In a 1959 essay entitled โMefistofele e l'androgine. The mystery of wholeness โ, a transcription of one of Eranos' talks at the University of Marburg, Mircea Eliade takes inspiration from the famous prologue of Goethe's Faust to address the theme of wholeness as aโ coincidentia oppositorum โ.
di Mariachiara Valentini
Cover: WILLIAM HENRY MARGETSON, Mephistopheles, 1885
In a 1959 essay entitled Mephistopheles and the androgyne. The mystery of wholeness, transcript of one of Eranos' interviews at the University of Marburg, Mircea eliade takes its cue from the famous prologue of Faust by Goethe to address the theme of totality as coincidence oppositorum.
From Prologue in Heaven in fact, a mutual sympathy emerges between God and Mephistopheles, understandable if we take into account that for Goethe Mephistopheles is the one who stimulates human activity, as both error and evil are productive and indeed necessary in order to conquer knowledge. According to Goethe, Mephistopheles is โThe spirit that denies, protests, that above all stops the flow of life and prevents things from happening ", whose activity is therefore not directed against God but against Life itself. And if Life, the movement par excellence, is the nucleus of divine creation, Mephistopheles' task is to make immobility, death prevail, "because that which ceases to change and transform itself decomposes and perishes": l goal is a real one "Death in life", or spiritual sterility, which for Goethe constitutes true damnation. And therefore the man who lets the roots of Life perish within himself is the one who submits to the power of Mephistopheles, the negating spirit.ย
The obvious objection to this characterization of Mephistopheles is to note how he, while opposing the flow of Life, does nothing but stimulate it, basically demonstrating that he is a "collaborator of God", and thus justifying his very existence within the divine plan: and if we turn our attention to the Goethe's immanent metaphysics we cannot fail to recognize that in fact the role of Mephistopheles could not be different from this.
Eliade argues that the main theme of which the "God-Devil sympathy" it is nothing but a symbol is there coincidence oppositorum, themed by Niccolo Cusano (1401-1464) and summarized by him as "the least imperfect definition of God". This is not the place to go into Renaissance metaphysics: it is enough for us to highlight in Renaissance the historical moment in which the ancient human feeling of totality as a foundation, almost palpable for Greeks and Romans, returns as the central theme of philosophical reflection, in such a strong way as to continue to influence numerous thinkers until the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.ย
By reviewing the long and geographically varied mythological tradition concerning the "consanguinity" of God and the Devil, a basic need of the popular soul emerges, namely that of explaining the mystery that is Totality, the ultimate paradox of the coincidence of opposites, perceived as an ancestral feeling but apparently impossible to rationally explain. Within this tradition we find an interesting trend, whose main theme is "the powerlessness of God to create or finish the world without the help of the Devil", often accompanied by God's ignorance about the very origin of the Devil . It is actually a rather naive attempt to indicate that God has nothing to do with the origin of evil: if God ignores the origin of the Devil, he cannot be responsible for the existence of evil in the world. The ingenuity lies in the fact that this expedient, making God's goodness "total", makes his power partial. The fact that God not only does not know something, but that this something ignored by Him is fundamental for the existence of the divine creation as such, is the evident demonstration of a "minus of power โby God, and therefore theologically unacceptable because it contradicts the divine attributes.
Eliade feels a sort of "symmetry" between the Prologue Goethean and the fantastic novel Seraphita by Honorรฉ de Balzac (1799-1850), focusing on the theme ofandrogynous regarded as the exemplary image of the perfect man. The work is imbued with the theories of Immanuel Swedenborg (1688-1722), "father" of spiritism as well as one of the major influences of the European intellectual world between the XNUMXth and XNUMXth centuries, whose thought, in addition to conquering Balzac, was of fundamental importance for the development of the reflection and artistic expression of William Blake, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Charles Baudelaire, William Butler Yeats and by Goethe himself.ย
Seraphita is the last great European literary creation that has as its central motif the myth of the androgyne: the mysterious character described by Balzac he is in fact the protagonist of a double love affair, with a man (who knows him as a beautiful woman, Sรฉraphita) and with a woman (in whose eyes he presents himself as the charming Sรฉraphitus), and reciprocated by both. Balzac's goal is precisely to illustrate and comment on the Swedish theories, and the androgyne he staged does not seem to belong to the earth, but to be almost totally turned towards the sky: he lives exclusively to purify himself and to love, and indeed he cannot leave the earth before he has reached the ultimate perfection, which is the knowledge of love. And yet the androgyne lives and acts in the concrete world, in life, where he embodies the perfect man, a "total being".ย
In the second half of the XNUMXth century we witness a degradation and the consequent loss of the metaphysical and symbolic meaning of the androgyne, now reduced to a hermaphrodite with gross characteristics: this inevitably happens when the Spirit (in a genuinely Hegelian sense) "is no longer able to perceive the metaphysical meaning of a symbol". The fullness of the androgyne is no longer understood as that of a total being, but as an "overabundance of erotic possibilities": the plane is no longer spiritual, but carnal in the lowest sense of the word; we are no longer faced with the incarnation of the mystical union of the magical-religious powers of the two sexes, but with the maximum expression of erotic decay.ย
In parallel, we owe the revaluation of the androgyne to German romanticism, thanks to the resumption of the thought of Jacob Boehme (1575-1624), according to which the appearance of the two sexes is a direct consequence of the first fall of Adam, who detached himself from the divine world and "imagined being immersed in Nature, with which he degraded and became terrestrial". It is interesting to note, in this regard, that Boehme's ideas are not drawn from the kabbalistic tradition but from the alchemical universe, of which he also uses the terminology: il Rebis, the double being or hermetic Androgyne, born from the union of the Sun and the Moon (or, alchemically, of Sulfur and Mercury) it is in fact one of the names of the Philosopher's Stone (he has dealt with this theme extensively and exhaustively Carl Gustav Jung, and in this regard we refer to two fundamental works, Psychology and alchemy e Mysterium Coniunctionis, to which Eliade himself refers extensively in his treatment).
