On this December 27th – which is the Third Day of Christmas here where I am – when the Incarnation of the Sun in Time (i.e. of the Great Luminary of the Spiritual Realm, Plato’s Only-Begotten «Child» of the Father, who never began to be, but simply is) still appears to be struggling against the seemingly overwhelming forces of Darkness and of Death, at least in such northern parts of the northern hemisphere as where Scandinavia is located, the following reflections composed by Plutarch, Priest of the Sun at Delphi, on the Nature of the Cosmos, and its ongoing generation by way of opposites, the possible origins of Good and Evil, the struggle between these two, and certain mediators between them, the predicted end of the world, and Pythagoras’ and Plato’s inspired views on these matters, seem quite appropriate.

I should perhaps point out that I am not necessarily endorsing everything the Priest of Apollo says, I am simply publishing his words, composed some two thousand years ago, because I find them to be interesting, and a useful contribution to the never-ending controversies over what Plato actually taught. As for myself, I have tended to favor the Privatio Boni view on the origin of Evil, and I think Plato could be interpreted as supporting that, but I willingly admit that a careful study of the World, carried out with an open mind, and with courage, and not while wearing rose-tinted glasses, and while looking for confirmations of one’s presuppositions, does seem to reveal the presence of a Dark Power or Influence with roots in something more and worse than mere Ignorance or Absence of Good.

This, the somewhat insufficient explanation for the Will to Evil, as it were, and for the deliberate Wallowing in Darkness, and for the Cult of Ugliness, noted by Sir Roger Scruton, is one of the weaker points of Platonic Theology, as traditionally conceived of by most later interpreters. Proclus, the author of the great work on the theology of Plato, tried to come up with a response.

But enough of that for now; let us hear what the Reverend Plutarch has to say:

The fact is that it is impossible for anything bad whatsoever to be engendered where God is the Author of all, or anything good where God is the Author of nothing; for the concord of the universe, like that of a lyre or bow, according to Heracleitus, is resilient if disturbed; and according to Euripides,

“The good and bad cannot be kept apart,

But there is some commingling, which is well.”

Wherefore this very ancient opinion comes down from writers on religion and from lawgivers to poets and philosophers; it can be traced to no source, but it carried a strong and almost indelible conviction, and is in circulation in many places among barbarians and Greeks alike, not only in story and tradition but also in rites and sacrifices, to the effect that the Universe is not of itself suspended aloft without sense or reason or guidance, nor is there one Reason which rules and guides it by rudders, as it were, or by controlling reins, but, inasmuch as Nature brings, in this life of ours, many experiences in which both evil and good are commingled, or better, to put it very simply, Nature brings nothing which is not combined with something else, we may assert that it is not one keeper of two great vases who, after the manner of a barmaid, deals out to us our failures and successes in mixture, but it has come about, as the result of two opposed principles and two antagonistic forces, one of which guides us along a straight course to the right, while the other turns us aside and backward, that our life is complex, and so also is the universe;

and if this is not true of the whole of it, yet it is true that this terrestrial universe, including its moon as well, is irregular and variable and subject to all manner of changes.

For if it is the law of nature that nothing comes into being without a cause, and if the good cannot provide a cause for evil, then it follows that Nature must have in herself the source and origin of evil, just as she contains the source and origin of good.

46 The great majority and the wisest of men hold this opinion: they believe that there are two gods, rivals as it were, the one the Artificer of good and the other of evil. There are also those who call the better one a god and the other a daemon, as, for example, Zoroaster the sage, who, they record, lived five thousand years before the time of the Trojan War.

He called the one Oromazes and the other Areimanius; and he further declared that among all the things perceptible to the senses, Oromazes may best be compared to light, and Areimanius, conversely, to darkness and ignorance, and midway between the two is Mithras: for this reason the Persians give to Mithras the name of “Mediator.”

Zoroaster has also taught that men should make votive offerings and thank-offerings to Oromazes, and averting and mourning offerings to Areimanius.

They pound up in a mortar a certain plant called omomi at the same time invoking Hades and Darkness; then they mix it with the blood of a wolf that has been sacrificed, and carry it out and cast it into a place where the sun never shines.

In fact, they believe that some of the plants belong to the good god and others to the evil daemon; so also of the animals they think that dogs, fowls, and hedgehogs, for example, belong to the good god, but that water-rats belong to the evil one; therefore the man who has killed the most of these they hold to be fortunate.

47 However, they also tell many fabulous stories about their gods, such, for example, as the following: Oromazes, born from the purest light, and Areimanius, born from the darkness, are constantly at war with each other; and Oromazes created six gods, the first of Good Thought, the second of Truth, the third of Order, and, of the rest, one of Wisdom, one of Wealth, and one the Artificer of Pleasure in what is Honourable.

