(upbeat music)
- This is KZSU Stanford.
Welcome to entitled opinions.
My name is Robert Harrison.
And we're coming to you from the Stanford campus.
While the world travels the way of folly,
entertainment and distraction,
entitled opinion sets out today with Parmenides
on the far fabled way of the divinity
into the godly realm of night.
Here is our team of mayors.
Here's the golden chariot with glowing axles.
Here are the maiden daughters of the sun
who know their way back home to the halls of night.
And here is the immortal opening
of the ancient Greek poem that will take us there.
The mayors that carry me as far as longing can reach,
road on, once they had come,
and fetched me onto the legendary road of the divinity
that carries the man who knows
through the vast and dark unknown.
And on, I was carried as the mayors
aware just where to go kept carrying me,
straining at the chariot and young women led the way.
And the axle in the hubs led out the sound of a pipe
blazing from the pressure of the two well-rounded wheels
at either side as they rapidly led on.
Young women, girls, daughters of the sun
who had left the mansion of night for the light
and pushed back the veils from their faces with their hands.
There are the gates of the pathway of night and day,
held fast in place between the lintel above
and the threshold of stone.
They reach right up into the heavens
filled with gigantic doors.
And the keys that now open, now lock, are held fast by justice.
She, who always demands exact returns.
And with soft, seductive words,
the girls cunningly persuade her to push back immediately.
Just for them, the bar that bolts the gates,
and as the door flies open,
making the bronze axles with their pegs and nails spin.
Now one, now the other, in their pipes,
they open a gaping chasm.
Straight through and on, the girls hold fasts their course
for the chariots and horses.
Straight down the road.
Thus begins the poem of the philosopher, healer,
the harmonities whom we join today,
as he gains admittance into the halls of night,
where the entitled opinions brigade is welcomed
along with him by justice.
And the goddess welcomed me kindly
and took my right hand in hers
and spoke these words as she addressed me.
Welcome young man, partnered by immortal charioteers,
reaching our home with the mares that carry you.
For it was no hard fate that sent you traveling this road,
so far away from the beaten track of humans,
but rightness and justice.
And what's needed is for you to learn all things,
both the unshaken heart of persuasive truth
and the opinion of mortals in which there is nothing
that can truthfully be trusted at all.
But even so, this too you will learn,
how belief based on appearance ought to be believable
as they travel all through all there is.
(upbeat music)
Here we are in the mansion of night,
deep in the caves of KZSU,
ready to begin our show about the dark places of wisdom.
I'm joined by Grant Bartolo-May Dowling,
a scholar of ancient philosophy
who is finishing his dissertation on Plato's
Socratic dialogues and who is especially interested
in Parmenides, the thinker who loomed large
for Plato's philosophy, as well as Plato's psyche,
Grant, welcome to the underworld.
I'm glad you could join us today on entitled opinions.
- Thank you very much Robert.
- So our topic, Grant, is the dark places of wisdom
and it's somewhat recognized as Oteric topic, I'd say.
And we're gonna be talking a lot about the ancient Greek
philosopher Parmenides, who's philosophical poem on nature.
I know that that's a title that was given to it,
probably not by him, but it's called known as on nature.
It's a poem that begins with a prologue from which I quoted
just now at length.
So let's start with Parmenides.
Who he was, what kind of philosophy he espoused,
and is enduring relevance.
What do we know about this rather mysterious figure,
Parmenides?
- So we know that in the ancient world and afterwards,
Parmenides was primarily understood to be a fussy coast,
a naturalist, and so that goes with the title of the poem
you mentioned on nature, he was most well known amongst philosophers
and in intellectual history for studying nature.
The way we'd refer to the Greek naturalists from Parmenides
is period today, is as pre-socratic philosophers.
I think this is especially attributable to Aristotle
and his histories of philosophy, especially at the beginning
of the physics and the metaphysics, where he places
thales at the beginning of the tradition of philosophy
and of pre-socratic philosophers, philosophers who
are practicing philosophy before Socrates.
One reason we distinguish pre-socratic philosophers
from philosophy after Socrates is that pre-socratic philosophers
didn't consider themselves philosophers, at least in name.
They were fussy, they were studying the natural world,
thales who Aristotle identifies as the first pre-socratic philosopher
only has one sentence that's been transmitted through the ages down
to us for his philosophy, and it is that everything is water.
