Although mostly considered in his "luminous" and "uranic" meaning, in the archaic tradition Apollo combines the most extreme dichotomies in his mystical and eschatology: the bow and the lyre, wisdom and "mania", depth and elevation, the catabasis and the journey in spirit to the White Island, the "Fall" of Being and the return of the Golden Age. Starting from ancient sources, we can find similar concepts not only to those of North Asian shamanism and Celtic spirituality, but even to the sacred vision of some modern poets — like Blake, Shelley and Yeats - whose Apollonian chrism will appear clearer to us if we analyze their “Weltanschauung” in the light of the Platonic and Heraclitean doctrines.
di Marco Maculotti
(This article arises from the cataloging of the notes collected for the conference "Elevation and depth: harmonies and contrasts in the Apollonian", held in Milan for the Imaginalis Association on 29 November 2019, whose audio recording we have published elsewhere)
«The point of view of knowledge is this: rejecting the present as reality, understanding thoughts and feelings, objects and figures of the present as disguises to be unmasked. The profound life draws from the well of the past, what is most remote in time is more alive. "
«The moment as intuition precedes the shock; in the flow of time an instant suddenly rises, which "is in no time", says Plato improperly, but which strictly speaking begins time, is already in time, but alludes to something that is not in time, it affects it, expresses it. […] “Everything rules the lightning”. "
- G. Colli, "After Nietzsche " [pp. 63 and 68]
Philologists and historians of religions of the last few centuries have more often than not misunderstood the numinous figure of Apollo, focusing excessively on his "luminous" attributes and ignoring (deliberately?) His "dark" side. The myth of an exclusively celestial Apollo, solar divinity connected with the Logos, rationality and order is not reflected in the ancient world, if not in some not too archaic theogonies (such as that ofJulian emperor(The birth of the tragedy). The ancient testimonies on the god, and no less evidently the sources concerning his "priests", the so-called Iatromanti, which Ioan P. Culianu treated exhaustively in his essay Journeys of the soul, actually show a very different situation, which makes Apollo not only a "Uranian" god, but at the same time also a daimon ("Immortal spirit") chthonic, dwelling in the "world below".
It is true that many Apollonian Iatromancers are told about the journeys "in spirit" in the direction of the White Island, Leukè, undoubtedly equivalent to the "supernal world" of shamanic traditions. Yet, at the same time, it should not be forgotten that the atromancers themselves were capable of accomplishing katabasis, "Immersion in spirit" into the world below, which at the time was referred to as Hades. There, they came into contact with the spirits of the lower world and with the souls of the dead, who were sometimes able to bring them back to life, making them "go back" with them to our world. In this we can see a correspondence with Mongolian-Siberian shamanism, whose tradition, however, distinguishes between "White shamans" (capable of making "supernal journeys") and "black shamans" (to whom the ability to descend into the underworld is attributed): in the Apollonian current of Iatromancers the two abilities often coexist in a single person (something that is found, albeit rarely, also in the Asian shamanic tradition).
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1. The Depth: incubation e katabasis
1.1. Apollo like daimon underground and oracle
One of the best known epiphanies of this chthonic Apollo is the so-called Apollo Pholeuterios mentioned on a marble slab dating back to the 1973rd century BC discovered in XNUMX in Istria, which at the time was a Milesian colony on the Thracian coast of the Black Sea. The epithet of the god, which appears historically connected to the cult of Apollo Iatro venerated in the colonies Ionic-Pontine, derives from the verb that has the meaning of at the same time "hide" need "to protect", placing itself in some way in contrast with theApollo Oulios by Elea (Velia): the latter was in fact considered the Apollo of the polis, the former being its “wild” counterpart. But the term from which its epithet derives also means "Den", the hole in the subsoil where wild animals usually spend their hibernation in hibernation. In this we must see a clue to the ancients sacred practices of incubation, during which the faithful (questante), after having made the necessary sacrifices and the due invocations, isolated himself from the world for a few days and nights inside a completely dark underground cave, to receive the oracle of the god. Extremely similar were the incubation sessions performed in underground the temple of Asclepius, but also of many other heroes of the Hellenic tradition.
We have several sources regarding these oracular rituals, which betray an undoubtedly shamanic origin. Strabo, for example, mentions the Charonion (underground temple of Charon) at Acharaca in Caria and describes how the sick people who came there for healing were taken to the underground cave and left there in solitude without food for many days, "Like animals in their lairs". Sometimes they were accompanied by Supplants, priests of the temple; but entry to anyone else was strictly forbidden and was punished with death. It was also held at the Acharaca temple an annual festival, during which, in a night ceremony, participants could see "all these things" (secret; the Mysteries, precisely) and during which, at exactly midnight, naked teenagers led a bull into the cave, where it immediately expired: this was considered a sign of the presence of the god.
