tunesmyth

I've been studying the Egyptian mysteries of Isis, Osiris, and Horos; I have no idea where they came from, though it seems noteworthy that they are illustrated in the stars, focusing on the heliacal rising and setting of various constellations along the galactic plane. Many of the other mysteries we know about—Innana/Ishtar and Dumuzid, Astarte and Baal, Aphrodite and Adonis, the Eleusinian mysteries, the Dionusian mysteries, the Apolline mysteries, the house of Oikles and some other parts of the Thebaian myth (like Oidipous), the house of Tantalos, the house of Danaus, Atalante, and (I think, though I have not studied it carefully yet) the Argonautica—all seem to derive from these Egyptian mysteries, as they share the same structure and tell the same story.

While I haven't dug very deeply into them, there seem to also have been the Mesopotamian mysteries of Gilgamesh and Enkidu; I also have no idea where they came from, though it seems noteworthy that they are also illustrated in the stars, focusing (as far as I can tell) on the movement of the planets along the constellations of the ecliptic plane. Some others of the mysteries, most notably Herakles, seem to derive from these Mesopotamian mysteries, as they share the same structure and tell the same story.

It's interesting to me that we see a lot of crossover and interaction between these two mysteries: for example, Gilgamesh spurning Ishtar (noting that Taurus, the Bull of Heaven, marks the intersection of the ecliptic and galactic planes just as it marks the intersection of the two myths), Herakles besieging Thebai, Jason taking Herakles on his voyage, etc. I have no idea if these indicate two parts of one greater story, or if they indicate the priority of one set of mysteries over the other, or if they simply show conflict between the different mystery schools.

I suppose that the mysteries are simply a mystery.

Occasionally, at long intervals, we see that an individual takes up the mysteries and sets out to retell them in their own way. "Homer" gave us perhaps the classic version of them in the Odyssey. Virgil retold an explicitly civic Roman version of them in the Aeneid. Apuleius retold an explicitly Platonist version of them in Cupid and Psyche. I haven't yet read it myself, but I'm told that Dante has retold a Christian-Neoplatonist version of them in the Divine Comedy. Within their various contexts, these are praiseworthy works, worthy of respect and ripe for contemplation.

My daughter and I recently finished reading Michael Ende's The Neverending Story, which follows in the same tradition, telling an explicitly Western-occult-revival version of the mysteries. I don't know who Ende studied under, but he certainly mastered at least the Lesser Mysteries, as he has missed nothing and provides worthy commentary and color on each point. One could do far worse than spending a year meditating one's way through it.

It's also, of course, an engaging narrative: my daughter—who, of course, has not studied the mysteries at all—loved it. If you haven't read it (and especially if you've seen the film, which is to the book as lead is to gold), I highly recommend it. It's worthy of your time.

Hmm. Herodotos says (Histories I §131) of the Persians,

They call the whole circle of heaven Zeus [e.g. Ahura-Mazda], and to him they offer sacrifice on the highest peaks of the mountains; they sacrifice also to the sun and moon and earth and fire and water and winds.⁠ These are the only gods to whom they have ever sacrificed from the beginning.

Of course we see Empedokles's four roots there. There's just one problem: Empeokles was contemporaneous with Herodotos, writing about the same time as him. (They both lived in what is now Italy, but in different regions: Empedokles in Sicily, and Herodotos in what is now Calabria.)

So here we have another source referencing the same doctrine at the same time as Empedokles. This is another argument in favor of my hypothesis that the four roots did not originate with him, but that he learned them from the Pythagoreans, who learned them from Pythagoras. Where did Pythagoras get them? I had made the case that he got them from the Egyptian mysteries on the basis of deific and symbolic associations, and that's plausible, but then—assuming Herodotos isn't misleading us—it suggests that the Egyptians similarly influenced the Zoroastrians.

On the other hand, Pythagoras is said to have studied with just about everyone (including the Persian magi, though how he had time for it after spending 20 years in Egypt is anyone's guess), and so it's possible that the Greek doctrine of the roots came from the Persians. But then it's a remarkable coincidence that these line up so nicely with the Egyptian teachings which apparently predate Zoroastrianism (or even Mazdaism) by at least a millennium.

Alternatively, it could be that the four roots were generally current in the spiritual milieu of the time, and Empedokles was simply the first to write it down. (This wouldn't be too surprising, since Empedokles was expelled from the Pythagoreans for doing so, meaning that it was a secret teaching.)

Whichever of the cases is true, I think we can be reasonably confident that the teaching didn't originate with Empedokles.

Digging through my folder of random pictures, I stumbled across this silly nonsense I made for my daughter a while back:

Saint George, his noble steed, and that dragon are all made out of the exact same origami model as that mob of birds I posted several years ago. In light of my recent studies, I award no points for guessing where our plucky hero seems to have originated...