And shortly after thales in the subsequent generations
of pre-socratic fussy-coi natural philosophers,
we got claims like everything is air and everything is fire.
Eventually more subtle pre-socratic naturalist theories
emerge such as everything is unbounded or unlimited.
And Parmenides was a pre-socratic naturalist
who held the theory that everything is won.
He's most famous for his monadic philosophy.
To round out the background context on pre-socratic philosophy,
the word philosopher before Socrates was a pejorative term
that meant someone who was too caught up in obsessed
in irrelevant technical details, because the prefix
Philo lover was used as someone who had an inordinate love of whatever then it was attached to.
Philo Oinos, wine lover was a drunk of Philo Epos,
a horse lover spent too much money gambling and would go broke betting on the horses,
and a boy lover, let's say, had a penchant for romantic partners that was too young,
something like that.
So Socrates owned this pre-socratic term before Socrates,
the people doing what we recognize now as philosophy,
were by and large, called fussy-coi.
So you mentioned that Parmenides was a monist.
So let's tell our listeners, OK, a monist is someone who is not a dualist.
It does not believe in the dual distinction,
either between mind and body or spirit and matter and so forth.
So I'd like some help from you, because Parmenides is known,
even though he says all is won, he makes even more radical distinction
than Plato from what I can tell between the world as it appears to us,
or it seems what seems to us to be most true,
which is what comes to us through our senses and our experience of the external world,
and this higher order of truth, which can only be reached not through the body,
but really through the mind.
Why is that not the archetype of dualism?
Why is he called a monist?
So one thing we can pretty surely attribute to Parmenides is the claim that everything is won.
He repeats that a couple times throughout the poem.
Later on in the poem, he lives up to his name as a naturalist of fussy-coi,
and he goes into all kinds of different, specific scientific theories of embryology,
of the weather and meteorology, of cosmogony, all kinds of different natural theories,
but there seems to be a subordination of the natural, the physical, the Greek word is fusis
for Parmenides to some kind of higher truth, and the material that might be most interesting
to us moderns insofar as it's groundbreaking and revolutionary in the history of science,
Parmenides is a scientific part of the poem.
He says as the matter and topics most fitting for the days confused, wandering two-headed
mortals as opposed to the higher truth of the gods, which he receives earlier in the poem,
and which is pretty austerely monadic.
I will say that there's a lot of scholarship on Parmenides,
and the claim that everything is won can be interpreted in many ways.
You could have many entities that are all the same kind of thing.
So all the things that exist are one substance.
You could also have a strict single entity view of monism where only one thing exists,
and there's other interpretations as well, and so while Parmenides does attribute it a pretty
austere monism as the higher immortal truth, scholars still debate exactly the kind of
monus that he was, and you should probably start your interpretation guided by the poem,
but as Kingsley and other scholars have done historicist research, there's other avenues to
guide exactly the specific monistic theory that you're attributing to the monies.
Well, I'm thinking just as a parenthesis, Nietzsche wrote that wonderful little book called
Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks, and he said that what made them all of them,
philosophers, is that each one had an understanding of the oneness of all things.
So Thailey said all is water, Heraclitus all is fire, an axamander,
or an examinees, I don't remember, that it can also be a combination of the four elements,
but there is a sense that everything is one. So he does belong to this tradition, I guess, of
they didn't call themselves philosophers, but philosophy as Nietzsche defines it in that
Texas, when you try to think the totality of what is as unified.