1.2. Pythagoras, Epimenides and the "magical food of the nymphs"
On the other hand it is handed down that Pythagoras, the most famous of the Iatromancers, sometimes even considered an Avatar of Apollo, descended - perhaps together with Epimenides of Crete, another iatromancer - into the caves inside Mount Ida, where the Dactyls, a kind of race of mythical pygmies who according to the myth would have invented philosophy. These beings share many traits in common with the gnomes and elves of Northern and Central European mythology, and on the other hand it is not surprising to learn that Epimenides it is said, among other things, that he boasted of having eaten many times the "Magical nymph food" - the nymphs being comparable to the fairies of the Roman tradition. Who knows the foklore concerning the fairies British are well aware of the topos concerning the food they offered in their subterranean kingdom: but while in post-medieval records, accepting such food condemned the reckless to ruin - that is to say, to live forever in the kingdom of fairies dying to our world, or returning to the "surface world" completely insane - in ancient Greece evidently the scholars thought differently, to the point that "To eat the food of the nymphs" was to know the divine secrets.
And yet, from the Hellenic point of view, wisdom was closely linked to madness, to the point that Giorgio Colli reminds us that, according to the Greeks, "the greatest of goods come to us through madness, which is granted by a divine gift [...] the "mantic", that is the art of divination, derives from "mania" [...] Apollo is not the god of measure, of harmony, but of invasion and madness [...] Madness is the matrix of wisdom " [The birth of philosophy, p. 20-1]. This may perhaps suggest the existence of a "golden vein", which passes through Pythagoras, Epimenides and the other Iatromancers to reach the "modern" Blake, Shelley and Yeats. It is no coincidence that the Apollonian cult was indelibly connected with that of the Nymphs, or of Muse. Parmenides himself, who described his catabasis as an encounter with the Goddess, who revealed to him "the unshakable heart of all-round truth", echoes the ecstatic and lyrical experiences of the three British poets mentioned above. And Empedocles defined Apollo "only a sacred and unspeakable heart [...] that with quick thoughts daring rushes through the whole world" - commented by Colli [The birth of philosophy, p. 44]:
« Apollo is inexpressible and hidden interiority, "sacred and unspeakable heart", that is the divinity in its metaphysical detachment, and at the same time it is a dominating and terrible activity in the human world »
1.3. The cave and wisdom
In any case, in these iatromantic practices one cannot but recognize chthonic atmospheres and mythologies that have more to do with the "world below" rather than with the supernal one. Epimenides himself had spent forty years inside the "Cave of the Dattili" of Mount Ida, which was also famous in antiquity because it was handed down that Minos himself had descended into it to be handed over by Zeus the laws with which to govern his kingdom: this we are told by Homer, Plato, Strabo and others. On the other hand, Plato himself and the Pythagoreans conceived the Cosmos like a cave: it therefore seems natural that they performed their crypto-shamanic rituals in an underground dimension, which is also confirmed by the chronicles (eg. Porphyry and Iamblichus), which report that Pythagoras owned an underground cave on the island of Samos, where he retired days and nights in search of true wisdom.
The worship of Apollo as daimon underground, however, was not limited to the Ionian-Pontine colonies. In Italy there was a well-known oracle in theLair of the Cumaean Sibyl at Lake Averno. In a cave to the north of the Acropolis of Athens (known as Akrai o Makrai) the god was invoked by his priests. And as if that were not enough, the association of Apollo with this place precedes the foundation of the Acropolis itself: it must therefore be, without any doubt, a very ancient cult. In Attica, Apollo was revered, in connection with Bread and the Nymphs, in a system of underground caves. Pausanias mentions a cave sacred to Apollo in a place called Fall, near Magnesia, where it is believed that the image of the god can give the suppliant the strength to carry out any task. In Magnesia there was also, near Mount Pelio, a cult of Chiron which equally placed the emphasis on healing and underground isolation in the manner of hibernating animals. Pausanias again he mentions a chthonic cult practiced in Phrygia, with a "trimurti" formed by Apollo, Heracles and Hermes "of the cave".
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2. The Depth and the Elevation: journeys in spirit to the Other World
2.1. Kidnapped to our world
Many of the Iatromancers are actually handed down, as it is also said in the Scotus-Irish tradition of gods fairies, that those who are "kidnapped" by Apollo and the Nymphs / Muses "after having descended into the world below, continued their business in the life of mortals, yet remaining invisible to their eyes." Many of them came from the northern or central Balkans: once they disappeared they literally became the daimon which would then be invoked by supplicants and faithful, inevitably located in the underground cave in which they had performed the catabasis. These oracles of heroes / demigods /daimones they were very active between the sixth and fifth centuries before our era.
