Pagan Suffering Servants in Schelling’s
Philosophy of Mythology
Edward Booth O.P.
To read a philosophical treatment, which seeks out the productive powers from which mythologies arise in the human intellect, and in a general setting which matches cosmology and a consequent philosophy of nature with theogony and continues that into the Christian revelation, as at “the fullness of time”, is an exercise which an English readership desperately needs. In such a setting the exploration of subjectivity cannot avoid enmeshing itself with objectivity. Sir James Frazer’s The Golden Bough has the defect of relating an overwhelming mass of objective information to an unanalysed subjectivity. What is extracted from an interpretation of the priest at Nemi, and continuing through assertions of sympathetic magic, and starting from tree-worship, is held together not by any perceptions on the functioning of subjectivity, but the overall presumption of progressive enlightenment: presumed more in himself and his readers than in his subjects. It would be expecting too much of them critically to examine their own subjectivities. For them they count it fortunate that they belong to an emerged elite which can stand in judgement on the past – which passes before them like paintings on the Royal Academy submission day. Enlightenment! But even Kant considered enlightenment as a phase which had passed, and Schelling spoke with mockery of “Aufklärerei”: “Enlightenmentism”.
Our concern is with Greek mythology, and here we acknowledge the widely read book of W.K.C. Guthrie, The Greeks and their Gods (London 19501, rev.1954): “an investigation into Greek views of the relations between man and God”. Academic and didactic, it reviews the materials: more texts and commentary, and fewer anecdotes, it sees German classicism from the standpoint of Herder (aesthetic more than philosophical), yet has the courage to quote the untypical Wilamowitz: to understand the belief and worship of the Greeks, we must like the Greeks accept that “The Gods are present”.[1] He was very conscious that the subjectivity of the researcher dominated such studies, and that it was impossible to throw off the tradition of scholarship. The complete passage from the didactic to the experiential of the mythological reality is impossible, though it is desirable to estimate the distance. But a philosophy of mythology such as Schelling’s enters into that experience as if it were living, and suggests, more than "Christian evidences", how there would have been a living continuity between it and Christianity. Schelling was also didactic, but as a philosopher who had researched all the materials, and expressed it in relationship to his discernment of an absolute process of universal potencies, here within the human consciousness, finding a point of harmony (±A) between potentialized being (=made potential: Seyende, seynkönnende: -A) to actualized being (Sein: +A): in algebraic shorthand: -A+A±A.
In the course of these lectures, he has two expressions of satisfaction with his methodology which are noteworthy. The first is at the beginning of lecture 26 and concerns Greek mythology: “it expresses the moment in which the consciousness has already achieved a completely free relationship to what it attained in the end of its process, and not like the Indian which sought freedom from a painful travail and a seemingly endless struggle. Furthermore, Greek mythology gained am advantage from this free relationship which brought together, from beginning to end, a progressive and consistent system of [its] gods. Thereby it rose above the individuality of being one [of its] moments to become universal mythology, which no previous one had reached. So it became the mythology which was totally different from all others, containing the explanation of them all”.[2]
The second passage is among the remarks which Schelling makes not far from the end of lecture 29, which is the last one reported. He claims that he has given, through the development of the cosmic potencies evident in the mythological process, “an example of the power of [his] scientific method”, with “thoughts developing organically from a first seed”, which is “of universal significance”; and which must always draw on “the richest knowledge of individual things”.[3]
It is most important that this is not interpreted as a claim which regards the whole content of the lectures as they are published here. These passages occur at the beginning and the end of what is the third of three accounts of Greek mythology within the printed text.
The figure is interesting in itself, even elegant. It begins from the passage in Hesiod’s Theogony, with “Chaos” identified with the Roman Janus (following Ovid) as “the god”, who at the end of the process will be identified with Dionysos, being brought to birth by Zeus from Demeter, in separation from the Olympian gods from Zeus downwards: they have found liberation, having contributed to the third birth of “the god”, not identical with Christ but the final and highest product of polytheism to anticipate His birth and revelation.
But the figure is quite different from the first figure which begins in lecture 8, which is more careful to propose a unified vision of mythology and the whole tradition of Judeo-Christian revelation: "all mythological conceptions are only displacements [Entstellungen] of biblical, revealed truths. … the nature of these conceptions itself has shown, that they have come to birth under a necessity, out of the deepest, most inner nature of the consciousness. They are created from the identical source from which revelation is created, that is from the source of the reality itself [Quelle der Sache selbst]".[4] Schelling postulated a bisexuality in the first principle of all Daseyn. Here he turns from the Seyende potencies, -A+A±A, to those potencies as transformed into Seynkönnende potencies, where a deviant realization of a first (A1), describable as “B”, would lead to its suppression in conflict by a second (A²), with their final harmonization by a third (A3).
