More on Hera
Feb. 15th, 2009 02:25 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
endymions_bowerThere is a certain convergence between Hera and Dionysos inasmuch as both are known to provoke episodic insanity; on this convergence generally, see Richard Seaford, “Dionysos as Destroyer of the Household: Homer, Tragedy, and the Polis,” in Thomas H. Carpenter & Christopher A. Faraone, eds. Masks of Dionysos (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993), esp. 129-133. It is not unusual for Heraic madness to be directly identified with Bacchic frenzy. Plato (Laws 627b) and Apollodorus (Bibliotheca 3.33) both trace the origin of Bacchic frenzy to an episode of insanity imposed upon Dionysos by Hera; Aeschylus calls Io a “maenad of Hera”; Euripides characterizes Herakles’ insanity as Bacchic frenzy. Heraic and Dionysiac madness seem thus to be regarded as essentially the same phenomenon from a descriptive point of view. Nor do either Hera or Dionysos have to be involved; the madness of Orestes, caused by the Furies, is also described as Bacchic frenzy. Theologically, then, it doesn’t really make sense to characterize Dionysos and Hera as “natural enemies”, as Seaford does (135). Rather, it seems that there is an important overlap in their functions relative to the emergence of the soul. What I’m trying to do right now, is to understand the differences in Hera’s and Dionysos’ functions in this respect; it’s an unfinished project.
I’ve already discussed somewhat the symbolic significance of madness as the formal differentiation of the soul into its diverse, and potentially conflicting, faculties. But Hera’s functions with respect to what I’ve termed the soul’s formal differentiation seem to extend beyond the confines of the ‘madness’ motif she shares with Dionysos. Perusing diverse instances of Hera’s ‘wrath’ (here, for example), one can see that even where they don’t concern insanity, they can be read as concerning the soul’s formal differentiation. One example that jumps out at me is that of the Sphinx, visited upon the Thebans by Hera as a result of some ‘injustice’. On a very basic level, the Sphinx herself, like most mythological composite beasts, is a symbol of the differentiated soul, with her blend of human, lion, and eagle parts—compare Plato’s image of the human soul as containing a human (the intelligence), a lion (the ‘spirited’ part), and a many-headed beast (the desiring part) (Rep. 588b & sq.).
But let’s put the Sphinx into more of a narrative context. One should get used to reading any ‘injustice’ in myth through the lens of Anaximander’s fragment, which states that “the source of coming-to-be for existing things is that into which destruction, too, happens, ‘according to necessity; for they pay penalty and retribution to each other for their injustice according to the assessment of Time’,” (Simplicius, In Phys. 24, 17; trans. in Kirk, Raven & Schofield, p. 118). ‘Injustice’ in myths is almost always a question of physics, of the emergence of some structure whose incorporated energy will have to be ‘paid back’. One might compare the modern concept of negative entropy, according to which living systems need to ‘export’ their disorder. This structure is the key, I think, to unlocking so much of the symbolic richness in narrative itself.
Since divine ‘wrath’ in a myth so often goes together with a narrative about ‘injustice’, it should come as no surprise that divine ‘wrath’ is essentially productive of such negentropic structures, and that so much of the innovation that occurs on the material plane in myths does so as a result of divine ‘wrath’, and why ‘wrathful’ deities in cultures as diverse as Egypt and India are so often the deities not of last but of first resort. Divine ‘wrath’ of this sort is productive specifically of things that possess this negentropic tension and thus ‘pay penalty … according to the assessment of Time’. Now, the Sphinx’s riddle to Oedipus concerns the mortal soul’s temporal differentiation: first an infant, now an adult in the prime of life, then elderly. Isn’t this, then, a respect in which Hera’s work on the soul transcends in universality that which Dionysos does, because the whole work performed by the demiurge in giving order to the cosmos can virtually be reduced to the single concept of temporalization, i.e., creating a “moving image of eternity” (Tim. 37c-e). This is not a question of putting something static into motion, but of giving a measure to eternally existing motion; this is why the demiurge’s act is inseparable from the emergence of soul as the locus of measurement—which is also why demiurgy, as an office or function, can be executed by any number of different deities from different pantheons, because there is no single cosmic order distinct from the many world-orders instituted by the many pantheons. Each one is adequate, not because they are all images, and images are all inadequate; this is the dualistic fallacy. Each one is adequate because each one institutes, enacts its world-order. They are not passive embodiments of a culture, or a linguistic or geographical territory—how many times have I heard someone ask sarcastically whether a storm over India is Indra’s, while a storm over Greece is Zeus’s?—but rather the enactment of these territories; they are what is alive in these territories. These world-views or world-orders are, that is, the souls of which the cultural territories we can observe are the bodies.
I’ve already discussed somewhat the symbolic significance of madness as the formal differentiation of the soul into its diverse, and potentially conflicting, faculties. But Hera’s functions with respect to what I’ve termed the soul’s formal differentiation seem to extend beyond the confines of the ‘madness’ motif she shares with Dionysos. Perusing diverse instances of Hera’s ‘wrath’ (here, for example), one can see that even where they don’t concern insanity, they can be read as concerning the soul’s formal differentiation. One example that jumps out at me is that of the Sphinx, visited upon the Thebans by Hera as a result of some ‘injustice’. On a very basic level, the Sphinx herself, like most mythological composite beasts, is a symbol of the differentiated soul, with her blend of human, lion, and eagle parts—compare Plato’s image of the human soul as containing a human (the intelligence), a lion (the ‘spirited’ part), and a many-headed beast (the desiring part) (Rep. 588b & sq.).
