Sane Polytheism

I realized something fun while trying to read one of my favorite parts of the Iliad in Greek:

ἐν μὲν γαῖαν ἔτευξ’, ἐν δ’ οὐρανόν, ἐν δὲ θάλασσαν,
ἠέλιόν τ’ ἀκάμαντα σελήνην τε πλήθουσαν,
ἐν δὲ τὰ τείρεα πάντα, τά τ’ οὐρανὸς ἐστεφάνωται,
Πληϊάδας θ’ Ὑάδας τε τό τε σθένος Ὠρίωνος
Ἄρκτόν θ’, ἣν καὶ Ἄμαξαν ἐπίκλησιν καλέουσιν,
ἥ τ’ αὐτοῦ στρέφεται καί τ’ Ὠρίωνα δοκεύει,
οἴη δ’ ἄμμορός ἐστι λοετρῶν Ὠκεανοῖο.

On it, he made the earth, the sky, the sea,
the sun that never sleeps, the swelling moon,
and all the signs which circle the heavens:
the Pleiades, the Huades, mighty Orion,
and the Bear (which they also call the Wagon),
which always spins in place, watching Orion closely,
and, alone, being free of bathing in the Ocean.

(Hephaistos decorates the shield of Akhilleus. Homer, Iliad XVIII 483–9.)

This is, in fact, almost all that is said of the hieroglyphs on the walls of the great Temple by the archaic Poets. (Homer says elsewhere that Sirius is Orion's hunting dog, and Hesiod adds agricultural timing to the rising and setting of these but mentions no other celestial figures.) "The Bear" is the Greek name, and "the Wagon" the Mesopotamian name, for the constellation we Americans call "the Big Dipper." That Orion and the Big Dipper and Sirius are emphasized is surely no surprise, as even a city kid like me in a misbegotten age like this one recognizes these three beyond all others. The Pleiades and Huades are a little surprising—even knowing where to look I have not managed to identify them—but I suppose that, given their intimate connection with trade (Pleiades means "sailors") and agriculture (Huades means "rain-bringers"), their import to the Greeks is obvious enough.

But let me focus on the Bear's behavior: always watching Orion and never going near the water. "The sea" must be the horizon, as the Big Dipper is far enough north that it remains in the sky all year round at the latitude of Greece. Presumably, then, the sky is simply heaven, and the "underworld" is the part of the sky below the horizon which we do not see.

Now, I have said before that Osiris is Orion, the "great man of heaven;" that Horos is Sirius, his son and the brightest star of heaven, literally following Orion's footsteps; and that Isis and Anoubis are Argo Navis and Canopus, searching for Osiris in their little boat together. We might see Egypt as heaven, the sea as the horizon, and Bublos as the underworld. The original home of Osiris is obviously heaven, but Seth kills him and he floats to the ocean, which seems a clear reference to Orion falling below the horizon; Isis follows him and brings him back from the underworld, which is just as clear a reference to Argo Navis following Orion in the sky and Orion rising back up above the horizon again. (Indeed, after he returns, the boat becomes visible again, as Isis searches for Osiris's pieces.) That Osiris is "king of Duat" may be a reference to the fact that he is the most conspicuous constellation in the southern sky, and perhaps then it is no surprise that Odusseus saw Orion when he went to Haides.

I wonder if the Greeks got their star lore from Egypt (presumably via Syria—noting Homer's reference to "the Wagon," and noting that the name Orion is believed to be from Akkadian uru-anna "light of heaven"); if so, then perhaps it is no accident that the Bear is the only other constellation mentioned. Who watches Osiris carefully and never leaves Egypt? Why, Seth does; and Plutarch even tells us (Isis and Osiris §21, though be advised that I ignore his celestial associations for Isis and Horos) that the Egyptians associate the Bear with Seth. (I can even sorta see the Seth-animal in the shape of the Bear.) So perhaps we have another piece of the myth, still written in the stars.

As for the Pleiades, these are not directly referenced as far as I can tell in the Egyptian myth (though perhaps these are the servant-girls of Astarte which invite Isis into the palace). It seems noteworthy that Osiris was forced to the sea unwillingly, while Orion chases the Pleiades into the sea; perhaps this is why the Greeks emphasize sensual desire as the cause of the fall of the soul, while the Egyptians seem to have seen it more as simple necessity.

Very speculatively, I wonder if Thoueris and the serpent are the Little Dipper (an obvious choice for the consort of the Big Dipper) and the constellation Draco, respectively; the Little Dipper defecting to Horos because Polaris points the way North, and Horos begins his upward journey once she joins him. Certainly, the Staff of Asklepios—another symbol of the soul's purification—is a reference to the world axis, topped by Polaris, around which a great serpent is coiled...