So there was a will, simple and direct: identifiable as A, a "quiet [ruhende] will",[5] which Schelling identified with manliness[6]. With both existing in each other, B was posited with the possibility of being other, and identified as the womanly principle. They made up an androgenous nature in the original consciousness, as the principle of all Dasein.[7] With Eve overlooked, Persephone as the womanly principle consents to be another by accepting the pomegranate of Hades, whilst Adam behaves in a womanly fashion by wanting to take the place of God: by activating the world potencies. They did so because they were together: the joint source of mythology and of the Christian-Jewish religion. That gives a priority to Persephone: the fall cannot be the cause of polytheism in this figure, because she is “the original consciousness” [Urbewußtsein].[8] Schelling gives her a pre-theogonic status by applying to her the tradition of being Kore, the ancient corn-goddess. After describing her as the universal “fortuna adversa”, the “original accident [Ur-Unfall]”, he calls her “the key to all mythology”, a presence in the human consciousness going back to the beginning of mythology, linking men to this original consciousness.[9] Here Schelling paints the picture objectively where we might have expected it subjectively. Zeus he says was the end of all the previous gods, they were only Zeus; he is the final cause of the whole mythological movement. Before the seizure of Persephone by Hades, her loss of virginity through Zeus in the form of a snake was more significant: it took her from her security and submerged her in the process of decline: as the “one that should not be”, (that is, the B in the pre-theogonic epoch). So the joint-consciousness with Adam is not permanent– he must have been infected in passing.
It is of the nature of the mystery cults to bring to light the oldest levels of consciousness. Hades’ seizure of her according to Hesiod was not the beginning, but she is present from the beginning of mythology. She underlies the whole process, because it expressed her own evolution as its principle: that she was the original principle of consciousness that deliberately chose to be something else from what she was.
The presentation is incomplete in details, as if hastily composed. It is evidently not identical with the third presentation, because that has the ultimate triumph of Dionysos; this has the establishment and confirmation of Zeus.
The reasons for the difference lie in two factors which work together. There is the artistry of Schelling who always tended to construct his philosophical figures differently, so they do not cohere together, powerful though they may be individually. And there is the fact that his editor-son selected the material from a number of courses to try and represent his father at his most speculative.
For bringing Persephone so much forward to the very beginning, another reason may well be his noting among the fragments of Mnasea (active around 200 BC) that she was by some identified as among the Kabiri, the most ancient of gods.[10] That entails that this figure, extending from the Kabiri to the triumph of emerging Zeus, trailing disaster by his rape of Persephone, so allusive and so elusive for a just summary, must be early, dating from before his expanded speculations on Dionysos.
But we are presenting the second figure of Greek mythology. It is characterized by its historical quality, without very much of the philosophy of potencies which surround the others. Earlier still or independent? The location of the mysteries in the earliest age is so different from their confident placing in the continuum between Dionysius being brought to birth by Demeter and the coming of Christ. It is found in lectures 14 and 15, from which we must pass to the appearance of Kybele in lecture 16, going over the division of material which follows at its beginning (their relative placement makes one uneasy). It has this particular historical character and above all, alluding to the potencies, and by its identification of the Phoenician Melkarth, the equivalent of the Greek Hercules, and Dionysos, as the Suffering Servants of gods and men, inviting their comparison with the Messiah as Suffering Servant in the prophesy of Isaiah: “identical” because each proceeds from the same potencies.
As a wise priest of a now past generation[11] observed: “If only the enemy had not discovered the science of comparative religion first!”
Lecture 14:
From parallelisms to Abraham’s suspended sacrifice of Isaac, and the sacrifice of Christ Himself in which ‘the Father did not spare His own Son’, Schelling passes from a sacrifice of Kronos of his son, Melkarth, to Ouranos, to a comparison between the Messiah of Judeo-Christian tradition and him as pagan Suffering Servant, with Hercules and Dionysos. The people feared that this separation of Kronos from his identity with Ouranos might end, and with it the liberty that came from their duality, with a return into the horrors of unity; hence they continued to sacrifice their own sons. Here are the beginnings of the triumph of the geistig[12] over the real principle. Exceptionally, mythology takes account here of cult, and moves into history.
