By David Black
2 January 2025
‘When we have gone back to Homer, most scholars will think that we have touched the pillars of Hercules, and that we had better not pry into the prehistoric darkness, which the accidents of tradition have left blank. But the problem, why the Greeks believed that the Gods themselves were subject to the moral, yet impersonal and purposeless, ordinance of Destiny, is too fascinating to be abandoned, and lures us to push out into the misty ocean of hypothesis.’ – Frances Cornford
Simone Pignoni, The Rape of Proserpine, 1650.
The idea of a single substance underlying the plurality of sensuous experience is traceable back to pre-religious magic. The articulation of this idea in Greek philosophy is attributed to the development of coined money in the ancient economy.
The primary stuff is constituted by the elements: earth, air, wind and fire. The elements are deified as nature gods by the human community, whose survival and well-being depends on ‘balance’ between the interpenetrating elements (e.g. volcanic fire can devastate the surrounding earth). Circa 500 B.C.E. the pre-Socratic philosophers develop a metaphysics of oppositions from the elements: reality versus appearance, original versus derivative, total versus partial, etc.
Parmenides (5th century B.C.E.) makes the first attempt in the history of philosophy at a pure, relentless, deductive logic of non-empirical abstractions. Counter-intuitively, he casts aside sensual perceptions of things moving in their multiplicity within space and time, to grasp the reality of the world as united in the One that is nowhere and nowhen. Existence simply is, and non-existence simply is not, whether in being or – what is the same thing – in thought. Everything is immovable, because movement requires empty space, and empty space is nothing and so cannot be. The thought of nothing, because it is a thought and therefore a something, negates the negation that nothing represents. Being is Reason.
Alfred Sohn-Rethel sees Parmenides as the first exponent of “pure thought” to emerge with “a concept fitting the description of the abstract material of money.” Sohn-Rethel pays almost no attention to Heraclitus. But according to Seaford, the opposition between Heraclitus and Parmenides can be seen as expression of the opposition between money as the communal logos of circulation and money as the abstract oneness of value detached from circulation.
Parmenides’ conception of the One as self-sufficient and immovable being, is contested by Heraclitus (also 5th century B.C.E.). In the Heraclitian Logos, being and not-being are mediated by becoming. The gathering of all things and thoughts in totality is the blending of opposite principles that, in the human world, takes place through conflict and contradiction. Heraclitus says, “there would not be attunement without high and low notes, nor any animals without female and male, both of which are opposites.” According to Richard Seaford, in Money and the Early Greek Mind: Homer, Tragedy, and Philosophy:
‘In Heraclitus and sometimes in tragedy the transcendent power of money to unite opposites, to efface all distinctions between things and even between people, converges with the ancient power of mystery cult to unite opposites.’
In the Eleusinian cult, Demeter represents the womb, the grave, earth and its fruits. It she who gives humanity the great gift of grain for agriculture. When her daughter Persephone is taken off to the Underworld, she becomes an ‘angry one’ (erinye) and causes drought on the land. As this deprives the gods of offerings, Zeus is obliged to bring about a compromise which allows Persephone to spend some months of the year in the upper world; and so seasonal fertility of the land is established and the balance of the cosmos is restored in a new order. Persephone is the goddess of another great gift, the pomegranate ‘winter fruit’.
Dionysus is the son of Zeus and his daughter Persephone. Dionysus has special access to the underworld but because of this is hated by the Titans, who attack him after dazzling him with his own reflection in a mirror. After the Titans tear him to pieces and eat him Zeus destroys them. But out of the ashes of the Titans grows the human race, a strange mixture of, on the one hand, light and love, and on the other hand, Titanic malice, darkness and violence.
Orpheus, musical poet and charmer of nature, defies the rule of Hades by attempting to bring back his bride, Eurydice from the dead. After charming the rulers of the underworld Orpheus rescues Eurydice but fails to keep his “Don’t Look Back” agreement and loses her. Orphism, as a cult, becomes a theology without a church, but promoted by a narrative of hymns. As Orphism rapidly spreads across Greece and reaches Italy and Sicily, it becomes part of the Eleusinian mysteries, and is taken up by the natural philosophers. and the Pythagoreans. Orpheus is discussed in the dialogue between Phaedrus and Plato: Did he look back to make sure she wasn’t a phantasm created by daemons? Or was it because he doubted the word of Apollo? Or was he fool enough to think he could get the elixir of immortality from the shades?
In the Eleusinian ritual, the initiate, under the guidance of the hierophantes, is made to experience alternately, light and darkness, and hope and fear. In experiencing a divine intimacy with the Goddesses, he shares their sufferings and partakes of their sublime higher existence. According to the Roman Bishop Hippolytus, the climax of the Eleusinian vision is the initiate being shown an ear of ripe corn, which represents the power of the earth mother. Aristotle says of the cult of Orphism that the initiate ‘was not expected to learn or understand anything, but to feel a certain emotion and get into a certain state of mind, after first becoming fit to experience it.’