Di Amphiaraus it was said that he had been "sucked" from the earth in Thebes, a merciful move with which Zeus saved him from imminent death and destruction, making him immortal. In the hypogeum where he acted as an oracle, theincubation it took place inside freshly skinned ram skins, a practice that is also found in various oracle centers in Puglia. The skin of sacrificed animals had a wide use in these wisdom centers, from forecasting the future to meteorological magic and purification - elements, these, decidedly shamanic (similar practices are still in force today in the Mongolian-Siberian and probably Caucasian steppes). Anfiarao, like Asclepius, was also connected to the serpente, which was said to sometimes take the form. Generally, however, he presented himself to the questante, in a dream or a vision, in his anthropomorphic aspect.
Also of Trophonius, who had an oracle in Lebadea, is said to have been "sucked up" by the earth: and from that moment he became an oracular god. The preparatory rituals for consulting him, brought back to us by Pausanias, suggest strongly Apollonian cultic elements. First of all, the beggar was led into the underground world by two young men, the Hermai, who made him drink the water from sources of lethe ("Oblivion") e Mnemosyne ("Memory"). Then, he had to donate honey cakes to the snakes that dwelt at the bottom of the underground cave. The cave itself, according to the myth, was discovered by the Boeotians following a swarm of bees, and this is relevant as the bee is par excellence an Apollonian zoomorphic epiphany: it is in fact handed down that initially the temple of Apollo in Delphi was built by bees with wax and feathers (of swan, it is assumed; another Apollonian animal). Another iatromancer we have heard of, Aristaeus from Thessaly, who was called "son of Apollo", according to legend made immortal by the Hours, from which he was nourished only by nectar and ambrosia, and when he was alive he distinguished himself as a legendary beekeeper, an art he had learned from Hermes and Chiron.
The names of Trofonio and his brother (or adoptive father) Agamedes are listed among those of the legendary architects and builders of the lower layer of the Delphic Apollo temple and other masterpieces of sacred architecture. We talk about underground levels with rooms connected by tunnels, in which the few who could enter - that is to say the priests of the god - were visited by Apollo and Zeus. It is thought that these underground constructions, like the homologous ones found in Ireland and on the island of Malta, were built according to architectural criteria that echo those of mathematics and Apollonian sacred geometry so dear to the Pythagoreans, thus allowing the faithful to experience real mystical encounters with the gods. (Note incidentally that the biography of the same Dedalo, mythical builder of the labyrinth of Knossos in which the Minotaur was imprisoned according to tradition, has numerous shamanic traits).
In Daimon of Socrates of Plutarch we have a testimony of a young man named Trimarchus who spent two nights in Trofonio's cave in a state of consciousness far beyond the ordinary one. Falling into a trance, his soul soared flying above an ocean dotted with archipelagos of sparkling islands, and in a whirlwind of extreme joy and awe at the same time he heard ineffable voices explaining the mystery of metempsychosis. (reincarnation) and predict his next death. In the description of Trimarco's mystical experience there is a hint of a sensation never experienced before of fullness and "otherworldly happiness" and alludes to a scenario full of "visual and auditory hallucinations", of oblivion and complete separation of the conscious mind from that soul, free to rise or float above our sublunary world. In all this it is practically impossible not to notice the points of contact with the shamanic journeys of the most varied traditions, as well as with the "Visits to the world of fairies" of the Gaelic tradition, to the "world of the Muses" by Blake, Shelley and Yeats and again - if we wanted to go further - to the so-called OBE, NDE experiences, as well as to abductions and to "Dimethyltryptamine encounters" by Terence McKenna.
