The Mythos and the Logos: Greek wisdom in the Platonic myths

Knowing oneself and the world of ideas through myth, or, in other words, reaching the Logos through Mythos: this is the main idea that supports Greek wisdom, as Plato has divinely illustrated in his works. The myth of the cave, the myth of Er, that of the charioteer and of Eros show us that in what we call "reality" nothing is certain, everything is in constant motion: the truth lies outside the fire, beyond out of the cave and of the mind itself, therefore in the world of ideas, which Plato calls "hyperuranium"; that is, "beyond the sky".


di Samuel Baricchi
cover: Jean Delville, "School of Plato"

Myth in Greek culture represents the foundation of city-state society and the life of Greek man. In the Archaic age, the Mycenaean populations looked at the sky with admiration, and, taking up an even more ancient type of wisdom, they foresee future events, reread the past, analyze the present. The Greeks had a very well structured collective mythology, for example from Hesiod and Homer; we contemporary and modern men create them for ourselves, as masters of our destiny, a great inheritance and legacy of humanism and the historical period of the Renaissance.


The Heroes, children of the Gods, and Fate

Greece lays its foundations in an ancestral era, in which the blood of heroes mixes with that of the gods. The Greek dynasties justified their political power through a divine lineage, and this not only in the Archaic period, but also in a more recent era, and even in the Hellenistic era, following the conquests of Alexander the Great. Achilles, the most powerful and fastest of the heroes of the Trojan War, descends on his mother's side from the lineage of divine and immortal creatures, Teti, linked to the sea, to water, to the unconscious, in common symbolism. Water, even in Jungian terms, always represents the mind itself.

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Michel Martin Drolling, "The Anger of Achilles"

The same Alessandro he managed to be considered by all the peoples he conquered the descendant of Amon, for the Egyptians, and of Zeus or of Heracles, initially, or of Dionysus, on the part of his mother, a mother who had oriental origins as the same god Dionysus, who according to the "mythos" went beyond the borders of the land known at the time, and traveled to India, on the banks of the Ocean river, which envelops the emerged lands, according to the vision of the earth for the Greeks.

But the Greek heroes are not only "semi-divine" by birth. Analyzing the myths, their semi-divine (or heroic) state also emerges to the extent that, during their life, they have been able to understand the potential of their own psyche, of the depth of the unconscious aspect, using these potentialities each, however much it concerns the Homeric myth, according to the respective predispositions.

Odysseus he is a tribal leader, like Achilles, and despite being an ordinary man, he manages in any case to be considered "heroic" as he uses his intelligence to then win the same Trojan war. It could almost be said that the true hero of Homeric mythology, and of Greece, is Odysseus, the man linked to the "logos" more than all the others, who with his stratagems and reasonings, manages, even during the Odyssey, the poem of which he is the protagonist, to survive and to go beyond any adversity. Each Homeric hero inherently has a different approach to reality.

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Giovanni Domenico Tiepolo, "The Procession of the Trojan Horse into Troy"

Agamemnon, devoted to the gods to the point of sacrificing his own daughter, Iphigenia, but devoted to the cause of the conquest of Thessaly more than anything else, he perpetuates the sacrifice to have favorable winds to leave for Troy. The moral significance of this gesture, from the point of view of the gods, is expressed in the moment in which it is imposed by the gods precisely because, no matter how many deaths that war would have caused, Agamemnon would have been the man who suffered more than all the others.

In ancient Greek myth there is always some sort of blind devotion to Fate and the whims of the gods, but also a profound meaning that reflects the desire for knowledge of the entire population overlooking the Aegean Sea. Not surprisingly, the walls of Troy are concentric and resemble the walls of Atlantis, similar to celestial orbits. Ancient man looked at the sky and, from the movements of the stars, he partially understood his own life, his own way of being, and his predisposition to creativity, to build, and reflected the universe above himself, transposing it on the earth, with his architectural works.

Even the cities of Celtic derivation are built in that way, while in more recent times the ancient Romans began to build cities following the layout of their military camps, with a square plan. However, the square can be inscribed in a sphere: everything returns to the circle, to the Ouroboros and to the eternal return of cyclic time, which man is led to perceive due to the sensitivity derived from the observation, even unconscious, of the cycles of the seasons, of day and night. Sun, Moon and night, and then again Sun, Moon and night again. So to infinity, in the mind of man; AndΒ therefore also in its imaginative faculty.

