Eclipse of the Gods
Notes from a Great Writer's Magnum Opus
Philip Athanasiou (1925-2021) was a distinguished Greek writer and publisher, founder of the iconic Demeter Books. His work explores a phenomenal range of subjects, often dealing in the esoteric and kabbalistic. He was particularly interested in the Greek myths and their relationship to the development of modern consciousness. His 1962 work Language and the Gods famously argues that there is no human culture without the tutelage of the gods. Toward the end of his life, Athanasiou published a magisterial study of the Greek myths, The Hymn to Hermes. Two years ago, his daughter, Ana Seferiades, discovered 777 handwritten A4 sheets of paper entitled “Eclipse of the Gods: Notes”. Next year, the text will be published as it was found with a foreword by Ana herself. In it she expresses the view that her father’s text “aimed, no less, than to bring home the exiled gods”. With her kind permission, a translated excerpt of her father’s text is provided below.
In the beginning. The absolute presence of the divine. “All things are full of gods”. Thales and the pre-Socratics. The world itself as divine presence. See also the Neo-Platonists and, in particular, Plotinus. The soul does not exist within the body; rather the body exists within the soul. All, in fact, consists of soul.
In the Greek language, theós, “god,” has no vocative case. Rather, it designates something that happens. In Euripides’ Helen: “O gods: recognising the beloved is god”. Also: “recognising friends is god”. The immanence of the gods.
The gods, like Dionysus, suddenly arrive. Dionysus the mad god, the suffering god; all of life is worshipped as divine by the ancients. Says Walter Otto: “The fullness of life and the violence of death are equally terrible in Dionysus. The Greek endured this reality in its total dimensions and worshipped it as divine”.
The apparition of the gods the source of human art, language, culture; splendour. See Otto: “there is nothing in the world which has shown such productivity as the image of diety”. See also Nietzsche: “What does our great historical hunger signify, our clutching about us countless cultures, our consuming desire for knowledge, if not the loss of myth, of a mythic home, the mythic womb?”.
There is no tragedy, as such, without the gods.
The artistic spirit of the ancients. The Greeks played at life as though it were a game. (“man is a plaything of the gods” says Plato). Dictum of Heraclitus: “Eternity is like a child playing at draughts; the kingdom belongs to a child”. The whole world, for the ancients, was like a theatre or, as Nietzsche writes, a dream.
“The waking life of a mythically inspired people–the ancient Greeks, for instance–more closely resembles a dream than it does the waking world of a scientifically disenchanted thinker. When every tree can suddenly speak as a nymph, when a god in the shape of a bull can drag away maidens, when even the goddess Athena herself is suddenly seen in the company of Peisastratus driving through the market place of Athens with a beautiful team of horses–and this is what the honest Athenian believed–then, as in a dream, anything is possible at each moment, and all of nature swarms around man as if it were nothing but a masquerade of the gods, who were merely amusing themselves by deceiving men in all these shapes” – Nietzsche, On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense.
The ancients, artistic in spirit, because self-consciousness was weak. See Jaynes, Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. “No one is moral among the god-controlled puppets of the Iliad. Good and evil do not exist”. For Jaynes, “the gods are what we now call hallucinations”. Consciousness, for the ancients, says Jaynes, did not exist; rather, one’s inner monologue was interpreted as the voice of the god or gods. As the bicameral mind broke down, the voices of the gods were no longer heard, except by prophets, oracles and seers.
Immanence of Yahweh in pre-Temple Judaism. Oscar Goldberg [sic] argues Yahweh was an ever-present reality to Hebrews before Solomon’s construction of the Temple (Genesis 3:8, Genesis 18:2). Abstract monotheism then replaced acted-out rituals. The immanent Yahweh replaced by the transcendent, invisible God. This is the anguish of the psalmists. “How long, O Lord, will You ignore me forever? How long will You hide your face from me?” (Psalm 13:2). Prophetic idea of Messiah is a longing for return of the ever-present or immanent Yahweh.