I have no idea what the Egyptian sphinx represents—best guess is that it was originally just a lion, but some narcissistic jerk re-sculpted his face onto it—but the Greek sphinx, at least, is simply the riddle, the puzzle, the koan personified: it entices you in with it's pretty face and soft breasts, but once you get close, it sinks its claws into you. (In fact, the word Σφίγξ "sphinx" is from the Greek σφίγξω "I will hold tight.") With that image, an entire avenue of sphinxes seems a frightening prospect, and yet here I am, traipsing down just such a path...

A while back I noted that there were two major Greek myth cycles, the "city myth" and the the "hero myth." The first of these (exemplified by the two great cycles of the Heroic age, Thebai and Troia) follows seven generations of kings as they found a city, the city's royal line splits, the main branch fails (due to assaults from foreigners ultimately caused by a divine curse), while the secondary branch moves on to found a new city. On the other hand, the "hero myth" (exemplified by the Horos myth and the Orestes branch of the Epic Cycle), describes the structure of the world that we inhabit and describes what we can do about it; it is meant to be an example to prospective initiates, just like Athenaie says:

ἢ οὐκ ἀίεις οἷον κλέος ἔλλαβε δῖος Ὀρέστης
πάντας ἐπ’ ἀνθρώπους, ἐπεὶ ἔκτανε πατροφονῆα,
Αἴγισθον δολόμητιν, ὅ οἱ πατέρα κλυτὸν ἔκτα;
καὶ σύ, φίλος, μάλα γάρ σ’ ὁρόω καλόν τε μέγαν τε,
ἄλκιμος ἔσσ’, ἵνα τίς σε καὶ ὀψιγόνων ἐὺ εἴπῃ.

Or haven't you heard what kind of renown noble Orestes gained
among all men when he avenged his father by murdering
that weaselly Aigisthos, who killed his illustrious father?
Likewise you, my friend—for I see that you are very handsome and well-built—
be courageous! so that even those yet to come may speak well of you.

(Athenaie, in the guise of Mentes, exhorting Telemakhos. Homer, Odyssey I 298-302, as translated—hopefully not too badly!—by yours truly.)

This is, in fact, why Horos never goes to Bublos or why Orestes never goes to Troia: they are drawing on the lessons of the "city myth" in order to determine their own path. The city is an abstraction or teaching to them, the stories of those who went before, rather than a lived experience. In fact, it suggests that the city is a place they want to avoid, a source of trouble! Because of this, it seems rather important to make sense of what the city is and what it means, but I've been in difficulty doing so. I hit upon a potential angle on it, though, that I thought might be worth walking through.

I recently mentioned the Ra Material in reference to Teiresias (himself a part of the Thebaian city myth), and while pondering this, I realized that "Ra's" metaphysics dovetails neatly with the city myth, with "Ra's" seven degrees of consciousness corresponding very well with the seven generations of kings; under this interpretation, the city myth describes the unfolding of the Cosmos from Source to Source, while the hero myth, situated at the end of it, tells us what we can do about it right now, today, and what we can expect to happen to us if we try.

As a disclaimer and a reminder, I'm pretty skeptical of channeled texts (and doubly so of anything "New Age") for a few reasons: first, I have a pretty strong anti-modernity bias; second, most people are incapable of reaching up to the aither to channel angels, and even if they can, it can be very difficult to tell since daimons "know how to tell many convincing lies;" third, the channelled material always reflects the biases of the person doing the channelling, and if one isn't personally close with them, it can be very difficult to correct for these; and fourth, the "New Age" seems to largely presuppose a worldview I don't adhere to, and involve wish-fulfilment fantasies which I'm not interested in. So this material needs to be taken with salt; please consider this post merely an attempt to expand upon my prior exploration of Teiresias in order to make a more comprehensive evaluation of the model possible.

Perhaps I should start by describing "Ra's" view of the development of consciousness. (Or attempting to, it is not perfectly clear to me, so take this as a sketch.) Consciousness is analogized as a vibration, and this continuum of vibration is discretized into seven degrees of consciousness, just like how we break up all the possible vibrations of the air into a scale of seven notes or all the possible vibrations of the visual spectrum into seven colors. Since souls are just a vehicle for consciousness, we inherently possess the capacity to vibrate in any harmony of frequencies, at least potentially; but in practice, one has to "climb the scale" a bit at a time, from lowest vibration to highest vibration:

1. Red, which relates to being, and is the consciousness of "inanimate" objects.

2. Orange, which relates to growth and movement, and is the consciousness of plants and animals.

3. Yellow, which relates to social identity, and is the consciousness of humans. Being the vibration of identity, it is the first properly "individual" degree: red and orange are "herd" or "group" consciousness, while yellow consciousness is individual (at least once sufficiently developed).

4. Green, which relates to love, and is the consciousness of lower daimons. Love is polarized: one may give love (compassion) or take love (selfishness), and thus green consciousness is dual in nature.