We're going to get more into the rivalry between subsequent generations of philosophers and
contemporary philosophers against one another, but a pervasive feature of ancient Greek culture is
agonism, competition. And we see this just as much between the poets, let's say, as we do between
the philosophers, where a later generation of poet will take the images, metaphors, and tropes
of a predecessor, and then invert them, put them on their head to somehow one up and win the battle
with that influence, which they're struggling with. And so can see this already with
Parmenides and his predecessors, where they were making claims like everything is fire,
everything is water, he gets to the next level of generality of abstraction, everything is one,
this more capacious claim that kind of subsumes what was made before, while also continuing to
preserve elements of the tradition. And so we'll see Parmenides himself gets reinterpreted
and reimagined by his predecessors, just as he was reinterpreting, reframing the
presocratic naturalist theories that had come before him. A lot of interesting questions that I very
much tempted to ask you, but I think I'm not going to because he's going to get us into the
arc kind of platinus and other subsequent thinkers of the one. But the title we're giving to our
show today is in the dark places of wisdom. And that comes from a book that you introduce me to,
and I will be forever grateful for you having opened my eyes to this book by Peter Kingsley in the
dark places of wisdom, which is Parmenides is a central figure of this, but he is also Kingsley arguing that
prior to the advent of Socrates Plato Aristotle, where philosophy traditionally understood to begin
with these thinkers and the others are presocratic, as you mentioned, that there is this other tradition
of which Parmenides is kind of the ultimate let's say champion, where it wasn't a linguistic
turn, it said truth is not to be found in the way we speak about things, or it's not in language,
but it's in finding a way to commune with, touch, have access to a divine order of being,
which requires certain kind of techniques, if you want to use or practices, if you want to use
what Piet had doe, that philologist philosopher of ancient schools, Greek schools of, and the practices
would require meditation, would require certain kind of altered states of consciousness, and maybe
other kinds of incantation. Kingsley makes this very provocative argument that that is the true
matrix of Western culture, certainly Greek culture, but that thanks largely to Plato, tell me if
I'm getting this wrong or not, but thanks largely to Plato, there was a kind of hostile takeover
of Parmenides philosophy and a kind of either deliberate or non-deliberate covering up
burial, a kind of consigning to oblivion, this other pre-Plato version of what philosophy was,
which was had much more in common with prophecy than it did with logos, so could you say something
about this book by Peter Kingsley in the dark places of wisdom and his thesis on this particular
issue? Sure, so one thing that I failed to mention in my opening introduction about Parmenides
is he's widely credited as the father of Western rationality, that rationality in the philosophical
tradition really begins with Parmenides, we see arguments of proof, especially indirect negative proof
for the first time in extant recorded European history, and in the immediate subsequent generations
after Parmenides, Plato represents Socrates as receiving his most rigorous dialectical rational
abilities from his encounters with Parmenides, and so Parmenides from the very beginning
was at least championed as this important father of rationality and logical thinking. Kingsley's
thesis argues that that only credits Parmenides with one half of what he was philosophically
significant for, and the other half touches on topics like magic, irrationality, hallucination,
topics like that which are traditionally rejected by rationalist philosophers,
and therefore the strong rationalist emphasis of philosophy ever since Plato has either
through no fault of its own, because of its presentation by the earlier generations of philosophers
just adopt today, rationalist understanding of Parmenides, but occasionally when some of these historical
facts surface or speculative interpreters start pondering these more shamanic, magical techniques
of ecstasy that seem to be suggested even within Parmenides' poem, there's a deliberate effort to
reject those sorts of narratives, and Kingsley is vociferous about this, and it may have led to,
I'd say, harmful repercussions with the reception of his scholarship, the fact that he's
so insistent that there's this widespread occasionally coordinated effort to obscure
this fact of the history of the birth of philosophy and western rationality through Parmenides
is a guiding star of his book and one of the main theses he's trying to set right in the dark
places. So Kingsley is a classicist, and yet as you mentioned, he has a controversial reputation
to say the least, no, because this book is, it's not shrill in any way, but it is polemical against
not only the history of philosophy that begins with Plato and Aristotle, I can read you,
just sentence here where I love it, he said that philosophy is supposed to be the love of wisdom,
but he says, "Instead of the love of wisdom, philosophy turned into the love of talking and
arguing about the love of wisdom, and since then talking and arguing have pushed everything else
out of the picture until now we no longer know anything else and can even imagine that there could be
something else." So how do you evaluate his claim that the true ground of western, let's say,
wisdom was not logocentric and that it was very promiscuous with magic shamanism, hallucination,
prophecy, and so forth, and whether Kingsley has good evidence to base this claim on.
So I recommended the book to you, and I go around recommending it to many other scholars and
friends that I encounter. So for the most part, I'm a Kingsley supporter and that sort of thing.
