Let us travel again into the wonderful world of myths. This is a poem (translated from Greek into English) that will transport you to another time. However, to understand it, I must point out that, according to many scholars as we see above, the Trojan War, apart from the fact that it took place in real time in ancient times, is also a raging philosophical lesson for our souls. The battle for Helen, who is the beauty of our sensory world, the world we live in, and according to Euripides[1] our world is a copy of another Helen, who is a copy of another World, the Perceived one. Similar to the myths many researchers believe that significant mythological episodes take place in our own souls…
The beginning of the world, if ever there was a beginning[2],
Two huge snakes seem to have coiled together.
Snakes in their tails. They took on a human form.
They were eternal Time and Ananke, who rules everything.
Chaos, Night, and Ether[3] were born from their coitus.
Then, the thick light-coloured scales took on an oval shape.
The egg breaks and lo and behold! The primitive Phanes[4] is already born.
The heads of a ram, a bull, a lion, and a snake together
Scattered in a young androgynous body,
They mate with Night, and beget Uranus and the Earth,
by whom, Cronus and other children are born,
And a new cycle of life has been realized[5].
Zeus comes to life, born by Cronus and Rea,
Growing up in a cave, with Curetes[6] to keep him company.
Hanted by his father Cronus
Since only one of them must win.
They made Cronus drunk, on Nyx’s advice.
Then, Zeus devoured everything that had been born at that time.
Trees, rivers, stars - they all ended up in his stomach.
They returned to the light, but now in a different way.
A golden chain connects them all and every form[7].
Zeus is now the first creator,
He rules over the whole universe, the most powerful of all.
Once, in a battle with the Titans, as a mighty force,
He hurled them into the underworld, away from the light of the sun.
Like the Silver Tribe[8] they wait chained
For the end of Zeus’ kingdom, so that they can come to the surface.
Even the darkness in our soul
will not die. It only waits and comes up with ease
if Zeus’ justice is not powerful,
and the logical part[9] of our soul cannot gain the upper hand.
In order for there to be balance in the soul and matter,
Harmony[10]should prevail between the pairs of gods,
Venus and Mars’ fated daughter
Because all important things arise from opposites.
Zeus without Hera cannot create
for she is the mediator so that he can move towards the Golden Ratio.
Hestia without Hermes cannot function
because a womb without a seed cannot bring life.
Demetra and Poseidon complement each other,
like the elements that constantly separate and unite.
But Demetra also mates with Zeus,
And gives birth to her daughter Persephone.
Pluto envies her and snatches her away to Hades,
And she undergoes the torments of the flesh in darkness.
He deceives her with a pomegranate as she goes up to her mother,
And she is forced to walk up and down forever.
Zeus splits and mates,
divides and unites.
He has no end, no middle, amd no beginning.
He always hide himself in all forms.
Like the Unit that manifests itself as the Golden ratio in Creation,
Like Thetis, who leaves her mark on history, together with Porus and Tekmor[11].
With the help of Metis, whom he had swallowed,
He transformed himself into a bull to mate with Europa.
And into a hunted swan to hide in the embrace of Nemesis[12].
From their union emerged Helen,
the most beautiful daughter of God, famous throughout the world.
She was abducted by Paris and found she herself in Troy,
But she went to Egypt, and there her image was sent.
The Achaeans set out to conquer Troy,
They did not know that it was only an idol that they wanted to conquer.
Together with the Trojans, they were deluding themselves,
Because real Helen[13] was not in Troy.
Like the bright beauty of Truth
It does not dwell in the tangible phenomena of the night.
It has its realm in the spiritual world
And, if you lead a wise life, the light will shine before you.
The goal of every soul may be
to seek the light, once it has entered the darkness.
Like Jason and the other Argonauts,
Who set out for Colchis.
On their way they ran into traps
But when they met Circe, she was like a shining Sun[14].
And Odysseus to get to Ithaca,
to meet his own truth,
went through trials, deceived himself,
until he found the way to his salvation.
In the Golden Race, may we all go,
the hardships of the body, so that we may leave them forever.
Areti Georgakopoulou
[1] Euripides, Helen 31-46
[2] Check at the chapter with the egg and Empedocles. They say that it all started with an explosion, the Big Bang. As if energy was condensed and suddenly got spread around in an endless void and filled it. But, before that, what was there? Was there no universe? The philosopher Empedocles tells us that there is Traction (union and attraction) and Repulsion (conflict and disruption), two forces that eternally rule the World. They are like inhaling and exhaling; it all contracts and expands and that’s a constant. So, is there an End and a Beginning or is it all a constant?
[3] Check the chapter of the birth of Venus.
[4] Check the hymn to the Protogone.
[5] Orphic excerpts, 82, Kern
[6] Curetes or Korybantes made noise with their armors so Saturn could not hear the cry of Zeus.
[7] Roberto Calasso: The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony, p. 228
[8] About Hesiod, Golden and Silver Ages
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Works_and_Days
Plato mentions in “Republic 469 a” that Hesiod’s Golden Race are the Guardians (Angels) who protect us. But the Silver one, fell into Tartarus.
[9] Check above about Logistikon on Plato, the three parts of the soul.
[10] Check at the chapter about the Golden Ratio 1,618
[11] About Alcman, Poros and Tekmor check the chapter on Thetis.
When the Achaeans gathered in Aulis to set off to Troy, the winds had let up, they were not propitious and ships couldn’t move. According to a Calchas’ prophecy, they had to sacrifice Agamemnon’s daughter, Iphigenia. Artemis took her and left a deer in her place. In the end, Agamemnon sacrificed a lamb… And the winds had now become propitious. There had to be a sacrifice for the Soul to find a Pore (passage) to pass from the Spiritual World to the Material World. The Pore is the passage and Tekmor is the point, the Pythagorean Unit. Through those, Chaos develops three dimensions and becomes our world, what we perceive with our senses. The Tekmor – point – unit becomes a line, the line becomes a rectangle and the rectangle becomes a cube (Plato Republic 546). Our world is a cube.
[12] Cypriot epics, extracts 3, 5, 6, 10
[13] Euripides, “Helen,” verses 31-46, 570-588, 702-708.
According to Euripides’ tragedy “Helen,” Beautiful Helen never got to Troy, she went to Egypt… Homer’s Helen symbolizes the Beauty of the World. Since everything around us is but an idol, it wasn’t Helen herself that went to Troy (the world of the Perceptible), but her idol. The real beauty is hidden behind idols in the Conceivable world… This is where Proclus’ Commentary on Plato’s Republic (1,175) comes in: “The myths want to indicate, I believe, through Helen, the whole of that beauty that has to do with the sphere in which things come to be and pass away and that is the product of the demiurge. It is over this beauty that eternal war rages among souls, until the more intellectual [the Greeks] are victorious over the less rational forms of life [the Trojans] and return hence to the [Conceivable] place from which they came.”
[14] Orphic Argonautica, verses 1218 – 1246.
The ship Argo embarks on her journey as a Vehicle of the Soul. She is pushed off the land by fifty Argonauts, who constitute the necessary elements for the commencement of her existence. Step by step, she puts on her bodies and her chitons, until she gets to the material body, that is the beginning of Life, in Colchis, in the sacred grove of the war god Ares. Once Jason has taken hold of the Golden Fleece, he begins along with Medea the journey back home, back to the Creator. The ordeals they go through are our lives in this World until we come to full Circle.
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