5. Blue, which relates to communication and wisdom, and is the consciousness of higher daimons, though it is also (being the lowest vibration not subject to mortality) where we resonate with after death. Blue retains the polarized nature of green; the positive pole is the collective search of understanding (collaboration), while the negative pole is the individual search of understanding (hoarding knowledge).

6. Indigo, which relates to universality, and is the consciousness of angels. Unlike green and blue, indigo is not meaningfully polarized, because of the nature of universality; negatively-polarized individuals, having mastered wisdom, come to understand this and reorient themselves positively as they endeavor to comprehend the All.

7. Violet, which is related to transcendance and unity. This is, in a sense, rejoining the All and moving on to a new "octave" of existence, in which one co-creates the universe as and with God. (At least, apparently: "Ra" claimed to be of indigo consciousness, themselves, and claimed only secondhand knowledge about violet consciousness from its own teachers.)

Apparently souls usually ascend as groups: that is to say, the group of what we now call "human souls" all passed through the red stage more-or-less together, then the orange stage more-or-less together, and are now working through the yellow stage more-or-less together. ("Ra" says the reason why the earth is such a mess is that, apparently unusually, humans aren't developing consistently: a few are polarizing positively, a few others are polarizing negatively, and the vast majority aren't polarizing at all. Evidently conditions are much smoother in the common case where the group develops together.) There are uncommon exceptions to souls developing as a group, however: some people are souls of a higher degree, who incarnate as humans in order to teach and guide; while, conversely, some few human souls "jump the tracks" and, through spiritual practices or divine support or sometimes even by accident, behold God naked and become able to ascend separately from the rest of their group.

I think that's enough about "Ra's" metaphysics to get on with. So far so good, and other than the emphasis on soul-groups, isn't too distant from Empedokles or Plotinos.

As for the city myths, there is, unfortunately, no one good source remaining for either of them. I'd like to look at Troia today, partly because I looked at Thebai last time and partly because the Epic cycle is by far the more familiar to me. The outlines of it's history can be more-or-less cobbled back together from bits and pieces in the Iliad and Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite (which I trust) and the Library (which is my preferred fallback when a reliable source isn't available). Here is a sketch at describing the seven generations, with citations:

1. Dardanos, the favorite mortal son of Zeus, founded Dardania at the foot of Mt. Ide. [Il. XX 215-8, 301–5.]

2. Erikhthonios, the son and successor of Dardanos, "became the richest of all men" with a herd of three thousand mares. Boreas mated with some of these mares in the form of a black stallion, adding twelve semi-divine horses to Erikhthonios's herd. [Il. XX 219–29.]

3. Tros is the son and successor of Erikhthonios, renaming the kingdom (but not the city) of Dardania after himself. [Il. XX 230, Lib. III xii §2.]

4. At this point the royal line splits three ways, as Tros has three sons: Ilos, Assarakhos, and Ganumedes. All three are described as faultless. Ilos goes to Phrygia; he wins a prize of fifty men and women; following an oracle's instruction, he follows a dappled cow to the hill of Ate; he asks Zeus for a sign; he is given the Palladium; and he founds Ilios on the spot. Assarakhos, meanwhile, simply succeeds to the throne of Dardania. Ganumedes, finally, being peer of the gods and most beautiful of mortals, is spirited away in a whirlwind to be the immortal, ageless cupbearer of Zeus; Tros is grieved by his son's disappearance until Zeus sends Hermes to tell him what has become of him and give him divine horses. [Il. XX 231–5; HH 202–17; Lib. III xii §3.]

5. Laomedon is the son and successor of Ilos, and also described as faultless. Kapus is the son and successor of Assarakhos. [Il. XX 236, 239.]

6. Priamos is the son and successor of Laomedon; he is the final king of Ilios, since while Zeus loves Priamos and his city, he withdraws his favor from Priamos's line and gives it to Aineias. Ankhises is the son and successor of Kapus; he was seduced by Aphrodite, but not made immortal; and he secretly bred his mares to the divine horses of Laomedon (descendants of those ransomed for Ganumedes), thereby stealing their bloodline. [Il. IV 44–9, V 265–72, XX 236, 300–8; HH.]

7. Hektor is the son and heir apparent of Priamos, but is killed in battle by Akhilleus. Aineias is the son and successor of Ankhises; he is the son of Aphrodite; he is most pious and beloved by the gods; and he escapes Ilios and refounds it after it is sacked. [Il. II 819–21, XX 293–308, XXII; HH.]

Now, let's synthesize these two models. I don't think this is too difficult! The seven kings can obviously be linked to the seven degrees of consciousness, with the line of descent showing the progression of consciousness (e.g. orange follows red just as Erikthonios follows Dardanos), and with the split among the sons of Tros showing the split in polarization at the green level of consciousness (e.g. just as, after Tros, the Troad has two kingdoms, Dardania and Ilios, so too does consciousness have two polarities after yellow). Everything else falls out naturally from there.

