LOST IN TRANSMIGRATION

(One may wonder whether Pherecydes deserves more than one entry, here allotted to him, and I should say that he does. But I do not have a meaningful second one for him at this time, and no matter how greatly I’d like to stack up this section with stubs, if not yet with entries proper, one entry is all that he is getting, I am afraid, for the time being.

The playful title of this entry is at the same time quite meaningful. It plays with the title of the recent movie Lost in Translation, relates to Pherecydes’ espousal of metempsychosis, and also points out the fact that his name is practically unknown today in the history of philosophy, to which fact most textbook name indexes will testify. I am not however going to omit him from this section both antiquitatis causa and as a matter of principle. After all, even though Russell has no reference to him, both Aristotle and Nietzsche mention him as a partial philosopher, or at least a philosophizer.)

Pherecydes of Syros was an early pre-Socratic thinker and a prosaic writer (the latter was quite a rarity in those poetically saturated times, in fact, he is probably the first known Greek author writing in prose) flourishing in the sixth century BC, which makes him a contemporary of Thales. Apparently, he was a very imaginative writer, as we can judge from the fragments of his lost work Heptamychia, often quoted by others. He is called a philosopher, a mythologist, and a theologian, due to the nature of his writings. Occasionally, he is also counted among hoi hepta sophoi.

Pherecydes has been credited with the earliest known retelling of the myths of Danae and Perseus. Apparently, he was much more than a storyteller. It has become almost obligatory for all Pherecydes scholars to note that Aristotle, in Metaphysics, characterizes Pherecydes’ writing as a mixture of myth and philosophy. In other words, myths for him are a form of teaching his philosophy. But he is going even further than that. He treats mythology not as literal accounts of the lives of gods and heroes, but as allegories.

Pherecydes’ cosmogony/theogony of the Heptamychia has sharply pronounced original features. Delighting some broad-minded Christian scholars, he appears to posit an eternal divine Trinity, which in his treatment includes Zas (his name-version of Zeus), the Aether; Zas’s father Chronos (mind you, not Kronos!), Time, and Chthonie, the deity of chthonic depths, later becoming Gaea, the Earth Goddess. Instead of the standard unpleasantness between the traditional Kronos and Zeus (Kronos wants to eat Zeus, but Zeus gets the upper hand over Kronos eventually), Chronos and Zas do not seem to be at odds in Chronos’ struggle against the evil Ophion the Serpent (Is Ophion actually Pherecydes’ version of Typhon the monstrous snake defeated by Zeus in the standard version?), delighting our broad-minded Christians with yet another uncanny parallel (albeit quite fragile, and, considering Zeus versus Typhon, not terribly original!) to what could be called Christian mythology. Zas marries Chthonie, following his victory over Ophion (which does not rule out his triumph over Chronos as well, as Nietzsche believes to be implied in Pherecydes’ tale), and gives her, the queen of the bowels of the earth, the outside surface of the earth as his wedding gift, as an immediate result of which she is now transformed into Ge (Gaea).

So far, this is more myth than philosophy, but the scholars who see Pherecydes as a philosopher, go further. In terms of his basic philosophy they cite his denial of ex nihilo creation, his theory of cosmos self-creation and his postulation of the eternal nature of the first principles, as Pherecydes’ greatest contribution to early Greek thought. But his contributions by no means stop here. Cicero and Augustine believe that Pherecydes was the first to profess the immortality of the soul, while Webster’s Biographical Dictionary calls him “the reputed originator of the doctrine of metempsychosis.” It also names him as “sometimes counted among the Seven Wise Men of Greece.” (Which makes the ranks of the magnificent seven well over two dozen strong!) Diogenes Laertius adds to this that Pherecydes has been considered to have been the teacher of Pythagoras, and so the litany of his philosophical achievements goes on. Fairly, I suppose, as to strip Pherecydes of his undoubtedly embellished legend would logically lead to stripping other ancients of theirs, and we are most likely to end up as a result culturally impoverished pedants with no monumental history to learn from.

And finally, here is an excerpt from Nietzsche’s Philosophy During the Tragic Age of the Greeks, which is, to the best of my knowledge, the only place in all his works where he mentions the name of Pherecydes:

Also, Pherecydes of Syros, who is a contemporary of Thales, and akin to him in many physical conceptions, hovers with the expression of the latter in that middle region where allegory is wedded to mythology so that he dares, for example, to compare the earth with a winged oak, which hangs in the air with the spread pinions and which Zeus bedecks, after the defeat of Kronos, with a magnificent robe of honor, into which with his own hands Zeus embroiders lands, water, and rivers. In contrast with such a gloomy allegorical philosophizing, scarcely to be translated into the realm of the comprehensible, Thales’s are the works of a creative master who began to look into Nature’s depths without fantastic fabling.

This statement of fact (even if this fact is a quotation from Nietzsche) need not wind up my entry in the last revision but having covered it with several caveats already I am ready to part with Pherecydes for now with a reasonably good conscience.