#deviant origins

[chthonicdivinebard]

This multiplication of primary entities in both the Rhapsodic account and the accounts in Athenagoras and Hieronymos suggests an attempt to produce a cosmogony even more fundamental and authoritative than rival versions. Hesiod may think that Chaos and Earth come first, but Orpheus knows what came before these, the limitless span of Time and the egg from which both Heaven and Earth will be generated. The accounts in Athenagoras and Hieronymos take this a step further. Others (such as Pherekydes of Syros, the Persian Magoi, and the Sidonians, all mentioned in Damascius's summary of Eudemos) may think that Time was the first principle, but Orpheus knows even how Time itself was first generated. The choice of the ultimate first principle as water, however, suggests an attempt to conform with the mass of other authoritative cosmogonies, from Homer to Thales, that put water first. All these Orphic accounts deviate from Hesiod's starting point, providing an account that goes further back to Time or that places a watery flux at the origin instead of solid Earth manifesting in the yawning gap of Chaos.

“Deviant Origins: Hesiodic Theogony and the Orphica” by Radcliffe Edmonds III (p6)

[chthonicdivinebard]

In the Orphica the pattern of reproduction remains more abnormal; there are both more variations of asexual reproduction and more perverse sexual couplings throughout the entirety of the account. Intergenerational incest continues even to the generation of Zeus, and the couplings are often explicitly violent rapes, rather than the epic "mingling in love." In the earlier stages of the cosmogony, different types of asexual generation abound, from the coagulation of solid matter out of the primordial chaos of waters to the famous cosmic egg.

“Deviant Origins: Hesiodic Theogony and the Orphica” by Radcliffe Edmonds III (p7)

[chthonicdivinebard]

After Earth emerges from Chaos, much must still come into being if the world is to resemble the familiar current world of humans, and these processes of generation and change may be divided into processes of (a) (re)production, (b) conflict and conquest, and (c) the creation of humans (cf Plato, Sophist 242cd). The first generates new divine entities in the cosmos, while the second creates changes in the power structure. The final stage produces mortal human beings, but Hesiod notoriously elaborates less on this phase than on the first two, providing only an allusion in the Th and the myth of the five successive races of mortals in the Works and Days...For Hesiod, the focus in the Th is upon the succession of the generations of the Gods, the power struggle that culminates in the reign of Zeus.

“Deviant Origins: Hesiodic Theogony and the Orphica” by Radcliffe Edmonds III (p6)

[chthonicdivinebard]

The Orphic account that seems to have been put together the latest comes from the Orphic "Rhapsodies", most likely stitched together in the first or second century CE from older pieces of Orphic poetry. The "Rhapsodic" account, which Damascius refers to as "the usual" Orphic account, is actually less complicated than the accounts in Athenagoras and Hieronymos. The first stage of water is not present; the first principle is Chronos, unaging Time. As in Athenagoras's account, Chronos generates Chaos and the cosmic egg, from which is born Phanes. In the "Rhapsodies", Phanes first generates and then mates with Night to produce the succeeding generations of divine beings.

“Deviant Origins: Hesiodic Theogony and the Orphica” by Radcliffe Edmonds III (p6)

[chthonicdivinebard]

By contrast, Alexander of Aphrodisias, commenting on Aristotle's "Metaphysics", claims that Orpheus begins with Chaos ("in Ar Met" 1091b, p321), and the cosmogonies ascribed to Orpheus in the "Homilies" and the "Recognitions" attributed to Clement (perhaps third century CE) also begin with Chaos just as Hesiod does, saving their variations for later stages of development. The Clementine Chaos seems to flow and swirl like the watery Chaos Plutarch describes, and the speaker, Appion, even adduces the authority of Homer ("Iliad" 7.99) to argue that the elements this primordial Chaos comprises are earth and water ([Clement] "Homilies" 6.3-4; cf Rufinus "Recognitions" 10.17.2-4).

“Deviant Origins: Hesiodic Theogony and the Orphica” by Radcliffe Edmonds III (p5)

[chthonicdivinebard]

While there are traces of some Orphic cosmogonies that begin with Chaos, the starting point of all creation becomes a major point of variation within the cosmogonic accounts that circulate under the name of Orpheus. Different accounts begin with water, with Night, with Chronos (Time), or even by stacking various of these primary principles in sequence. The variation of the starting point serves as a way to assert the authority and originality of the Orphic account over the traditional Hesiodic one.

“Deviant Origins: Hesiodic Theogony and the Orphica” by Radcliffe Edmonds III (p4-5)

[chthonicdivinebard]

The absence of other elements among the primary principles in Hesiod's account worried later thinkers accustomed to seeing the cosmos begin with something less solid than Earth, and Plutarch, in his essay on the primacy of fire or water, attests to a long-standing interpretation of Hesiod's Chaos as water. "It seems to most people that he named water in this fashion [as Chaos] because of its flowing (chysis)" ("Aquane" 955e). Hesiod was thus grouped with Homer among those who put water first, since the line from the "Iliad" (14.201) that names Okeanos and Tethys as the origin of all the Gods was interpreted to indicate a Homeric cosmogony beginning with these water principles. This grouping, as Betegh (2002) has shown, probably goes back as far as the work of the fifth-century BCE sophist Hippias, who collected and distilled the wisdom of the poets (starting with Orpheus, Musaeus, Hesiod, and Homer), but Damascius, a millennium later, nevertheless rightly categorizes Hesiod's starting principles as the indeterminate space of Chaos followed by the Earth.

“Deviant Origins: Hesiodic Theogony and the Orphica” by Radcliffe Edmonds III (p4)

[chthonicdivinebard]

Whether they express their ideas in theogonic myth or philosophical prose, Greek cosmological thinkers, as Cornford (1912:71) points out, are all trying to resolve some common basic problems: "(1) the primary "physis", (2) the disposition or structure into which this living stuff is distributed, (3) the process by which the order arose." The Orphic accounts play their variations on the Hesiodic themes at each of these points, riffing in different ways on the idea of (1) the ultimate origin of the cosmos; (2a) the processes of reproduction by which subsequent entities were generated; (2b) the conflict between these divinities that created the changes from the original state to the current one; (2c) the way in which humans entered the story; and (3) the final resolution of the conflicts and changes that created the current, normal order of Zeus. The shocking innovations they introduce in the images of the theogonic narrative serve as rhetorical devices to bolster the authority of their often less shockingly innovative cosmological ideas. The Orphic poems tend to follow the pattern of Hesiod's cosmology, rather than creating radically different structures, and the variations they introduce in the ideas of how the cosmos came to be are often less striking than the mythic images with which they express them.

“Deviant Origins: Hesiodic Theogony and the Orphica” by Radcliffe Edmonds III (p3-4)