But let’s put the Sphinx into more of a narrative context. One should get used to reading any ‘injustice’ in myth through the lens of Anaximander’s fragment, which states that “the source of coming-to-be for existing things is that into which destruction, too, happens, ‘according to necessity; for they pay penalty and retribution to each other for their injustice according to the assessment of Time’,” (Simplicius, In Phys. 24, 17; trans. in Kirk, Raven & Schofield, p. 118). ‘Injustice’ in myths is almost always a question of physics, of the emergence of some structure whose incorporated energy will have to be ‘paid back’. One might compare the modern concept of negative entropy, according to which living systems need to ‘export’ their disorder. This structure is the key, I think, to unlocking so much of the symbolic richness in narrative itself.
Since divine ‘wrath’ in a myth so often goes together with a narrative about ‘injustice’, it should come as no surprise that divine ‘wrath’ is essentially productive of such negentropic structures, and that so much of the innovation that occurs on the material plane in myths does so as a result of divine ‘wrath’, and why ‘wrathful’ deities in cultures as diverse as Egypt and India are so often the deities not of last but of first resort. Divine ‘wrath’ of this sort is productive specifically of things that possess this negentropic tension and thus ‘pay penalty … according to the assessment of Time’. Now, the Sphinx’s riddle to Oedipus concerns the mortal soul’s temporal differentiation: first an infant, now an adult in the prime of life, then elderly. Isn’t this, then, a respect in which Hera’s work on the soul transcends in universality that which Dionysos does, because the whole work performed by the demiurge in giving order to the cosmos can virtually be reduced to the single concept of temporalization, i.e., creating a “moving image of eternity” (Tim. 37c-e). This is not a question of putting something static into motion, but of giving a measure to eternally existing motion; this is why the demiurge’s act is inseparable from the emergence of soul as the locus of measurement—which is also why demiurgy, as an office or function, can be executed by any number of different deities from different pantheons, because there is no single cosmic order distinct from the many world-orders instituted by the many pantheons. Each one is adequate, not because they are all images, and images are all inadequate; this is the dualistic fallacy. Each one is adequate because each one institutes, enacts its world-order. They are not passive embodiments of a culture, or a linguistic or geographical territory—how many times have I heard someone ask sarcastically whether a storm over India is Indra’s, while a storm over Greece is Zeus’s?—but rather the enactment of these territories; they are what is alive in these territories. These world-views or world-orders are, that is, the souls of which the cultural territories we can observe are the bodies.
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World-Orders and Regions
Date: 2012-06-20 06:24 pm (UTC)There is an order in the entire world insofar as it is present in every part of the world, not only as a part, but as a whole. There is an order that encompasses both rainfall in Greece and in India, because in Greece there is one world-order that encompasses rainfall in Greece and in India and in India there is also a world-order that encompasses rainfall in Greece and in India. Thus the existence of local-cosmic orders is what actually constitutes the existence of a global-cosmic order. And although we come to know these different world-orders through their embodiment in cultures located in a particular region and existing during a particular time, their manifold is actually the ratio essendi of the spatio-temporal differentiation of the cosmos. For this reason, the many local-cosmic orders are what connect the many regions to their causes and to being and in this sense they enact their territories and are their soul.
There can be many creators and world-orders, because a world-order is an order of orders?
Re: World-Orders and Regions
Date: 2012-06-20 07:35 pm (UTC)A = {A, B, C, …}, B = {A, B, C, …}, C = {A, B, C, …}, …,
where there is no X = {A, B, C, …}.
The world-orders function the same way, inasmuch as each world-order is complete, each is a totality.
So what about the totality of totalities? "The existence of local-cosmic orders is what actually constitutes the existence of a global-cosmic order"—Indeed; the problem is that it is probably not strictly correct to call this a "world-order", but rather something like the pure form of any possible world-order as such, or something even weaker, the pure possibility of a factical exhaustion of possibilities for totalization.
Re: World-Orders and Regions
Date: 2012-06-20 09:54 pm (UTC)Going along this line, divine ubiquity might very well be the first axiom for cosmology as a metaphysical science, as the study of the world as intelligible, that is as a world-whole in each part of the world.
Re: World-Orders and Regions
Date: 2012-06-21 03:19 pm (UTC)What sort of "proportion" could be established between world-orders on this basis? Any proportion seems as though it would have to be intellective, i.e., just doing conceptual dialectic and comparison of theologies, and being awake to the possibility of fresh existential connections or manifestations. This latter seems key to me, the lack of closure internal to theology, and which could be seen as a sort of empty relationality.
It is quite true that "cosmology" as such has, in a sense, not yet had its day, inasmuch as there has been no proper metaphysics of world-orders (that I'm aware of) that has not simply fallen into hylomorphism.
Re: World-Orders and Regions
Date: 2012-06-21 04:22 pm (UTC)