The tradition concerning the myth of the androgyne is long and complex, within which we find numerous attempts to reconcile the Platonic myth of the androgyne (Plato, Symposium) To Biblical theme of the Fall, such as that of Leone Ebreo, or that of Giovanni Scoto Eriugena, according to whom the division of the sexes is a consequence of the fall that will see his final reintegration at the moment of the eschatological reunion of the terrestrial world and Paradise, a reunion of which Christ is an anticipation, since with the resurrection He "was no longer male or female, although he was born and died male".
We mainly owe to the Christian Gnostic sects an eminent position of the androgyne within the doctrines: for Simon Magus the primordial spirit was arsenothelys, "male Female"; in the Naassenes we find a strengthening of this conception, for which the terrestrial Adam is an image of the celestial Man, defined precisely arsenothelys, and therefore we are faced with an androgynous Adam. Descending men from Adam, thearsenothelys "It resides virtually in every man" and spiritual perfection consists "precisely in rediscovering this androgyny in oneself". Androgyny is also attested in Gospel of Thomas and in Gospel according to the Egyptians, as a characteristic of spiritual perfection: according to Eliade it is an attempt to โdescribe the metanoia, the "conversion", the total reversal of values โโ"embodied in the resurrection of Christ.
Implicit in the idea of โโ"universal bisexuality" as a necessary consequence of the idea of โโ"divine bisexuality as the model and principle of all existence" perfection (therefore Being) basically consists in a unity-totality, or in a "coincidence oppositorum"At all levels and in every context, as also attested by the numerous symbolic androgynous rites. Think of Dionysus, the bisexual god par excellence, of the bearded Aphrodite venerated in Cyprus and of the Italic bald Venus, to remain in the restricted area of โโWestern tradition. The purposes of ritual androgination are manifold, first of all that of initiation into puberty, or even as a nuptial custom among some Greek peoples: what we want to highlight, however, is the constant for which there is always a "A new start", be it sex life, harvest, new year or whatever. In fact, Eliade writes:
If we consider that, for the man of traditional societies, cosmogony represents the "beginning" par excellence, we understand the presence of cosmogonic symbols in initiatory, agricultural or orgiastic rituals. To "begin" a thing is to be about to create that thing, then to use a huge reservoir of sacred forces. [...] The myths reveal that at the origin, in illo tempore, there was a compact totality - and that this totality was divided or fractured so that the world or humanity could be born.
The whole tradition of androgyny reveals one profound dissatisfaction with the "human condition", which evidently presents itself as a laceration, a division of an unknowable nature. Man is aware of this laceration to the point of attempting by any means some return to what he knows to be the primordial condition. In this sense we can better understand the meaning of the Fall, which before being understood in the Jewish-Christian sense must be understood as the definitive loss of the original state of totality. Eliade compares this original feeling to the nostalgia for a lost Paradise, "for a paradoxical state in which opposites coexist without contrasting each other". IS the longing for coincidence oppositorum, is what forces, almost chains man to conceive of opposites as complementary aspects of a single reality. And it is precisely this titanic tension that still guides the reflection of intellectuals like Goethe and Balzac.ย
About Faust by Goethe, we would like to add a small reflection: Mephistopheles is nothing more than a concrete testimony of the presence of the divine in the world of the human. The fact that his work is known directly by man indirectly makes divine power known: thus Faust, witness of the work of the Devil, is in reality a witness of the work of God, which allowed Mephistopheles to tempt man. . The paradox is that precisely through the explanation of evil Faust knows, albeit painfully, the good he has lost for eternity. The quest for Faust, primarily aimed at achieving the coincidence oppositorum already in this life, it tragically turns into an unsolvable split.ย
It is interesting to note how precisely in the nineteenth century the figure of the Devil and that of the Androgyne became one in the thought of Eliphas Levi (1810-1875), most likely counted by Eliade among the expressions of the decay of the myth of the androgyne. In the work Dogme et rituale de la Haute Magie it contains the famous illustration of Baphomet made by Lรฉvi himself, and in fact represented as a androgynous with goat head. Beyond the specific symbology of the traits that make up this figure, we would like to highlight how the pagan Baphomet has been associated with the figure of Satan over time, and how this progressive association has been accompanied by a parallel progressive assumption of the androgynous character. If we refer to Levi's Baphomet as the "definitive" form of this figure, we absolutely cannot leave out a peculiar detail: the two arms of Baphomet, the right pointing upwards and the left pointing downwards, respectively bear the inscriptions Solve e Coagulates, the alchemical formula par excellence, testifying to the fact that we are faced with a further transformation of a single symbol: the Rebis.
Finally, a final consideration must be made regarding the "God-Devil consanguinity", this time with particular reference to the Roman Empire. In its Aeneid, Virgil makes Juno speak in a peculiar way (book VII v. 312):
Flectere si nequeo superos, Acheronta movebo!
In fact, the goddess, after having tried by every means to stop Aeneas, admits that she is not able to do it with her own strength, but at the same time she is aware that she does not have the other Olympians on her side, who had already opposed the his intent; for this reason Juno decides to turn to the Underworld, exclaiming: "If I cannot bend the powers above, I will move those of the Acheron". Virgil writes superos, not "Gods" or "Olympians", because the deities of the Underworld are not inferior in power to the Olympic ones of which Juno herself is a part: life and death, good and evil, are on the same level, which means which are opposites involved dialectically, between contradiction and complementarity.ย