So from what I understand, so I've talked to Tony Long who taught Kingsley as an undergraduate,
it was a super bright undergraduate, very successful graduate student. His first book is published
with Oxford University Press on Pythagoras and was really well received. This is the first book published by,
I think it's the golden two fee center publishing, and he hasn't returned to mainstream academic
publishing since in the dark places of wisdom. And I think it's open to question the degree to
which his exile has been kind of self imposed, first imposed from without. I know scholars,
and I won't name names that in San Diego and University of New Mexico, etc. who are giant Kingsley
fans. And I'll say on my dissertation committee, one of the scholars here at Stanford who's
taught me the very most about ancient philosophy. And anything insightful, I say here,
it's thanks to him, of course, all the errors and less insightful materials my own. His name
Alan Coad, I took his course on Plato's late epistemology, that is his theory of knowledge and
metaphysics, that is his theory of being. And we read the dialogues, The Softest, which discusses
Parmenides and features the parasite of Parmenides by the visitor from what gets translated now
as LA, but we'll be calling Velia, and the dialogue Parmenides, where Parmenides is the eponymous
character and the main speaker. Coad introduced his split level undergraduate,
ancient philosophy course on Plato's late epistemology and metaphysics by presenting
Parmenides as an eachromontist, that is to say a su-saying prophetic doctor. And this blew my mind
because I'd already gotten a master's degree, I'd taken many courses on pre-socratic philosophy,
I wrote my master's thesis on another pre-socratic philosopher and exegorist. And I'd never
heard anything like this. Parmenides may have been my favorite philosopher at the time, and I'd
never heard anything like this. So yachromontis, the Greek word, what does it mean literally?
Yachro is doctor, doctor, my thesis, prophetic. Yeah, exactly. So prophecy, healing.
And the reason this is significant for Kingsley is because of a variety of archaeological discoveries,
the first important ones being made in the 1830s, and then many more, which have been made in the 1960s,
connect Parmenides to these more magical, mystical, divine cult-like healing and prophetic
techniques. And it's the Italian scholars, particularly the Italian classes, who only work on
archaeology as opposed to philosophy, who are the most receptive and supportive of Kingsley scholarship.
And it seems to be the anglophone ancient philosophers who don't have training in archaeology,
and aren't even really familiar with the material record in allia,
who are the most skeptical and the most resistant to Kingsley's main point. You ask me to evaluate
it myself. I will say that I don't completely agree with Kingsley's reading of Plato. I think
Plato is one of these philosophical literary artists on the level of Dante or Shakespeare or Joyce,
where it's very hard ultimately to ever figure out what exactly their intention is with a
work of philosophical literature. You almost have to see yourself as a philosopher artist on the level
of those writers to confidently ascribe intentions to their work. And so I have my own ideas about
the way that Plato is interacting with Parmenides, and while I completely agree with many of
Kingsley's specific claims about how Plato misrepresents Parmenides, I take a slightly less
conspiratorial, nefarious,
accusations. The accusation is that Plato committed parasite. Namely, he set out to kill the father,
Parmenides, and that is a provocation. Let me read a passage from the bottom of page 212.
It's only a couple sentences to the top of page 213. So this is Kingsley from in the dark places
of wisdom. Always Plato is praised for his extraordinary creativity as a writer, for the wonderfully
evocative quality of his myths and mythical imagery. What's never noticed is the ways he chose
to take over older mythological traditions and through lack of interest or simply as a result of
misunderstanding, obscure their significance, jumble the details, blur the edges of what once had
been their finest of distinctions. What's never even mentioned is just how much was covered or lost.
So I agree with Kingsley that Plato jumbles details, blurs the edges, and will insert his own
philosophical distinctions and concepts in the voice, in the name of his predecessors.
What I don't agree with is it's necessarily nefarious through a lack of interest or through
misunderstanding. I think it's deliberate, artistic, and philosophical, mostly in the dynamics of
this agonism that I brought up earlier. What do we know about the the doctor's side of
permanence? What sort of techniques or recipes or practices is he and his school or the school,
the tradition that he comes from, because one of Kingsley's main points also, he does a geography
of Vedlia, which is a place in southern Italy, but Vedlia was founded by Greek-speaking
colonists from a place called Fokaya, which is in Asia Minor, present-day Turkey, and he
reconstructs the way in which Fokaya had many contacts with the east and that there were traditions
associated with the cults of the dead, with the practices and so forth, that he finds that
permanent days is in many ways the inheritor of some of these traditions and that his work as a
physician in the profound sense of the term "physician" was connected to them.
So I'll start on the Greek Peloponnese mainland because that's what's the most studied, the most
research, the most well-established, then I'll move towards what's less well-established and what's
more unique for Kingsley on incubation. So one of the main theses of this text is that
central to Parmenides's philosophical perspective on the world and his poetry was informed by what he
spent his time doing day-to-day and his day-to-day job was being in charge of incubation rooms.
So incubation is a somewhat clunky clumsy term. There's no one Greek word that was ever
kind of established as the kind of technical term for usic he stillness comes up a lot.
