump on the back of a horse had to be about as crazy as the first person to take a raft out beyond sight of shore. This is the common denominator between sea and horse, and this is essential to Poseidon.

Note that Shiva, like Poseidon, bears the trident (trishula); Shiva has nothing much to do with the sea, but everything to do with the soul, and with the whole realm of generation. Perhaps the trident, then, is associated with the sea because it is associated with Poseidon, rather than the other way around. The tripartition of the soul we find in Plato may thus be more archaic than we realize. Or perhaps the Bronze Age Poseidon was the total demiurge, so that a global tripartition of the universe fell within his activity; then he was squeezed into a much more narrow role in classical times, as the whole concept of divine demiurgy becomes more idealist and hence Zeusian. In this sense, nothing has changed; it’s just that the realm of generation, of what comes to be and passes away, is no longer preeminent in the Hellenic worldview—or in that rather overeducated slice of it we know best. Maybe the tripartition Homer knows, which divides the cosmos among the sons of Kronos, is already there in the Bronze Age, but Poseidon is the chief, ruling from the center rather than from the top, as Zeus does? 

Poseidon Beyond the Sea (Part 2 of 2)

Poseidon and Heroes

 

I think that in many cases the lives of heroes express the difficulty in reconciling the divine and mortal components in the soul. It’s important to remember that conflicts between the Gods are generally centered around heroes; therefore, we shouldn’t overestimate the significance of these conflicts for the Gods themselves, but rather attribute them to the nature of psychical being, where principles not in conflict on other planes come into conflict, a conflict which is productive, generative. As king of the realm of generation, therefore, it makes sense that Poseidon is involved in some high-level mythical conflicts which have to do with the limits of soul-being and its internal tensions. This often plays out through the problematic fates of Poseidonian heroes, and the separation of the narrative ‘hero’ from the theological status of being a ‘hero’ as such, i.e., the mortal child of a God or Goddess.

In the Argonautica, for example, it is actually Pelias who is the ‘hero’ according to the technical definition, for he is the son of Poseidon. Jason, despite being the ‘hero’ of the narrative, and the assistance he receives from Cheiron and Hera, is not a ‘hero’ in the technical sense. This is similar, in turn, to the Odyssey, which is determined by the wrath of Poseidon and the solicitude of Athena toward Odysseus. Odysseus, though a human like Jason, is often characterized in the text as diogenês, literally ‘born from’, or metaphorically ‘sprung from’, Zeus. There is something intriguing in Homer's deliberate use of this epithet in a context where Odysseus is frequently ranged against figures who are the very sons and daughters of deities.

 

It is not hard to see, however, that what Zeus and Athena favor in Odysseus is the latter's wit and powers of persuasion. Part of Zeus’ vision for the cosmos apparently transcends the strictly divine, so that reason will have, one might say, a divine grant of autonomy from revelation as well as from instinct. So the myth is delineating the space of human intelligence beyond—and thus, in a certain respect, against—the strictly divine, in delineating the border, so to speak, between the spheres of Zeus and of Poseidon, in addition to discriminating intelligence from its psychic foundation.

 

Jason, on the other hand, draws his assistance from Hera and, of course Medea. To Medea, we may compare Ariadne, who assists Theseus, a son of Poseidon, but whose ultimate destiny lies in being the paradigmatic Bacchant, symbol of the Bacchic salvation that supervenes upon the soul’s liberation from the labyrinth. Hera, herself the Queen of the soul in its ideal, that is, Zeusian, aspect, delivers to Jason (whose name means ‘healing’) the golden fleece, a skin, which as such symbolizes embodiment, but a shining body outside of time, for the Argo travels east, against the flow of time, to the birthplace of the sun, while the aged Pelias gets the illusory resurrection from Medea, the sorceress and granddaughter of the sun, in the cauldron of the image, just like his daughter Alcestis, who ventures into Hades’ realm, to be freed by Herakles.

 

These conflicts all concern the possibilities and limitations of the soul in its mortal vehicle and its relationship to various methods of transcendence. When Athena teaches Bellerophon the use of the bit in order to control Pegasus, she directs him to offer sacrifice to Poseidon in compensation. Marcel Detienne has a great quote about this moment: “Athena acts through the bit, she intervenes in the domain of the horse through the technical instrument which confers mastery; whereas Poseidon manifests himself through the ardour, the violence, the disquieting and uncontrollable power of the animal. Two potencies of the horse, of which however the one is, as it were, equine and the other is, instead, equestrian.” Athena’s intervention permits Bellerophon to transcend harnessing the power of the horse through the mediation of a chariot in order to ride him directly. With Athena’s help, Bellerophon achieves a new, more direct relationship between these two parts of the soul, and thus a new possibility for human consciousness, a more immediate and thus precise control over the powers in the psyche, and this is successful inasmuch as Bellerophon is victorious over the Chimaira, but not successful if the measure is Bellerophon's own happiness. Perhaps this is not a sustainable psychic disposition for a mortal?

Jason’s end has much to do with his breach of promise to Medea. She leaves, taking with her, it seems, everything that is divine about him, and he dies a belated victim of the Argo, that is, of his ‘vessel’ or ‘vehicle’, which seems like a way of affirming his very mortal status. In failing to honor his promise, he also fails to live up to his promise, in the sense of his potential, the potential of what is divine in him.