Whereas the Olympian gods are daemons of particular localities, the mystery gods, Dionysus and Orpheus, are daemons of human groups. The function of mystery cults is, strictly religious and organised as a secret society into which admission takes place through initiation rites.
The intoxicating spirit of Dionysus is human; the rituals of his worshippers (thiasmos) draw the god into the group and make the individuals lose themselves in the community of the divine and the One. As Cornford puts it,
“Orgiastic ritual ensures that Dionysus, even when his worship was contaminated with Olympian cults, never became fully an Olympian. His ritual, by perpetually renewing the bond of union with his group, prevented him from drifting away from his province, as the Olympians had done, and ascending to a remote and transcendental heaven. Moreover, a mystery religion is necessarily monotheistic or pantheistic.”
For the cult of Dionysus, human existence is the cyclical life of the seasons. The conceptual framework is thus temporal, rather than spatial. In Orphism it is both temporal and spatial, as the wheel of life through the seasons is governed by the circular movement of the stars. The Orphic reformation of the Dionysian religion involves worship of the heavenly bodies – especially the Sun – as measurements of time.
Orpheus, as a cult myth, represents, according to Seaford, ‘the victory of unity over fragmentation in both cosmos and self.’ The oppositions expressed in mystery cult – between limited and unlimited, individual and community, fragmentation and wholeness – may provide, he speculates, a ‘traditional model’ for the oppositions in money, as unconsciously projected by the philosophers.
The idea of experiencing the wholeness of self in the presence of the One through mystic initiation occurs in Plato’s Symposium, where the priestess Diotima says that beauty is revealed to the initiated as distinct from all things that partake of it, and as unchanged by their passing in and out of being.
This may suggest, according to Seaford, that “The mystic notion of a concealed fundamental truth may be adapted to – or even stipulate – the new cosmological idea (however counter-intuitive) of a concealed impersonal reality underlying appearances’; and that ‘the transcendent mystic object is unconsciously fused with the transcendence of monetary value.’
Plato, despite his anti-materialist outlook, approves of money because it renders things homogeneous and commensurable. The Guardians in Plato’s Republic, who have gold and silver in their souls, and are free from ‘the polluting human currency of the majority.’ In this way, Seaford says,
‘Plato’s divine precious metal combines its traditional immortality with the socially constructed, necessarily unchanging, impersonal and invisible value of coined precious metal, located in the soul…’
The absorption of individual things into their ideal unity consists of sublimated monetary value, which becomes the source of ‘being beyond being’. Thought autonomously acting on thought is imagined as in a way which resembles money producing interest in likeness to itself. Aristotle says that interest is an ‘unnatural; mode of acquisition because, as production of like-by-like, it transgresses the ‘natural; role of currency as means for exchange and circulation of wealth. The unlimited monetized power of the tyrants is condemned by Aristotle, who says that the free man ruling over his oikos is only self-sufficient to the extent that he is part of the self-sufficient polis. For unity to prevail in the face of the unlimited power of money and greed the polis must limit itself in terms of its size, population and class inequalities.
Seaford describes how in Greek tragedy the transcendent power of money to efface all customary distinctions converges with the ancient unifying power of mystery cult and communal reciprocity. The struggle between unity and fragmentation can be seen in Euripides’ play The Bacchae. The tyrant Pentheus is hostile to the Dionysian mystery cult and plots to expose its secrets by means of bribery. The god Dionysius, disguised as a man, tricks Pentheus into disguising himself as a woman to spy on the cult and then arranges to have him discovered and torn to pieces by crazed Maenads.
Of the blending and clash of opposites Seaford comments, ‘In Pentheus, as in the vision of Parmenides, the self-sufficiency of the man of money combines with the isolation of the mystic initiand.’
Monetization marginalizes communal reciprocity and actualises the illusory individual autonomy of the tyrant who like, nobles in general, depends in reality on the socially constructed acceptance of the value of money and its power to circulate beyond the control of any individual.
References
Richard Seaford, Money and the early Greek Mind: Homer, Tragedy, and Philosophy (Cambridge, UK; New York : Cambridge University Press, 2004) ISBN 0-521-83228-4
Walter F Otto, “The Meaning of the Eleusinian Mysteries,” The Meaning of the Eleusinian Mysteries.
Frances Cornford, From Religion to Philosophy (Princeton Paperbacks: 1991)
Alfred Sohn-Rethel, Intellectual and Manual Labour: A Critique of Epistemology.