It was pervasive and extremely common in the Greek world from the 9th, 8th century to at least
second, third century AD. So for at least a thousand years it was an extremely cultural ubiquitous
practice and it was particularly associated with medicine, both the Asclepian and its rival
Hippocratic traditions, both endorsed incubation for medical treatment. And so because it lasted for
over a thousand years and because there were different medical schools and traditions which were
using incubation for medical purposes, there's not just a one-size-fits-all description of what would
go on. We have excellent sources that were from the temple of Epidaris which were carved onto
the walls with success stories for incubation.
Okay, so incubation is at its most basic level when humans hibernate. So when human beings
find a dark, still room and lie in silence maybe with occasional incantations for as long as possible,
at least hours, but typically days. And some of these medical traditions priests would incubate
on behalf of sick patients and in some of the patients were sent in themselves. In these cases,
the patients could either be cured directly. For instance, someone who had been
say stabbed with a spear in their sternum and the spear tip had broken off,
record on the walls of the temple of Epidaris that in their hands in the morning after their
hallucinatory dreamlike experience with the god, they were holding the spear tip. They'd been
directly cured by a miracle. The kind that's more relevant to paramedics though is receiving guidance
from the gods in these hallucinatory dreamlike states. We started to mention Anatolia in the Eastern
influence on incubation in Greece. I'll pause here to say the earliest incubation seemed to be
occurring within caves to find this kind of dark, still space, but very quickly as incubation was
incorporated into Greek religion, temple complexes featured incubation rooms at the very farthest
back recesses of the temple. These rooms were called abatons and they were put back there because
there would be the least light, the least motion, the least interruptions from entering into a dream
like hallucinatory state by depriving oneself of any site or emotion or food or sound for all
this time. Yeah, so very interesting, the way Kingsley insists mostly on the caves as the original
places and the caves are important to him because the beginning of Parmenity's poem, which I read
from, talks about the halls of night, about the mansions, the world beyond, and that you're going
into what Kingsley claims is Tartarus, namely the world of the dead, and that Parmenities at the
beginning of his poem has this extraordinary privilege like Orpheus, with whom he's associated
later, of undertaking a journey into the realm of the dead, and she says justice says to him
it's not because of any hard fate that you're doing this, but you're privileged, and therefore,
if I understand Kingsley correctly, that part of the therapeutics of incubation was that you
were getting in touch with the shadow world of the night, which is also strangely the home of the sun.
So we don't hear, I understand, monism better when night and day, sun and darkness have a common
nature and that to descend a kadabasis into this other world was part of the cure that was being
practiced. Absolutely. So now we'll connect Parmenities' practice to underworld cults. It's worth
noting that Parmenities was the first generation in Velia. He was among the first children ever
born to this new colony. He was born, therefore, to parents who are not native to Velia. In fact,
they were native to this island we've mentioned on the western coast of modern day Turkey called
Focaya, and Focaya was an extremely conservative and unique culture unto itself. A big claim
that Kingsley makes is that Parmenities preserved elements of Focaya and Anatolian cult worship
in his practice as Fullarchos, the incubation guide of these abaton rooms in medical religious
complexes in Velia. So within Focaya itself and within neighboring cities like Istria and Caria,
Greek travel writer, such as Stravo, record pervasive underworld cult complexes, the most
impresses of which was called Heropolis, in which priests or occasionally sick patients themselves
would be led down into caves to receive or regular guidance to help with their healing from
either Hades or Persephone or this sect of Apollo worshipers called Apollo Uliades. And something
that's very significant is that nowhere besides Velia in the archaeological record is there any
mention of Apollo Uliades besides in Velia and then also in these cities in Anatolia that I've
just mentioned. So that's one of the greatest pieces of archaeological evidence Kingsley uses
to show that Parmenities preserved these incubationary techniques of getting in contact with the
underworld gods that come from Western Anatolia, the place that his colonial parents and the entire
older generation that was founding Velia would have brought with them and he was one of the
priests of the new colony that was charged with preserving these techniques and they ended up
blasting for five or six hundred more years in Velia after the generation of Parmenities.