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Mary Evans, "Plato's Cave"

Plato and the myth of the cave

The myth is in fact, according to Plato, philosopher disciple of Socrates, the initiator of the method of scientific reasoning, questioning others and never believing blindly, always asking why, and getting to the first cause of things and questions, an explicit "lie" to ordinary people to argue through examples, stories, fairy tales, problems and extremely complex philosophical questions. Plato in his works uses the "myth”Precisely by affirming the fact that these myths are plausible explanations of reality, not proven demonstrations of his theories, but rather archetypal examples, exemplifying, written to explain very complex issues.

The most famous myth of Plato concerns the cave. There is a fire in the center of the cave: the philosopher Heraclitus saw in the fire the main and primal element of reality, in continuous movement. The principle of reality is estranged from the element of fire. The people are tied back, and they see at the bottom of the cave the changing shadows cast by the fire, which lets its light filter through simulacra, resting behind the men.

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The philosopher, and Socrates himself, for Plato, carries out this action: he unties himself, through the faculty of reason, of the "logos", and turns his face and chest towards the simulacra, discovering that they cast mendacious and false shadows on the bottom of the cave. Taking another step, he even discovers that the light he was convinced he saw is fueled by a fire, the same physical reality, in continuous movement, in continuous change, where nothing is certain, but the philosopher, passing through the fire, reaches the exit of the cave, to finally see the Sun. In this myth there is the element of the cave, the human consciousness, the mind, the psyche, which is used to seeing projected images from a focus, reality, directly on its depth; but the truth, according to Plato, is found outside the fire, outside the cave and the mind itself therefore, in the world of ideas, which he calls β€œhyperuranium”. That is, "beyond the sky".

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Rene Magritte, "The Human Condition"

Plato argues that the ideas of men, any idea, actually already exists in a state that goes beyond every sky and every universe, to a very subtle state, but also very "high", very deep, beyond any perception and observation. Earthly ideas, the ideas of mortal men, are simply the imitation of nature which lies beyond sensation. The ultimate sensation, the final perception, is therefore for Plato the "non" sensation, only there, completely coming out of his own psyche, disturbed by the shadows cast by the fire, and by his own perception, even the rational one, which is however limited because he is "inside" the cave, can man completely get out of himself, and from its limits, and see the Sun, the authentic "logos". From the archetypal point of view, the Sun is also an element of life, a light that contrasts with the darkness of the depths of the cave. The Sun and the blue sky outside the cave represent hyperuranium itself, where Plato places the "true" reality.

However, this leads not so much Plato, but Platonism and Neoplatonism to debase the sensible reality, and Plato himself considered art in a negative way, as an "imitation" of a reality that already in itself imitates the supersensible reality, the β€œTrue” reality for the ancient Greek philosopher. One could almost say, therefore, that from art, going backwards, one can know reality, even if it is "mimesis" of reality. However Plato used as a fundamental method of knowledge reminiscence, or "remembering", anamnesis.

Ideas are already present in the minds of men, just as they are in hyperuranium, it is all about remembering. It is therefore a backwards process, and it could be said that even from the aesthetic manifestations of art it is possible to make this anamnesis, this remembering, even from fantastic literature. In fact, Plato himself uses examples taken from the imaginative field to explain very complicated concepts: the same fantastic literature, as can be seen, is full of that archetypal and ancestral search for the authentic self, through myths invented by writers, stories and fairy tales for adult men.

Platos Cave.


The Greek city-states, the "Republic" and the Logos

Another myth that Plato uses to politically justify power, as a philosopher, is that of creation of men. In fact, they were created, according to the Platonic myth told in the "Republic" by the gods who mixed in them, in their essence and substance, different elements. Rulers have gold in them. To descend, in social classes, silver, bronze and, finally, iron. Plato divides the ideal society of the "Republic" according to castes, to use a term related to Indian culture, where this aspect has always been very strong. The ruling caste, in the ideal society, is that of the philosophers, and therefore not of those who descend from divine lineage, but of those who have gold in them. Gold recalls the Sun and the Sun is the visible image of the "logos".