2.2. The Bow and the Lyre: the coincidence oppositorum in Apollonian mysticism
We note however that in Trimarco's case the catabasis translates into a "supernal journey", from which he is able to see the world from above. In this, which has correspondences in the shamanic tradition, it can be understood the thesis of Giorgio Colli della Sapienza Apollinea as coincidence oppositorum: the bow and the lyre, the elevation and the depth, the "den" of daimon underground and the heavenly abode of the god [The birth of philosophy, pp. 40-42]:
« The duplicity intrinsic to Apollo's nature testifies at the same time, and in a more enveloping representation, to a metaphysical break between the world of men and that of the gods. The word is the medium: it comes from exaltation and madness, it is the point where the mysterious and detached divine sphere enters into communication with the human one, manifests itself in audibility, in a sensitive condition. From here the word is projected into our illusory world, bringing into this heterogeneous sphere the multiple action of Apollo, on the one hand as an oracular word, with the hostility charge of a harsh prediction, of a knowledge of the harsh future, and of the other side as a joyful manifestation and transfiguration, which imposes itself on terrestrial images and weaves them into the magic of art. This projecting of the word of Apollo on our world is represented by the Greek myth with two symbols, with two attributes of the god: the bow, to designate its hostile action, and the lyre, to designate its beneficial action. Greek wisdom is an exegesis of Apollo's hostile action. And the metaphysical fracture underlying the Greek myth is commented on by the wise: our world is the semblance of a hidden world, of the world in which the gods live. Heraclitus does not name Apollo, but uses his attributes, the bow and the lyre, to interpret the nature of things. "The name of the arch is life, the work is death". In Greek the name "bow" has the same sound as the name "life". So the symbol of Apollo is the symbol of life. Life is interpreted as violence, as an instrument of destruction: Apollo's bow produces death. And in another fragment Heraclitus couples the hostile action of the god to the benign action of him: "Contrasting harmony like bow and lyre". [...] Therefore the works of the bow and the lyre, death and beauty, come from the same god, express an identical divine nature, symbolized by an identical hieroglyph, and only in the distorting, illusory perspective of our world of appearance do they present themselves as contradictory fragmentations».
In fact, in this game of dichotomies Apollo, while being invoked - he or his iatromantic "disciples", who acted as oracles in their stead - inside underground hypogea, was considered at the same time to dwell at the axial end of the cosmos, that is to say say at the height of the sacred laurel tree placed, next to the golden statue of Apollo, at the 'Omphalos underground of Delphi, rising to the Cosmic Tree e axis beat of the Apollonian sacred cosmology. Laurel and omphalos here they manifest the same sacral function as the lingam and the Yoni of the Shivaites: the second serving to collect, like a large cosmic womb (remember the correspondence between the Grotto and the Cosmos), the subtle energies of the beggars; the first to "bring down" the god from his supernal abode, evoking him thanks to the energies accumulated during the rite.
The laurel, on the other hand, bears a "luminous" symbolism - the Germanists would say - in that connected to glory, power, victory, immortality. And also the myth of his birth brings us back to Apollo: they say that it was born from Daphne, priestess of Gaea, who was threatened by Apollo - who, struck with an arrow by Eros, had instantly fallen in love with the woman - was mercifully transformed by his goddess. in a laurel tree. In this myth you can also read a reference to the "Taking possession" by Apollo of the sacred complex of Delphi, with the killing of the monster Python and then the institution of the Pictish Games - musical and poetic agons whose winners were crowned with laurel. Before being considered a sacred site to Apollo, in fact, Delphi was considered the oracle of Gaea, as well as of other archaic deities such as Poseidon and Kronos, which will return later in our speech.
2.3. Immortality of the soul, metempsychosis and shamanic mysteries
Another mythical character sometimes remembered in the bed of the Iatromancers is the demigod of the Getae (a tribe of Thrace, whose territory was a bridge between the Hellenic ecumene and the Eurasian steppes) Zalmoxis, sometimes considered by the Greek authors a disciple or a servant of Pythagoras, which reconnects him to the Apollonian sacral bed. Of Zalmoxis it is said that taught his disciples the doctrine of the immortality of the soul: then he descended into the underworld, where he remained three years. His followers - to whom he appeared in vision in the form of a "disembodied soul" - mourned his passing, but in the fourth year he returned to the surface, thus confirming his teaching. Then he disappeared again to appear here and there in the form of daimon ("Immortal spirit").
The Thracian Orpheus naturally presents Apollonian and shamanic chrisms: with the lyre he enchants the animals and draws them to himself; of beasts and birds knows the language, and it should be remembered here that in the shamanic tradition knowing the "language of the birds" is equivalent to understanding the divine mysteries. His catabasis to bring Eurydice back to life, although we are not able to deepen the subject here, has clearly shamanic characters (descent to the "world below" in search of a "lost" soul) as well as Platonic (the myth being able to be placed in relation with the "descent" into the sublunary world of the "forgetful" soul - that is, deprived of the water from the source of Mnemosyne - after drinking water from the source of lethe, destined to reincarnate again in the cycle of patrols which from the higher dimension are seen as lower.
The same Return, who is called by the Muses "a friend, a son and a brother of Orpheus", received from them the prophecy that he would be transformed into a anthropodaemon ("Spirit in a human form") and used for that function hidden in an underground cave. He also received from his mother the prophecy that he would be delivered by Persephone himself, referring to the Mysteries of Eleusis andeschatology of the human soul as seed and of human generation as sowing. It is also said that, as it happened in the Charonion of Acharaca, the animals spontaneously approached the underground altar of Reso to breathe their last sigh on it. Reso is also remembered as the primordial king of Thrace, belonging to the tribe of the Edoni, a population probably coming from the Eurasian steppes who settled on Mount Pangeo and of which the Called "female bacchanalia" of Edon (which perhaps presented, if the etymology does not deceive us, points of contact with the cult of Adonis and Cybele).
