Poseidon Beyond the Sea (Part 1 of 2)
Feb. 13th, 2011 05:27 pmWhy 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?