The men who govern, therefore, in the Platonic vision of society, must not be those who boast of being "ordinary" men, as is so popular today in politics, much less those who boast of having particular titles and skills. The ruler, for Plato, must be the philosopher, that is the one who knows, and Socratically, being Plato a pupil of Socrates, he who knows he does not know, and therefore, knowing that he does not know, he is not satisfied with dogmas and beliefs, but continues to search, continues to observe, continues to reason and, therefore, always discovers something new and approaches the Sun outside the cave, outside the his own mind, his own psyche, outside himself, in the hyperuranium, beyond every sky and universe.

Plateau

The very essence of things has an invisible, very subtle nature, but it exists, and exists outside the real, the real is only an imitation of the "true" reality. The ruler must necessarily correspond to the philosopher, in Plato's "Republic". The philosopher is the one who seeks the principle, which for Greek philosophy - putting aside the pre-Socratics who sought the principle in the natural elements, in the archetypes of the earth that unfolded before their eyes, fire, air, water , the earth, the infinite, the "apeiron", the unlimited - coincides with the "logos", from Socrates onwards.

That is, it coincides with the same human psychic faculty, with the same human mind, with reasoning, the verb, the word, but also because for the Greeks everything has a dual aspect - and the first philosophers had exchanges and communicated with oriental cultures, both in the commercial sphere and from an intellectual point of view - the word within oneself, therefore the unconscious. The ruler in Plato's "Republic" is the one who follows the "logos". To pretend to be "normal" people also means to admit to being mediocre, just as it is impossible to define that men are all the same, as Nietzsche states: it would be a real crime against the "logos" itself. However, in the Platonic view of society, only the philosopher can command as he doubts himself continuously: he knows he does not know.

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Plant of Platonic Atlantis

So any political perspective in which one prides oneself on being "better" than others, more competent, or one almost boasts of being "common", because men are and must all be the same, cannot work in Plato's "Republic" . Only those who are truly sensible, and manage to go outside the cave, outside of all preconceptions, and manage to follow the light of the Sun on a journey towards it, must rule, because the gods have created the one who follows the "Logos" with gold, not with silver, or bronze, or iron. From this concept Plato rattles off the whole society by dividing it into classes, and these classes must not mix with each other, otherwise the society crumbles, and demeans, and moves away from the truth, becoming mimesis of a further mimesis that reality itself already is, with respect to the world of ideas, hyperuranium. In this Plato echoes ideas reminiscent of the Indian castes.

However, it is good to remember that the Greek man never kneels or submits, so the ruling philosopher must be sensible enough to avoid becoming a tyrant. Alexander the Great had no difficulty in governing those peoples who in ancient times were already accustomed to kneeling, like the Persians, who had always been accustomed to tyranny, but instead, he never managed to govern his own Greeks, who refused to kneel and to adhere to customs that are foreign to them and "barbarians", in the sense of not coming from the Greek territory of the poleis, the city-states.

These city-state they derive from a tribal vision of society; during the Trojan War, according to the Homeric myth, the various "wanax", the commanders of the city-states, who at the time were little more than small tribes and congregations of villages, unite in a single siege of the city of Ilium. Achilles was in command of the Myrmidons, Agamemnon of the Mycenaeans, Menelaus of the Spartans.

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William Blake

The myth of Er and the immortality of the soul

The myth of Er speaks of the immortality of the soul, together with the myth of the winged chariot. Each of us, according to Plato, is a thousand-year-old creature, who chose this life based on the type of existence he had before. This eschatological myth is strongly influenced by the Orphic myth of metempsychosis, also taken up by the Pythagoreans, and Plato alleges a moral aspect to metempsychosis, while for Orphism metempsychosis was simply a natural phenomenon, without responsibility on the part of the soul of the individual.

Er, son of Armenius, a valiant soldier from Pamphylia, who died in battle, as he was about to be burned at the funeral pyre, awoke from his deadly sleep and told what he had seen in the afterlife. Her soul just out of her body had joined many others and by walking she arrived in a divine place where the judges of souls sat between two pairs of abyss, one directed into heaven and the other into the depths of the earth.. The judges examined the souls and placed on the breasts of the just and on the shoulders of the wicked the sentence, ordering the first to go up to heaven and the others to go underground. They then ordered Er to listen and watch what was happening in that place and then tell it. Meanwhile, from the chasms came dirty and tattered souls who had traveled for 1000 years, in heaven or underground, to atone for their sins.