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3. The Elevation: return to the Island of the Immortals
3.1. The Immortals and the Poets
All these correspondences with the Gaelic-Celtic tradition of the fairies and the underworld must make us think. Hesiod already told that the men of the Golden Age, after their cycle, became daimones immortals, used to watch over the fate of mortals. And equally those of the Silver Age, which after the catastrophe that ended their world they became daimones chtonî. This inevitably leads us to the Celtic tradition of the gods Tuatha de Danann, a people of demigods who, once defeated by the Milesi, retreated to the underground dimension of the Sidhe, hiding from the eyes of mortals but continuing to keep a watchful eye on their existence.
The Tuatha dé Danann, in other words, would be the "ancestors" of the gods fairies medieval, as well as i daimones consulted by the Iatromancers would have been, in illo tempore, divine or semi-divine mythical characters. It is also interesting to note how the size of the Tuatha dé Danann /fairies, despite its location mostly mentioned as underground, it stands out from ours in that it appears as a fluid, preformal, prenatal dimension, without well-defined boundaries - such as Blake's "World of Imagination", Shelley's Eternity and Yeats's "Great Memory" - which nevertheless has many points of contact with the world of Ideas to which, in the Platonic doctrine, the soul arrives whenever, after having abandoned the sublunar plane, it returns to its source.
All these more or less modern poets whom we rightly define as "Apollonian" had a vision of reality in every way equal to that of the ancient Iatromancers and philosophers of archaic Greece. They considered reality as a "game of mirrors" and human existence as "a dream within a dream" - in this recalling the ancient belief of the "shadowy" nature of the human being, residing in a plane of existence whose actual "reality" is soon unmasked. In Shelley's vision, only the soul which, awakened in the Memory by the action of the Nymphs or Muses, knows how to immerse itself even for a moment in the Ocean of the "Great Memory" can be considered re-awakened, initiated, reborn.
3.2. The "pathos of the hidden"
Little or nothing changes from the myth of the Cave and the doctrine ofhistory Platonic, or from Sapienza Apollinea as reconstructed by Colli, which places at the center of iatromantic spirituality [The birth of philosophy, pp. 66-9]:
"[...] the "pathos" of the hidden, that is, the tendency to consider the ultimate foundation of the world as something hidden. Such is the concept of divinity in Heraclitus [...] two other fragments declare the superiority of what is hidden: "Primordial nature loves to hide" and "hidden harmony is stronger than the manifest one". The second theme is the mystical claim of a pre-eminence of interiority over the illusory body of the external world. […] But then the enigma, extended to a cosmic concept, is the expression of the hidden, of the god. The whole multiplicity of the world, its illusionistic body, is an intertwining of enigmas, an appearance of the god, in the same way that an interweaving of enigmas are the words of the sage, sensitive manifestations that are the imprint of the hidden ». [...] Heraclitus [...] argues that the world itself that surrounds us is nothing more than a fabric - illusory - of opposites. Each pair of opposites is an enigma, the dissolution of which is unity, the god behind it. In fact, Heraclitus says: "God is day night, winter summer, war, peace, satiety, hunger" "
It's still [After Nietzsche, p. 41]:
«For the Greeks the life of men is an appearance of that of the gods. Our world expresses over time, with the uncertainty of the future, through inadequate, blurred fragments, what the gods are in a total way, without becoming, from the beginning. There is a hidden world, the world of which ours is the semblance, this is the Greek intuition: the gods live there. And Apollo is the most subtle, variegated symbol of this divine existence compared to the human one, in relation to this: he gives men divination, tells about their future life, contemplated by his god's eye. Therefore the future is already all in the past, and time only concerns the order of manifestation. "
The correspondences between the Apollonian / Platonic doctrines and those of Shelley are excellently highlighted by Yeats in his essay Shelley's philosophy of poetry (1900). In addition to the central relevance of the symbol of the underground cave in his poetic work, Yeats emphasizes Shelley's belief in the survival of the soul of "those who rise above ordinary human nature", becoming after death "invisible to our imperfect organs" and yet continuing to live in a world of "love. , beauty and pleasure " congenial to them. They can be seen only by those who, through a special purification, have "conformed themselves to their highest state" [cf. YEATS, anima mundi, p. 85].