Two more words that you mentioned, Fullarcus and Apollo Uliades, right? So Fullarcus is interesting
because I gather it means the den where animals retreat. Dinner layer,
dinner layer where they retreat, especially if they've been wounded or where they go and they
hibernate. This is how it was described in antiquity. So a Fullarcus was someone who would be
in charge of the place of the den which would be the cave and then the other
Apollo had placed a huge role in Kingsley's interpretation of Parmenities because he also there again
like what he wants to do by showing that there was a lot more to Parmenities and just
reason and rationality. He argues that there was a lot more to Apollo than what has come down to us
through the more recent traditions which is the God of light, the God of restraint, of
individuation and of reason and even Nietzsche, you know, divides Apollo from Dionysus.
Kingsley says that Apollo is also the God of night and a God therefore of prophecy,
he is the God of the oracles, we know that. But he has this completely other side to him
that Parmenities is particularly connected to, right?
Yes, that's right. And the kind of just as Plato is the main bad guy in the story that Kingsley
setting up about the misdirection that the history of Western philosophy goes into when it comes to
Apollo, Plutarch is the fall guy who accurately according to Kingsley describes the views of Delphi
in which Apollo had nothing to do with the night that Apollo was the God of day and the God of light.
But according to Kingsley, by Plutarch's time, there was a misunderstanding of the role that
Apollo played within Greek religion insofar as he was almost always associated with some
incubationary temple sites that dreams, hallucinations, etc., were intimately tied up with
Apollonian worship. Apollo also is connected with the figure of the Quaros and Parmenities in the very
beginning of the problem of on nature, the very beginning lines, identifies himself of Quaros,
therefore, connects himself to Apollo and all this Greek material about the Quaros journey.
Finally, I would mention that Apollo, Uliades, those are followers of Apollo Ullis,
wasn't, it's a rarely attested word for healer, which shows its eastern influence.
And as I maybe mentioned briefly, just a little bit earlier, isn't attested in any archaeological
record anywhere else in modern-day Greece or Italy, besides Valia, modern-day turkeys,
the only other place where you can find archaeological records of this Apollo Ullis cult.
So it's strong archaeological evidence that Kingsley can draw on that Parmenities is preserving
these techniques of ecstasy that were very common to the colonial origins of his community,
but weren't so common to the atruscan context in which they found themselves when they founded their
colony. One last word on this and maybe we'll expand a little bit more, but Kingsley has a story about how
these techniques were transmitted from pretty far east beyond India from Siberia, from Central Asia,
via trade networks and the Silk Road, etc., all the way to the terminus of Western Anatolia,
and then it was the seafaring Anatolians who took these eastern philosophies, eastern techniques of
practices of ecstasy, hallucination, prophecy, etc. and then dispersed them across the Mediterranean.
I'm sure a lot of people are going to be asking themselves now exactly that connection is
there some transmission of eastern kind of Buddhist, you know, transcendental meditation type
philosophy in the philosophy of Parmenities. Kingsley seems to suggest that the actual roads
were well trafficked between Fokaya and the far east, so maybe there is indeed as Nietzsche himself
in the birth of tragedy that Dionysus has an asiatic origin, you know, so there's something for the
east. So Apollo as a god not only of light but of darkness, so that's very important.
Stillness, can you say a word about stillness grant because it is what incubation is focused on,
no, darkness and this lack of activity and motion around oneself. What is the healing power of
stillness and how much are we in, I don't know, want to jump out of the historical context,
but if there's something that's relevant in all this kind of incubational philosophy is that
we are so far from any kind of stillness in our own frenetic world that we might want to hear
more from you about the therapeutic power of stillness. Sure, you were mentioning stillness has an
end of incubation and it's not clear to me the extent to which stillness is a technique of ecstasy,
a means for arriving at these kind of manic prophetic healing. We'll get to log giving
abilities first being an end in itself. I think that's a pretty profound question. I'm not sure I
have a direct answer to right now, but there is something stillness is one route that was used in
pervasively across the ancient world to get into these hallucinatory ecstatic head spaces,
which were especially valuable for making big decisions, whether to go to war,
whether to found a colony, et cetera. When you reach a crisis that wasn't really clear,
you'd have to appeal to the authority of the gods and these states were believed to be
how human beings were able to achieve that connection for authoritative guidance.
