#radcliffe edmonds

[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]

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]

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)

[chthonicdivinebard]

The earliest quotations of Orphic poems appear in Plato, but the discovery of the fourth-century BCE Derveni papyrus provides quotations from an Orphic poem that must have been circulating even earlier. This papyrus, miraculously preserved on a Thessalian funeral pyre, preserves a text in which the author makes allegorical interpretations of a poem by Orpheus that narrates Zeus's rise to the sovereignty of the cosmos by subsuming all the earlier entities within Himself. The text is full of gaps, often at the most tantalizing points, but the quotations from the Orphic poem nevertheless help fill in the fragmentary accounts of the Neoplatonists.

“Deviant Origins: Hesiodic Theogony and the Orphica” by Radcliffe Edmonds III p3

[chthonicdivinebard]

The absence of the moon in the Mithras Liturgy, then, provides clues to the cosmological perspectives both of the creator of the spell itself and of the redactor who compiled the Great Paris Magical Papyrus. In the cosmologies of other theurgic systems, the powers of "genesis" are a necessary part of the cosmic order, and the moon serves as a helpful intermediary for those seeking contact from the material world to the realms above. In the Mithras Liturgy, by contrast, the ambivalent position of the moon as intermediary in other cosmologies is interpreted in a more negative sense, since this ruler of "genesis" must be absent for the apogenetic ritual to succeed. Although the surviving evidence for Mithraism does not present a particularly negative picture of the moon and "genesis" (apart from the obvious fact that Mithras slays the lunar bull), the redactor of the Great Paris Magical Papyrus found in the Mithras Liturgy a scenario that could be fit within more pessimistic views of the moon and "genesis." Throughout the papyrus, the moon is a hostile power, trapping souls in "genesis" through hostile "daimones" and the chains of fate. This power can be coerced into assisting in violent magic, but it must be kept as far as possible from an enterprise that aims at "apogenesis." The magician's preparations and ascent to the Great God Mithras, therefore, must take place when the moon is entirely absent from the sky, at the seizure of the moon.

At the Seizure of the Moon: The Absence of the Moon in the Mithras Liturgy by Radcliffe G Edmonds III in “Magic in History: Prayer, Magic, and the Stars in the Ancient and Late Antique World” edited by Scott Noegel, Joel Walker, and Brannon Wheeler (p 238-9)

[chthonicdivinebard]

This correspondence suggests that the spell was originally composed by someone who had some understanding of Mithraic ideas about the sun and moon. Indeed, in contrast to Franz Cumont's famous claim that the Mithras Liturgy is neither Mithraic nor a liturgy, scholars have identified a number of genuinely Mithraic features in the cosmology of the Mithras Liturgy. The peculiar doubling of the Sun-Gods in the ascent not only appears in Platonic contexts but is a standard feature of Mithraism, where Sol, the sun, appears separately from Mithras Sol Invictus. Mithras as the ruler of the celestial pole, turning the heavens by means of the Bear constellations in the form of a bull's shoulder, appears not only in the central scene of the Mithras Liturgy but in a variety of Mithraic monuments. The positioning of the Great Bear on the ceiling of the Ponza mithraeum, as Beck has argued, shows that at least some Mithraic groups made the connection between the Great Bear...and Mithras, for Mithras is depicted with the bull's shoulder in the side panels of a number of monuments.

At the Seizure of the Moon: The Absence of the Moon in the Mithras Liturgy by Radcliffe G Edmonds III in “Magic in History: Prayer, Magic, and the Stars in the Ancient and Late Antique World” edited by Scott Noegel, Joel Walker, and Brannon Wheeler (p 237-8)