Those in life who had committed injustices were punished with a penalty 10 times higher than the evil committed, while good deeds were rewarded in the same measure. All the punishments inflicted were temporary, except those reserved for a few, such as for example to Ardieo, despot of a town in Pamphylia who had killed his old father and elder brother and had committed many other atrocities. When the most evil, such as tyrants, tried to get out of the abyss, it emitted a sort of lowing and then they were caught, skinned and thrown back into the Underworld. This myth strongly echoes certain Eastern doctrines, such as the cycle of reincarnations in Hinduism, through the endless rounds of Samsara, and the doctrine of karma.

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Ananke and the three Moiras in the myth of Er

Souls who remained in that place for seven days were then forced to walk for four days until they came within sight of a kind of rainbow where the spindle, symbol of destiny, hung on one end, resting on the knees of the goddess Ananke (Need). The spindle had a counterweight formed by eight concentric rotating vessels, arranged one inside the other. On each circle there was a siren that emitted the sound of a single note that joining with the others formed a harmony.

Ananke's daughters, the three Moiras, sat in a circle not far from their mother: Clotho spun and sang the present, Lachesis the past, and Atropos, "she who cannot be dissuaded", the future. A herald presented the souls arranged in a row to Lachesis and, after taking from his knees a large number of fates and models of life, proceeded to the draw, warning that everyone would be responsible for his choice and that no one would be favored since even those who had chosen after the first would have had more and more paradigms of life than those who still had to choose.

Er then recounted how souls made mistakes in choosing: for example, a soul who had come from heaven and who had been virtuous only out of habit, having lived in a well-governed city, had hastily chosen life of a tyrant to realize then, reproaching his bad fate, how this was full of pain. The souls from below, on the other hand, had learned from their earthly experiences and had chosen with greater judgment. Most, however, chose following the way in which they lived previously: but not all. For instance, if Agamemnon had chosen to live like an eagle, Odysseus, tired of risky adventures, had preferred the life of any quiet man.

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Arnold BΓΆcklin, "Odysseus and Calypsos"

After making the choice, each soul received from Lachesis the "daimon", the tutelary genius, who would supervise that the chosen life was fulfilled; then the soul had to go to Clotho to confirm his fate and finally to Atropos who made him immutable. The souls then walked across the deserted and warm plain of Lethe, and, stopping to rest on the banks of the river Amelete ("river of forgetfulness"), all, except Er, were obliged to drink the water that gives oblivion and those who were not wise drank it immoderately. When the night came, the souls were sleeping when at midnight an earthquake threw them into new life together with Er who, woke up on the funeral pyre, was able to tell his experience in the afterlife.

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Chance does not ensure a happy choice, while the past of the last reincarnation could be decisive. Choosing, in the Platonic vision, in fact means being critically aware of one's past in order not to make more mistakes and have a better life. Land Moire will then make the choice of the new life unchangeable: in fact, once the choice has been made, no soul will be able to change it and his earthly life will be marked by necessity. The souls will quench their thirst with the waters of the Lethe river, but those who have done so in an inordinate way will forget the previous life, while the philosophers, who guided by reason have drunk little or nothing, will keep the memory of hyperuranium so that, referring to them, they will be able to broaden their knowledge during the new life inspired and guided by their "daimon".

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Gustavo Dore, "Dante in the Empire"

The winged chariot and the myth of Eros

The myth of the chariot and the charioteer, or the myth of the winged chariot, told in Plato's "Phaedrus", serves to explain the Platonic theory of the reminiscence of the soul, a phenomenon that during reincarnation produces memories related to the previous life. It tells of a chariot on which a charioteer stands, personification of the rational or intellectual part of the soul (logistikon [Ξ»ΞΏΞ³ΞΉΟƒΟ„ΞΉΞΊΟŒΞ½]). The chariot is pulled by a pair of horses, one white and one black: the white one represents the part of the soul endowed with feelings of a spiritual nature (thymoeides [θυμοΡιδές]), and heads towards the world of Ideas; the black one represents the desiring part of the soul (epithymetikon [αΌΟ€ΞΉΞΈΟ…ΞΌΞ·Ο„ΞΉΞΊΟŒΞ½]) and heads towards the sensible world. The two horses are held by the reins by reason, which does not move independently but has only the task of guiding.