3.3. The exile of Saturn, ruler of the Golden Age
This esoteric doctrine as well as in the Gaelic tradition of the fairies would also find confirmation in the Mediterranean tradition itself: according to the Greeks in fact, at the end of the Golden Age, the Primordial Ruler Saturn / Kronos was exiled to a timeless dimension on an island at the edge of the world, called Ogygia ("the Primordial") or "Isle of the Blessed", where he waits in a state of koma ("Suspended vitality") until the stars return to their right place and the Golden Age returns. So they write Santillana and Dechend [Hamlet's mill, p. 180]:
" […] son Zeus dethroned [Kronos] throwing him off the "chariot" and exiled in "chains" to a blessed island where dwells asleep because, being immortal, he cannot die [but lives] in a kind of life-in-death, wrapped in burial linen until, according to some, the time for his awakening comes and he will then be reborn to us as a child. "
This island (the etymology of the term suggests yours isolation from the flow of becoming) is also the "island of the Hesperides", which are the golden apples of Apollo, and the White Island, Leuke, namely Hyperborea, and is also theAvalon Celtic, deriving this denomination from endorse it ("Apple"), in turn etymologically connected to the Apollonian god. It is the secret world of the Immortals, reachable only "in spirit", through the coincidence oppositorum Apollonian: "Neither by sea nor by land", says Pindar, "you will be able to find the road that leads to the Hyperboreans" - and in fact it was only in this way that the Iatromancers in ancient times reached us.
These Immortals are, according to Hesiod, «i daimones of the Golden Age, guardians of mortals ", who underwent the" Fall "alongside Kronos, their primordial ruler - in this we can glimpse some correspondences with the Old Testament myth of the "Fall" of the Rebel Angels and Lucifer, a mythical character who also has many characteristics in common with Apollo and his Celtic counterparts Lugh and Belenos. They will be added, similarly to what happens in Valhalla Nordic heroes of Odinn, the heroes of subsequent eras, destined to reach the golden demons in this dimension of timelessness and immortality, always remaining young and feeding exclusively on nectar, ambrosia and honey (the symbolism of bees and honey returns here, chromatically connected to the 'gold). These "Blessed kidnapped" would be, according to Hesiod, "The divine race of Heroes, more just and more good"; for these merits they "live with happy spirit and without worry in the islands of the Blessed, near the Okeanos with great happy whirlpools".
Of the Tuatha dé Danann themselves, on the other hand, it was said that they came from an island located in the far West and the northern borders of the world, to which they would return after the "expulsion" by the Milesi - while remaining sovereigns of the underworld of Ireland. Needless to say, in the same way as the various Apollonian Iatromancers and Pythagoreans, the Druids and Bards of ancient Ireland also attributed their knowledge to the journeys they made "in spirit" to the otherworldly abodes of the Tuatha dé Danann. The island at the edge of the world where they resided, in all respects homologous to the various Islands of the Immortals of the Hellenic tradition, is called in the Irish tradition Tir na mBeo (the "Land of the Living") or Tir na hOge (the "Land of Youth").
3.4. The exit from time and the return of the Golden Age
Let us therefore see how in the archaic European traditions, both in the Hellenic and in the Celtic ecumene, we find in the sacral vision an attempt to integrate the supernal world (the world of Platonic Ideas, the White Island) with the underground one ("explored" following the catabasis). The world of mortals, far from being defined really "Real", is among them, being shaped by their subtle influences, creating the "game of mirrors" and "puppets" that we find in the Platonic Myth of the Cave, in the analyzes of Giorgio Colli and in the lyric of the great "Apollonian poets" "Of the last centuries.