It's that contact. Yeah, and King's Lee says that stillness is also the condition of death,
but not death as the termination of life, but death as this other side and perhaps even, you know,
origin of life, where one goes into the incubation chamber or into the caves in order to,
in a certain sense, die or cross the threshold into the realm of the dead and commune with the dead
and the divinities that belong to the underworld, because through the power of death,
there was healing to be had, and that if you don't die before you actually biologically perish,
then you haven't understood anything about life. And it's that sort of psychic descent,
which is important to the myth of Orpheus with whom power manides gets associated. But I want to,
we don't have all that much time remaining focus on Persephone, the figure of Persephone,
because she's the queen of this underground, and there's a mysterious goddess or that there's,
it's not clear in the prologue and the Paul, who is the divinity with whom
for many days or the young man, the kudos, is received by. And one of a very persuasive argument
that you have in the dark places of wisdom is that it's actually Persephone, even if she's not
named. And that would make sense, because as King's Lee also points out very insightfully,
there are no men, there are only women in this poem, divinities. I mean, you have the maidens,
you have justice, you have the goddess of the underworld, and so forth. The horses, the mares,
even the mares, even the horses are feminine. So first, a word about Persephone,
and then I'd like to ask you about real women in the real police of certain Greek things and
log-giving, okay? So Persephone, are you persuaded that she is one of the principal divinities that
this poem descends into contact with? I'd say I am persuaded King's Lee is excellent here going
into philological detail about small mentions, like the mansions of day and mansions of night,
and then looking at the Greek literary and religious tradition to find where over and over again these
geographical landmarks in the underworld are associated paradigmaticly with Persephone, so that alone
is very compelling. The cultural origins in Anatolia, in these complexes like Heropolis,
which were underworld cults, which were worshiped Persephone, and used very particular vocabulary,
which then show up on inscriptions in Velia, also fantastic evidence, and then there's the
level of the meaning of the poem, and it the ways it helps to understand what
Permanides is getting at once you posit Persephone as the goddess, and so I think through making
sense of the poem, through its historicist context, and through the philological, poetic, religious
details that King's Lee points out, he makes a very strong argument that the unnamed goddess
is Persephone, he also really puts really nicely how, when we're dealing with stillness and the
profundity of getting in touch with death, there's only so much you can say, and there's a power in
silence, and sometimes even more powerful than invoking a goddess is not invoking her by name
and leaving space for that power to be felt psychically as you say.
Exactly, and yeah, King's Lee says that the gods are named very sparingly by the Greeks,
and especially the gods of the underworld are usually not named at all because somehow their power
resides in their remaining unnamed, not nameless unnamed.
Female gods in particular, because oftentimes it was women who were the biggest demographic
practitioners of cults around females, and that there's the least material record, least written
record of these things, because women are for obvious reasons in the ancient world systematically,
written out of male written accounts of culture and society, and so there's many reasons
why there's more silence and darkness around the role of Persephone in the poem,
some relating to gender, some relating to the profundity of stillness and death, and some relating
to the silence we give the dead and the afterlife. Okay, great, so we're winding down now,
we just have a few minutes left. We talked about gender, women, darkness, there's one more claim,
very important, which is that, for many days and others, we're associated with legislation,
and log it, that Parmenis might have been a log ever himself, and that there was
recommended, there's records of some of these forlarchy who recommended that the city in order to be
cured of a plague, liberalize its laws against women, and kind of free them up to, if not
equal rights of citizenship, at least going a long way towards the enfranchisement of women,
hugely important, if that is indeed the case, because it would also connect to the predominantly
and, in fact, exclusively feminine presence in Parmenidé's poem, can you say something about the
legislation on this topic? Absolutely, so there's two parts to this answer, there's one about how in
Parmenides' specific community, the eachromontis was given special rights as ambassador and lawmaker,
and then there's the broader answer about how incubation in the ancient world in general was
bound up with log giving, so I'll start with the second one, and then zoom in on Parmenides,
the story really goes back to this prevenience kind of mythical prehistoric, kind of on the level
of the Trojan War where there's maybe some historical connection to a real person, but we certainly
don't have any evidence that could vindicate any certain facts, and this character was named
Epimenides, he was Sicilian and he was the Greek Rip Van Winkle, he slept in a cave for many years,
so textbook incubation, so in this, this Rip Van Winkle character sleeping in a cave for many years
was visited by the goddess justice of female goddess on behalf of the dead who informed Epimenides