But Areimanius created rivals, as it were, equal to these in number.

Then Oromazes enlarged himself to thrice his former size, and removed himself as far distant from the Sun as the Sun is distant from the Earth, and adorned the heavens with stars.

One star he set there before all others as a guardian and watchman, the Dog-star.

Twenty-four other gods he created and placed in an egg. But those created by Areimanius, who were equal in number to the others, pierced through the egg and made their way inside; hence evils are now combined with good.

But a destined time shall come when it is decreed that Areimanius, engaged in bringing on pestilence and famine, shall by these be utterly annihilated and shall disappear; and then shall the earth become a level plain, and there shall be one manner of life and one form of government for a blessed people who shall all speak one tongue.

Theopompus says that, according to the sages, one god is to overpower, and the other to be over¬powered, each in turn for the space of three thousand years, and afterward for another three thousand years they shall fight and war, and the one shall undo the works of the other, and finally Hades shall pass away; then shall the people be happy, and neither shall they need to have food nor shall they cast any shadow.

And the god, who has contrived to bring about all these things, shall then have quiet and shall repose for a time, no long time indeed, but for the god as much as would be a moderate time for a man to sleep.

Such, then, is the character of the mythology of the sages.

48 The Chaldeans declare that of the planets, which they call tutelary gods, two are beneficent, two maleficent, and the other three are median and partake of both qualities.

The beliefs of the Greeks are well known to all; they make the good part to belong the Olympian Zeus and the abominated part to Hades, and they rehearse a legend that Concord is sprung from Aphroditê and Ares, the one of whom is harsh and contentious, and the other mild and tutelary.

Observe also that the philosophers are in agreement with these; for Heracleitus without reservation styles War “the Father and King and Lord of all,” and he says that when Homer prays that

“Strife may vanish from the ranks of the gods and of mortals”

he fails to note that he is invoking a curse on the origin of all things, since all things originate from strife and antagonism; also Heracleitus says that the Sun will not transgress his appropriate bounds, otherwise the stern-eyed maidens, ministers of Justice, will find him out.

Empedocles calls the beneficent principle “friendship” or “friendliness,” and oftentimes he calls Concord “sedate of countenance”; the worse principle he calls “accursed quarrelling” and “blood-stained strife.”

The adherents of Pythagoras include a variety of terms under these categories: under the good they set Unity, the Determinate, the Permanent, the Straight, the Odd, the Square, the Equal, the Right-handed, the Bright; under the bad they set Duality, the Indeterminate, the Moving, the Curved, the Even, the Oblong, the Unequal, the Left-handed, the Dark, on the supposition that these are the underlying principles of creation.

For these, however, Anaxagoras postulates Mind and Infinitude, Aristotle Form and Privation, and Plato, in many passages, as though obscuring and veiling his opinion, names the one of the opposite principles “Identity” and the other “Difference”; but in his Laws, when he had grown considerably older, he asserts, not in circumlocution or symbolically, but in specific words, that the movement of the Universe is actuated not by one soul, but perhaps by several, and certainly by not less than two, and of these the one is beneficent, and the other is opposed to it and the artificer of things opposed.

Between these he leaves a certain third nature, not inanimate nor irrational nor without the power to move of itself, as some think, but with dependence on both those others, and desiring the better always and yearning after it and pursuing it, as the succeeding portion of the treatise will make clear, in the endeavour to reconcile the religious beliefs of the Egyptians with this philosophy.

49 The fact is that the creation and constitution of this world is complex, resulting, as it does, from opposing influences, which, however, are not of equal strength, but the predominance rests with the better.

Quotes from Plutarch’s Isis and Osiris treatise, which may be read here: https://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Plutarch/Moralia/Isis_and_Osiris*/C.html

Photo: Edmund Schilvold (Jeloy, Norway, 2007)

This post was originally published on my profile at Academia.edu on December 27, 2024. It received 234 views and ten likes, and eight comments were made on it. One of the profiles and people who contributed valuable reflections was Rajan B. Menon Menon. He presents himself in the following way:

Retired Engineer, Yogi, proficient in Sanskrit, English, Spanish and various Indian languages. Auto-didactic Sadhana in the Bhagavad Gita oral tradition of Dr. Padma Kumar, Mata Amrita Anandamayi’s teachings and Yoga texts, Rig Vedic texts, Sun worship, Upanishads.

https://vid.academia.edu/EdmundSchilvold

https://www.academia.edu/community/5Rzggn