The Immortals who dwell in the atemporal dimension present themselves at the same time as Blessed who are granted a (semi) divine state both as exiled, often in one dimension underground - that is to say Invisible in our ordinary senses: fairy land, Ogygia, Tartarus -, in which they are destined to spend the duration of the Aeon until its final consummation. Then, the Golden God will return to reign, putting an end to the flow of becoming: Kronos returns Aion, the Infinite Eternity. Thus writes, for example, Alfredo Cattabiani [Calendar, p. 24]:
“Was there a time when there was no precession of the equinoxes? Will there come a time when it will no longer exist? According to many traditions the Golden Age, called in the Roman tradition 'Saturnia Regna', the kingdom of Saturn, was precisely the period preceding the precession when men did not know wars or bloody sacrifices or inequality. Then Saturn disappeared on a Blessed Isle where he resides "asleep" until he comes the time destined for his awakening, when he will be reborn to us as a child restoring the Golden Age, the timeless Age. »
E Nuccio D'Anna [The cosmic game, pp. 26-7]:
« The kingdom of Kronos […] is that of the illud tempus aureo, the time of the beginnings that expresses the fullness of the condition of the beginnings, its perfection. Kronos is the king par excellence, the "ancient ruler" who, according to Pausanias, still received a sacrifice on Mount Kronos in Olympia, the omphalos of Hellenic spirituality, the "center of the world". Here, at the vernal equinox, every year the Basilâi (the Kings) repeated a ritual that intended to bring the kingdom of Kronos back to life, that is the spiritual condition of the beginnings which thus "brought back" the Hellenic world to the primordial illud tempus. "
The tragedy of the exile of Aion / Kronos in the patrols of time concerns, from a more esoteric point of view, every single conscious entity of the entire cosmos: behind the anthropomorphizations of the myth lies the terrifying mystery of the "fall of Being" into the world of becoming or, for the Hindu tradition, of the Maya ("Illusion caused by becoming"). The radical *Sat in Sanskrit it stands for "pure essence", "truth", hence the name of the golden age in the Indian tradition: Satya Yuga. Its term coincides with the end of a heavenly and hyperborean world, and with the disappearance or rather the concealment of the primordial Center / Pole.
"The world", writes Colli, "is a deviated, transfigured violence, which appears as grace, art, harmony, an evanescent fabric of abstraction" [After Nietzsche, p. 44]. Likewise in the Greco-Roman myth, following the dethronement by Jupiter, the demiurgic god ruling the cosmos from the Silver Age onwards, such "Land of the Gods" in which during the golden and primordial age man lived in their company under the aegis of Saturn, with the new configuration of the cosmos ruled by Zeus it suddenly becomes hidden, indeed almost becoming a "Land of the Dead", which finds sublime imaginal representations in the soul of painters of Arnold Böcklin's sensitivity.
But Saturn / Aion, in the meaning of atemporal god of the Golden Age - that is to say the state of the primordial Being, indifferent to the "cages" of spacetime and dualisms - is also Apollo himself: the one who protects the golden apples on the island of the Hesperides, which is also the White Island, in the guise of the dragon Ladone (Python's counterpart in the foundation myth of the Delphic Apollonian oracle). The killing of him narrated in the Heracleus cycle ends with the asterization of him: he becomes the constellation of the Dragon, namely the Pole Star, the axial culmination of theaxis beat, of the laurel tree at the top of which Apollo resides, or of the Yggradisl beyond which stands Asgard, seat of Odinn and the Nordic Æsir.
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4. The Luciferian side of Apollo: "he who totally destroys"
The "Luciferian" or "Saturnian" side of Apollo emerges beautifully in the work of Marcel Detienne Apollo with the knife in his hand, where it is told how Apollo rebelled against Zeus guilty of having commanded the Cyclops to kill his son Asclepius. Zeus was about to punish Apollo by making him fall, exactly like Kronos, in Tartarus but following the prayers of Latona he agreed to send the rebel in exile: "A year, a" Great Year "of slavery employed by a mortal, to take care of his flocks». From this myth, in other words, the oracular function of Apollo is mythically inferred, condemned by the demiurgic god to take care of the flock of mortals for a "Great Year", that is, for an entire cosmic cycle. The portrait sketched by Detienne brings out his correspondences with Saturn / Kronos, but above all, surprisingly, with Prometheus [cfr. KERENYI, “Prometheus: the Greek mythology of human existence”, in Myths and Mysteries] and with Lucifer [p. 258]:
"Apollo fallen; the god of unlimited pride, who always wants to be the first, condemned to lead the existence of a poor devil, enslaved [...] the immortal who lied remains to lie "Breathless and speechless on a well laid bed", victim of numbness, kôma, cruel [...] Radical exile, in which immortality seems suspended, now that he has become the slave, the day laborer subjected to the whims of a mere mortal, the god, excluded from Olympus and from "always", experiences the life of the ephemeral, of being subjected to the "day", to daily change, to what, every day, happens to him. "
4.1. Eschatological perspectives and conclusions
In this eschatological perspective, the Book of Revelation Johann (moreover written after a period spent in isolation in an underground cavity on the island of Samo, and therefore in incubation): in Apocalypse 9:11 we read in fact: “And they had for king over them the angel of the abyss, whose name in Hebrew is Abaddon and in Greek Apollon». The Greeks derived the name Apollo from the verb απολλυμι, literally "to destroy", from which the meaning of "destroyer", "exterminator" is derived: Apollo, as Detienne and Colli also remind us, is also this. In fact, the latter emphasizes ne The birth of philosophy [p. 18]:
«The very etymology of Apollo, according to the Greeks, suggests the meaning of "He who totally destroys". In this figure the god is presented at the beginning of theIliad, where his arrows bring sickness and death to the Achaean camp. Not an immediate, direct death, but a death through disease. The attribute of the god, the bow, an Asian weapon, alludes to an indirect, mediated, deferred action. [...] And indeed, among the epithets of Apollo, we find that of "He who strikes from afar" and "he who acts from afar" »
But in the archaic mentality of the Greeks as well as the Celts and many other populations there was still nothing in this eschatological function. Satanic: the conclusion of the times (or rather weather, i.e. of the flow of becoming) brought by Apollo, the universal conflagration with fire (ekpyrosis), will eventually lead the cosmic manifestation to its original source, which is the Source of Pure Being (the Sat Vedic): Saturn will return King, the Blessed will be freed from their golden exile.