that hundreds of miles away in Athens, there was a raging plague, he had fallen asleep before the
plague started, and they had the goddess justice had a message for him, to heal Athens of its plague,
there were three things Epimenides needed to do, first, encouraged the Athenians to pay more
attention to animals and study animals closer, second, to liberalize conditions for women and
increase women's rights in Athens, and finally to create a formal law code, then the goddess justice
woke up Epimenides in this cave and Sicily after his multi-year sleep, he got on a boat, went to
Athens, told the Athenians they were so desperate they followed his advice, and lo and behold,
the story goes, it worked, Athens was cured of this dangerous prehistoric mythological plague that was
haunting it, and therefore ever since then, in the Greek imagination, especially in the Athenian
imagination, there was a strong connection between the goddess justice, incubation, and law giving,
because those were the instructions that the goddess justice gave Epimenides during about of
incubation. The other part on Epimenides I can say quickly is that Valia, as we've been saying,
was a very conservative colony, it tried to, for hundreds of years and succeeded, at preserving
its Anatolian religious cult practices. The group that was most charged with doing this in these
Anatolian communities were called the Mole Boy, and they're best documented in a kind of sister
city that was kind of co-colonized by the Fokayans called Miletus, the Mole Boy were these political
elites that had special rights in the city to make laws, to be ambassadors, etc. And those
traditions of the kind of initiated priests, having special political rights and statuses,
continued in Valia. These, so, Parmenides was part of this inner political elite that his
priestly status granted him. And so, therefore, in Anatolia and Valia, not only was incubation away for
the goddess justice to come and suggest legal reforms or something like that, but it was those
priests who knew the ecstatic techniques of incubation, or regular dreaming, hallucination, etc.,
which were given special status to act as ambassadors and to reform laws, etc.
Grant has been a fascinating discussion. I want to now invoke someone that might not be very well
known by the audience of entitled opinions, because I don't know how many of our listeners are NFL fans,
but one of the great quarterbacks of not only the active group of quarterbacks, but maybe one of
the great quarterbacks in the history of the NFL is Aaron Rogers, who played for the Green Bay
Packers for several years, won multiple MVP awards, won a Super Bowl as well. And he had to make a
decision a couple of years ago, a year and a half ago, after he left the Green Bay Packers,
whether he was going to retire, or whether he was going to continue playing for another team.
And all the commentators were anguishing over his indecision, and you talked about decision-making,
you've taught a course on decision-making and its connection with incubation. Isn't it
bizarre that Aaron Rogers went into what he called a solitary retreat, where he actually went
into a room completely dark, no light at all, for four days alone, and incubated.
Came out of that, deciding that he was indeed going to play in the NFL again, and joined the
New York Jets. And it was huge expectations by the New York Jets that have failed miserably in the
last decade or two decades in the NFL. And their season began last year, and within four plays,
Aaron Rogers tore his Achilles tendon. And so we had a suspended animation, which is what
the state of incubation is, the state of suspended animation. I mentioned this because we're recording
this show just a couple of days before the Monday Night Football game of the first game of the
San Francisco 49ers, of which I'm a huge fan, and the New York Jets. Aaron Rogers, the incubator,
is back now, has been healed of his Achilles tendon rupture. And the whole nation is absolutely
riveted by what is going to happen on Monday Night when Aaron Rogers faces the San Francisco 49ers
and his top ranked defense. So all this is not just the past. There is such a thing as
solitary confinement, which is exactly what incubation was for permanent days.
So the choice by Aaron Rogers to join the New York Jets makes me want to leave our listeners with
a warning that this isn't a complete endorsement that I can't say every time you turn off the
lights and stay still for three days. You'll come up with the best decision. I will say that
this was absolutely ubiquitous in the ancient world. It seemed like second nature to approach
critical decisions this way. Marcus Aurelius' teacher, Franco, followed his dreams for medical
advice, for instance, and just as a last cautionary tale of the incredible highs or potential
tragic lows of incubating in contemporary times, I'll mention this figure, John Lilly,
who was affiliated with Stanford University and invented the sensory deprivation tank, had
incredible breakthroughs about superintelligences and the potential of the human brain, but also became
an addict to research chemicals and seemed worse for the wear ultimately for spending so
much time in these sense deprivation tanks and if you're interested in a Hollywood sensationalized
version of what can go wrong, I'd recommend the movie altered states.
So I want to thank you for coming on in title opinions again. Remind our listeners who've
been speaking with Grant Bartolome Dowling, finishing a dissertation in ancient philosophy is
particularly Plato and the Socratic dialogues for coming on to in title opinions. So thanks again,
Grant and remind our listeners that I'm Robert Harrison for in title opinions. Thanks for listening.
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