Empedocles: Cosmologist and Magician: Part II
In my last article, “Empedocles: Cosmologist and Magician,” linked here, I laid out Empedocles’ story of the cosmos and his story of the soul and merged the two. For background, please read that article. Empedocles was a Pre-Socratic philosopher who lived from 492 BCE to 432 BCE.
Brief Review
Briefly, Empedocles’s stories included four basic elements, earth, air, fire, and water, and two basic motions: Love, which unites everything, and Strife, which breaks it all apart.
So, in the beginning, Love holds all things together in harmony. This includes daemons or souls who live immortal lives in the heavens. Then Strife enters the picture driving all the elements apart, creating chaos, violence, and hatred. Then Love re-emerges, bringing it all back together again.
Most philosophers and scholars believe Strife drove the elements out of heaven and into an earthly mortal existence. Then Love returns, sending them back to heaven and immortality.
Love Drew Us Out of Heaven
But Empedocles begs to differ. He believes Love drove the daemons out of heaven, and Strife brought them back. In this article, we will see how Love lured them out of heaven, and in the following article, how Strife brings them back.
Peter Kingsley, in his book, Reality, says that in the beginning,
“The pure soul was up in the heavens, where it belongs. For the original home of the daemon is not here on Earth: quite to the contrary. The heavens are where it comes from and, Empedocles explains in no uncertain terms, are where it will eventually return when individual human beings become so purified during their final incarnations on Earth that they ‘spring up from there as gods’—as immortals again with their own full power and dignity restored to them at last.”
What Caused the Fall?
But what caused the daemons to “fall” out of the heavens in the first place? In Empedocles’ own words,
“Whenever it happens that any daemon—one of those beings who has life for a long, long time—through some failing pollutes its own dear limbs with blood.”
So, the daemons have to leave home after they pollute their limbs with blood.
Kingsley then says we shouldn’t conclude that Empedocles talks about the human form when he talks of “limbs.” In other passages, Empedocles speaks of the “limbs” of the sun or of the “disembodied divine awareness” as having “limbs.” Kingsley says this will become clearer as we progress in the story.
Empedocles then explains what happens after the blood pollutes our limbs. He says the soul is
“made to wander away from the blessed ones and take on all sorts of shapes and forms of mortal existence through the course of time, exchanging one hard path of life for another.”
Kingsley explains the meaning of this,
“What had been pure and immortal becomes mortal; is pulled down out of the heavens and dragged into the depths, utterly lost to its own kind. It cries out with longing for its own familiar realm and cries even more when it sees the ‘unfamiliar place,’ to use the expression used by Empedocles, that it has been drawn into a world of dreams. Any original sense of identity is gradually left behind as the soul is deprived of all its dignity, stripped of its joy.”
The “Covered-Over Cave”
The soul then realizes it has been drawn inside a “covered-over cave” and enters a dark, oppressive underworld where terrible shapes and events manifest. The soul is far from its home and authentic self in this state.
But that is not the end. As Kingsley points out,
“The daemon is about to be wrapped up and inserted into a whole sequence of bodies made from flesh and blood, to be coated with earth and dressed up in robe after robe of flesh that will fit it to perfection, but—and this is the paradox—always remain alien to what it really is.”
Now comes the time for the journey home.
Who Rules This Stage?
But before we get into the journey home, let’s take a closer look at this fallen realm. Who rules it? What’s it like?
In describing this place, Kingsley says,
“It was an age of what could be called almost perfect harmony. There is no conflict—yet. There is only one dominant power that humans acknowledge: one queen. She has their exclusive, undivided devotion.”
As Empedocles says,
“For them, no Ares was god, no Battle-Panic, no King Zeus, no Kronos, no Poseidon; but Aphrodite was their queen.”
But Empedocles warns us that this is no golden age. Innocence is tempered by strictly forbidden things, like killing animals and eating meat. Kingsley says,
“The gentlest signs of tension are already present, of a potential conflict lurking in the wings that eventually will give rise to so much suffering.”
There were Two Falls
Kingsley then points out that many scholars wrongly equate this period with the harmony of heaven. This incarnation into Aphrodite’s realm is a punishment for the daemon’s failings, and from there things only get worse. In other words, as Kingsley points out,
“It means that when the soul violates the strict ban on destroying life and eating flesh in Aphrodite’s charming realm—which it certainly will—this will not be its first fall from grace.”
Kingsley says it will be its second fall. It turns out there are two falls. The Daemons fall from heaven into Aphrodite’s realm, followed by the fall of incarnate humans from Aphrodite’s domain and into even greater suffering. So, the first fall occurs when Aphrodite seduces us into her Love realm; but what is this love Aphrodite offers?
Kingsley says the notion of a double fall is significant in Christianity, with the fall of the angels followed by the fall of humans; only for Empedocles; the humans are also the angels.
The Nature of Aphrodite’s Realm
What is the nature of Aphrodite’s realm? Kingsley uses Empedocles to show us.
“. . .she comes as a ‘soothing’ assault of love: like a soothing drug, gentle in the way that only Aphrodite knows how to be. But we know a great deal from the ancient Greek poets about this gentleness of hers. It’s all sweetness and seduction, cunning and persuasiveness, the purest deception.”
Empedocles quotes Homer when talking about Aphrodite,
“love, desire, sweet talk, deceitful words that steal away the intelligence even of those who are most cautious and wise.”
Empedocles continues,
“Watch her with your consciousness! Don’t just sit there in a daze staring blankly with your eyes! Even mortals acknowledge her as implanted in their members, as she through whom they think thoughts of love and perform their acts of joining. They call her Delight and Aphrodite. But actually to perceive her spinning around in the mid-parts [genital area]: this is something no mortal has ever done. As for you, though, listen to the undeceptive arrangement of my words.”
The Consequences of Breaking Aphrodite’s Rules
Once Aphrodite’s realm has been upset by the killing of animals and the eating of meat, hatred, anger, and bloodshed follow, snowballing on each other as the situation worsens.
Kingsley says we are now those men and women who have fallen this second time and thus are a part of all this misery. Kingsley adds,
“For this is where we all are in the great cycle of the soul that Empedocles is describing: no longer divine and no longer innocent, heading toward greater and greater destruction.”
But it is precisely here that Empedocles gives us hope in the middle of despair. He is the messenger who reminds us of our true origins and who we are. He strangely offers us, as Kingsley points out,
“the death of our mortality.”
We Need to Change Ourselves
In short, Aphrodite, bewildering our souls, engenders a desire for earthly life. How do we know she has trapped us? Empedocles says if we are mortal, Aphrodite has trapped us with her deceptions. Kingsley, commenting on Empedocles, suggests,
“What Empedocles is indicating, insisting on, demanding is that if we want to understand anything about the cosmos we can no longer go on seeing things in the same way.”
Break the Spell of Aphrodite
In other words, to save our souls, we must break Aphrodite’s spell over us and begin viewing everything differently. We need to awaken a different form of cognition and perception. One that allows us to see again from the perspective of immortality.
Empedocles counsels us not to sit there in a daze and be deceived. He says,
“Don’t let deception overthrow the seat of your awareness.”
Kingsley says Empedocles is a sorcerer because that is the only avenue left to wake people up.
Kingsley says,
“It is the only option left, the only available way to function, for those rare individuals who have made the irreversible discovery that what we consider reality is a total illusion.”
So we can see that Aphrodite’s Love, deceptive as it was, drew us out of the heavenly realm. It wasn’t Strife. Aphrodite seduced us. Now only Strife can save us. We’ll see how that unfolds in the following article.
To learn more about the Intelligence and Magic of the Universe: Click this link: The Magical Universe