Christ as Judaism’s return – Christ’s first words in the synoptics being “repent”, which, in its original sense, means return – to ever-present Yahweh; God once again walked with his people; he ate and drank with his people; he showed his face to his people, just as he did in the days of Abraham. “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up” (John 2:19). Christ abolishes the temple and makes himself a living temple; a wanderer, just as Yahweh once wandered among men.
The telos of philosophy is the transformation of God or gods – the source of all of human culture – into an idea or a problem to be solved. In the figure of philosopher Maimonides God becoming less the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, more the god of the philosophers. In other words, an abstraction. The apparitions of God in the Bible become allegories, fables, metaphors.
The God of Spinoza, says Martin Buber, was “the greatest anti-anthropomorphic effort ever essayed by the human spirit”. The attributes given to the divine by Spinoza are infinite. Yet the God of Spinoza nevertheless remains a living God; not yet the perfectly abstract God of the philosophers. The love of God is manifest in our love for Him. Therefore, the divine love is the same as human love.
The living God, however, becomes the God of reason, of morality, of philosophy in Kant: “The starry heaven above me and the moral law within”. Also: “God is not an external substance, merely a moral relation within me”. Kant’s faith is a rational faith; the religion of Hegel is, likewise, a religion of rationality.
Hegel’s system which leaves man and his relationship to divinity out the picture and, in doing so, kills the living God. See Hegel: “The pure concept, however, or infinity, as the abyss of nothingness in which all being sinks, must characterise the infinite pain, which previously was only in culture historically and as the feeling on which rests modern religion, the feeling that God Himself is dead”.
See Nietzsche. “What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us”.
Nietzsche’s critique of philosophy: “Where the tree of knowledge stands is always paradise: that's what the oldest and the most recent serpents declare”.
The existentialists’ critique of Hegel’s system, which leaves humanity out of the picture. See Rosenzweig’s Star of Redemption: “Philosophy takes it upon itself to throw off the fear of things earthly, to rob death of its poisonous sting”. Existentialism – the relation of the I to God – a way of return to God. See Kierkegaard: “To have faith is precisely to lose one’s mind so as to win God”.
The gods kept alive in the spirit of art. See Rilke: “There the tree rises. Oh pure surpassing!/ Oh Orpheus sings! Oh great tree of sound!/ And all is silent, And from this silence arise/ New beginnings, intimations, changings”. See Hölderlin: “In years to come, when Spirit again prevails/ They'd say that these lonely ones lovingly/ Created a secret world, known to the gods alone/ The earth will take back those concerned/ With impermanent things: others climb higher/ To ethereal Light who've been faithful/ To the love inside themselves, and to the spirit/ Of the gods. Thus they master Fate/ In patience, hope and quietness”.
“Nature’s gleaming is higher revealing” – Hölderlin.
Return of the gods to the history of thought in later Heidegger. “What does Hölderlin’s poetry say? Its word is: the holy. This word speaks of the flight of the gods. It says that the gods who have fled protect us, until we are inclined and able to dwell in their nearness. To be a place of nearness characterises the homeland. And so it remains necessary to prepare a sojourn in this nearness. Thus we accomplish the first step on a path which leads us to where we may correspond appropriately to the destiny which is Hölderlin’s poetry. Only thereby might we attain to the outer border of the place where "the God of gods" appears”.
According to one Jewish legend, when, after their expulsion, Adam and Eve first witnessed the sinking sun, they were terrified because they believed the world was returning to its primordial chaos because of their guilt. All night they wept together in darkness. Then, to their amazement, the new dawn broke, shimmering and lovely.
“Beauty will save the world” – Dostoyevsky.
The present age – this age of catastrophe and shadowy ruins – awaits the return of the exiled gods. Says Ernst Bloch: “We are still living in prehistory, and all things are still in the stage prior to the just and true creation of the world. The true genesis is not at the beginning, but at the end”. 1
The final note in the text