In this we can glimpse correspondences with the eschatological doctrines of the most disparate sacred traditions: the "destroyer" Apollo is in this sense homologous to the Kalki of the Hindus, the last Avatar of Visnhu who will come to end Kulpa by wielding a sword on a white horse, or to the Maitreya Buddha of the Orientals. The Norsemen, for their part, handed down that the end times (Ragnarokkr, literally "twilight of the gods") would have occurred with The fire, carried by surtr (homologous, also etymologically, of the Golden Saturn as well as functionally of the Destroyer Apollo).
Surtr is in fact, in the Nordic tradition, the spark of fire primordial Being who, once trapped by the advance of cosmic ice (i.e. from the flow of becoming which, by means of the demiurgic creation, freezes the forms and in them the spirit Luciferian) it awaits the turning of the ages in order to free itself and return to its original state. On the other hand, note that in the gylfaginning Surtr is represented in all respects mirroring Saturn / Kronos exiled on the Island of the Immortals, as well as the eastern Avatara who will finally arrive, when the stars return to the right place, to put an end to the cosmic manifestation:
'But first of all there was that world, at noon, which is called Muspell; it is clear and serene, the region is flaming e fiery, impervious to those who are foreigners and were not born there. He who has a name surtr there he resides, al confine of that land and is its keeper; brandishes one sword flaming e at the end of time he will come and bring ruin and conquer all gods and burn the whole world with his fire »
Bibliography:
CATTABIANI, Alfredo: Calendar. The festivals, myths, legends and rites of the year. Rusconi, Milan 1988
COLLI, George: Apollonian and Dionysian. Adelphi, Milan 2010
COLLI, George: The birth of philosophy. Adelphi, Milan 1975
COLLI, George: Greek wisdom. Adelphi, Milan 1977
CULIANU, Ioan Petru: Journeys of the soul. Mondadori, Milan 1991
D'ANNA, Nuccio: The cosmic game. Time and eternity in ancient Greece. Mediterranee, Rome 2006
DETIENNE, Marcel: Apollo with the knife in his hand. Adelphi, Milan 2002
KERÉNYI, Károli: Myths and Mysteries. Einaudi, Milan 1950
MACULOTTI, Marco: Apollo / Kronos in exile: Ogygia, the Dragon, the "fall". AXISmundi, April 2017
DE SANTILLANA Giorgio & VON DECHEND Hertha: Hamlet's mill. Adelphi, Milan 1983
USTINOVA, Yulia: Cave Experiences and Ancient Greek Oracles, academia.edu
USTINOVA, Yulia: Either a Daimon, or a Hero, or Perhaps a God: Mythical Residents of Subterranean Chambers, academia.edu
USTINOVA, Yulia: Truth Lies at the Bottom of a Cave: Apollo Pholeuterios, the Pholarchs of the Eleats, and Subterranean Oracles, academia.edu
YEATS, William Butler: anima mundi. Guanda, Parma 1988
Beautiful article! Much has been handed down thanks to the fables and folk songs of the ancient lands of Thrace. In Bulgaria there are still the legends of the samodivi (nymphs / muses) and the fable of the golden apple and the dragon.
Thank you! True, however, a little throughout the area of the Northern Balkans and Eastern Europe. I am reminded of Eliade's studies published in the collection of essays “From Zalmoxis to Genghis Khan”. A greeting
MM
Dear Yordan, I hit this post again and reread your comment.
You will be pleased to know that, in the editing of my new essay The Angel of the Abyss (the first paperback published with the new Axis Mundi Edizioni publishing house) I made extensive use of Romanian and Bulgarian "Apollonian" fairy tales, as well as the ancient Thracian myths and traditions. It was really a happy discovery for me, it is a trend that practically goes hand in hand with the Hellenic Hyperborean-Apollonian one. I was very useful, as a source, "La Dacia Iperborea" by Geticus, which you will surely know.
A greeting,
MM