Mt. Ide (traditionally from ἴδη "woods," as in a place of material to harvest and work with) is the world-axis or ladder of consciousness, which is why Zeus sits atop it and watches all. The hill of Ate (Ἄτη "blindness, recklessness") is presumably where Zeus threw her after Hera tricked him into recklessly making Iphikles king rather than Herakles (cf. Il. XIX 91–136), clearly a place where a lack of foresight makes one deviate from the intended course. Dardania (apparently related to the onomatapoeic δάρδα darda "bee," like "bumble" in English, and an appropriate name for cooperation, as a hive of bees work together for the good of all) is the positive polarization of consciousness, while Ilios (which Ilos, of course, selfishly named for himself) is the negative polarization of consciousness, distant from Ide but still in sight of it (as one can never really escape divinity).

Dardania is founded by Dardanos at the foot of Ide since red consciousness is foundational, inherently positive, and where everything begins; while Ilios is founded by Ilos on Ate since green consciousness is the first that can be negatively polarized (though doing so is short-sighted). Nonetheless, each of Tros's three children are described as ἀμύμονες "without blemish," because all is one, so to love others and to love self are both to love God. However, Tros has a third faultless son: Ganumedes; Xenophon's Socrates (Symposium VIII xxx) makes the case that Ganumedes was beautiful in soul, and I likewise think that Ganumedes is a mythic representation of how peculiarly virtuous souls can short-circuit the usual path of growth through intensive self-development and/or devotion to divinity. Zeus withdraws his favor from Priam because negative polarization halts at the indigo level (thus ending the line of Ilos), and Hektor dies in battle because it is not possible for a negative polarization to transcend. Aineias refounds Ilios because the result of returning to the One is to co-create the next "octave" of consciousness.

Homer goes to particular lengths to talk about horses (maybe they should have called him Φίλιππος Phillip "horse fancier"), so these must be noteworthy for some reason. I suppose that while the kings represent the levels of consciousness in general, the horses must represent their property; that is, specific individuals or groups of individuals within those levels of consciousness. Perhaps the wealth of Erikhthonios indicates the vast speciation of the natural world, while the offspring of Boreas ("the North Wind") indicates that only some of the many species of animals are judged desirable enough to become vessels of the yellow level (e.g. are imbued with "breath" or "wind," that is, individual soul); perhaps the horses Zeus gifts to Ilos indicate that while some beautiful souls may leave the group, the group is not neglected, but is in fact given support in recompense for their loss in order to maintain balance; that Ankhises breeds his horses with the descendents of these perhaps suggests that these beautiful souls join groups of the indigo level ("go to be with the angels"). These kinds of things aren't really discussed in the Ra Material so far as I recall, though, so this is all not-terribly-deep guesswork based strictly on the symbolism in the myth.

A few miscellaneous notes from while I was working my way through all this:

• I have long wondered why Homer is so very down on Aphrodite; she seems to me to be among the nicest of the gods. One nice thing about this interpretation of the city myth is that it makes sense of this. Aphrodite is love, and loving mode of consciousness—green—is where polarization takes place; since Ilios is the negative polarization, which is ultimately incapable of returning to the source, this is the reason for the city's downfall. In fact, that Zeus refuses to adjudicate the apple to any of the goddesses indicates that God has given us free will to choose our paths; that Paris has to choose between Aphrodite (= love​ = green?), Athene (= wisdom​ = blue?), and Hera (= universality = indigo?) indicates that these are the levels affected by choice of polarization; that Paris chooses Aphrodite for reasons of self-gratification reinforces the recklessness (ate) of the negative polarization in general.

• I'm not really prepared to do a deep-dive on the Thebaian myth yet, but while we're talking about sphinxes, it's worth noting that Oidipous, being of the fifth royal generation, would, by this theory, be of the blue, or wisdom, degree of consciousness. This makes his solving of the sphinx's riddle—a test of wisdom—pretty appropriate!

• If you'll recall in the Horos-myth, I likened Thoth to "experience," the reason or purpose behind climbing the ladder of consciousness: so God-in-part can come to know part-of-God. Thoth is married to Maat, the "necessity" of this occurring. It is noteworthy that the child of Thoth and Maat is Seshat "scribess," who is depicted with two cow horns and a seven-petalled flower above her head. It is plausible to me that "scribess" is a reference to consciousness being that which observes and records (cf. Od. XI 223–4) and the seven-petalled flower is indicative of the seven modes of consciousness here described:

  𓋇

  This would, of course, presuppose that "Ra" is correct in saying that they influenced the development of Egypt with their teachings.