According to Plato, the soul must always move towards hyperuranium, in order to know the essence of reality, which is mimesis of the world of ideas. In the "Symposium" we find the myth of Eros, son of PenΓ¬a and Poros, who represents the vital spirit which is the foundation and energy of the soul and of the "logos". Eros is what moves and animates the charioteer of the myth of the winged chariot told in the β€œPhaedrus”. PenΓ¬a represents poverty, while Poros represents ingenuity.

"Therefore, as the son of Poros and Penìa, Love finds himself in this condition: in the first place he is always poor and anything but tender and beautiful, as most believe, indeed he is harsh, uneducated, always barefoot and without home, and lies down on the bare earth, sleeping outdoors in front of doors and in the streets according to the nature of his mother, and always accompanied by poverty. On the other hand, on his father's side, he undermines the beautiful and the virtuous, as he is brave and daring and vehement, and a shrewd hunter, always ready to plot intrigues, greedy for wisdom, rich in resources, and all his life in love with knowledge, an ingenious magician and charmer and sophist; and he was neither born immortal nor mortal, but in one hour of the same day he flourishes and lives, if luck is propitious, in another he dies, but then is reborn by virtue of his father's nature, and what he acquires always escapes him away, so that Love is never poor or rich, and on the other hand stands in the middle between wisdom and ignorance. "

- Plato, "Symposium"

Eros is aimed at the world of ideas, at the knowledge of a hyperuranium which is estrangement and representation of the very mind of man. To know the world of ideas, and all that is beyond the heavens and every universe, is to know oneself.

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A modern reinterpretation of the myth of the Platonic cave, by the painter Hamill Lalita

Live the myth and know yourself today

This is what emerges, now as then, from a careful reading of the Platonic myths. At this point we automatically ask ourselves: how to know yourself today? What myths in our age can be considered valid "updates" of those written by the greatest Greek philosophers and singers, more than two thousand years ago?

In fantastic literature, we believe, the natural human yearning for mythopoetic creation can be found; and this creation is strictly connected to the ability of the authors to render the mythical events in a poetic or literary form unconscious representations of themselves that the respective "daimon" has destined for them at the moment of reincarnation in the sublunar plane.

The literature of the Fantastic in full, the Fantasy and the "sword & sorcery" tell myths, "channeled" by writers such as Robert E. Howard, Clark Ashton Smith, CL Moore and the more recent Michael John Moorcock that are nothing but perceptions ecstatic of the human imaginative faculty, of the spirit of man who animates each of his works, that Eros of the Platonic "Symposium", that charioteer who desperately seeks hyperuranium and drives the winged chariot to the sky, and from the sky beyond infinity.

Β«Will you come with me to Atlantis? There, along the yellow and blue marble streets, we will go down to the orichalco piers and choose a galley with the Tyrian silk sails and the golden figurehead representing Eros. Together with the sailors who knew Odysseus and beautiful amber-breasted slaves, who came from the mountain valleys of Lemuria, we will raise anchor for unknown and fortunate islands of the outer sea; until, sailing in the wake of an opal sunset, we lose that ancient land in the twilight of milk, and on sofas of satin and ivory we will see the rise of unknown stars and dead stars. Perhaps we will not return, but we will follow the tropical summer from one alcyon island to another, on the amaranth seas of myth and fairy tale; we will eat the lotus, the fruits of lands that Odysseus did not see even in a dream, we will drink the clear wines of the fairies distilled under the eternal moonlight. I will find you a necklace of pink pearls and one of yellow rubies, I will put you a crown of precious corals similar to blood flowers. We will wander in the markets of lost cities made of jasper and in carnelian ports beyond the Cathay; I will buy you a peacock blue robe with gold, copper and vermilion damask, and a black of shamite with orange runes, woven by magic, without using your hands, in a dark land of filters and spells. "

- Clark Ashton Smith, "From a letter"

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Mary Evans, "Atlantis as described by Plato"