The separate philosophical figure in lectures 14-16 does not help to provide a fuller philosophical interpretation of the theogony of the later, third figure for what lies between the beginnings of Greek mythology in Janus-Chaos and the birth of the god Dionysos from Demeter. This figure presents no anticipation (the first figure even less) of the launching of an exoteric mythology from a beginning only esoterically graspable, for Dionysos cannot be confined to being born from the exoteric begetting from Zeus and the child-bearing of Demeter: she was daughter of Kronos, brought to understand that her longing for the return of her daughter Persephone was a misplaced yearning for “the god”, the geistig god to be identified with Dionysos, as a presence which the apprehensive “real” god, Kronos, had sought to suppress as a rival, even though his unified reality, extending through his children, had been the stable presence which had given her security. Nor is this interlude assimilable to the Zeus- and Persephone-centred figure which precedes it.
If then we are presented with three large fragments, with only an impressionistic unity, their proper unlinked themes indicate a separate origin and a different intention. Its positioning of the mystery cults at the earliest period of the mythology and not at the ultimate stage, so strongly insisted on in the later figure, is a distraction from what ought then to be a filling out of a Titan- and Olympian-thematic in which the Janus-Chaos origination is fulfilled in the third birth of the same god, from all of which the Zeus pantheon has become detached, finding, in contrast to the necessary process which sustains the emergence of Dionysos now evidently greater than Zeus, an ultimate liberation in the completeness of which Hesiod’s only finally easeful Theogonia is the expression.
It is in fact an historical compilation, whose form is very different from the two others. That is immediately evident from the few references to the potencies which are Schelling’s normal source for the ordering of materials; they are referred to in passing and in isolation. (e.g. pp.325, 352, 367). This discrepancy is so considerable that one must look elsewhere for an explanation, which may well lie in its selection by Schelling’s editor-son as a later history for Kronos and even Ouranos, faut de mieux: a passage taken from a different place, probably a lecture series earlier than the other two. But it is of great interest in itself, with a seed-idea which could re-establish what are called “Christian evidences” in a setting which ought to have been explored, and has never been so explained. From parallelisms to the great events of Abraham’s suspended sacrifice of Isaac, and the sacrifice of Christ himself in which ‘the Father did not spare His own Son’, Schelling passes from a sacrifice by Kronos of his son to Ouranos (reported by the Church Father Eusebius from the Phoenician tradition) to a speculative comparison between the Messiah of Judeo-Christian tradition, according to the prophesy of Isaiah foreseen as a “suffering servant”, and Hercules (as he appeared to the Greeks, but with reference to his earlier appearance among the Egyptians), with the Phoenician Melkarth (son of the Phoenician equivalent to Kronos), and especially with Dionysos, whose burden and whose importance was greater, and who had been a god until deprived of his divinity by Kronos. Here the potency theory does emerge briefly, as Schelling speculatively asserts that, because all of these religions were “real”, it was “the same forces and potencies” which lay behind the Messiah and his pagan counterparts. And this leads to his assertion that, whilst Judaism was “an incomplete Christianity”, paganism was “a self-constructed Christianity”, with continuities stronger than those of the Jews who had rejected Christ.
Schelling does not pursue the absolute identity of these three pagan servants of the gods and men, as he might have done in a different context. He accepts that Dionysos could have been born of Ourania according to an Arabian tradition, but he asserts that Ourania was Ouranos become a woman god – as equivalent to his emasculation by Kronos (p.305). Yet he is content that Ourania should become a man again to pursue his conflict with the threatening geistig Dionysos (p.307). Accepting that Melkarth was the son of the Phoenician Kronos, he repeats a Greek tradition (through two Church Fathers) that Kronos had offered him in sacrifice to Ouranos (p.313). Thus he places it in the context of Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice Isaac – who was held back by an Angel of Yahweh, “therefore not of Elohim” (p.304). Kronos’s son was not one of his children in the tradition of Hesiod; there, Kronos had swallowed all of them except Zeus, who had escaped by a trick played by his mother. Here he alludes to a tradition that Kronos had also become a woman god (and elsewhere that he had been emasculated like Ouranos, which Schelling considers to be equivalent), and had returned. Become again a male god, he took the place of leadership (so it must be!) from Ourania. This, in turn, affected that “melting into one godhead” of Ourania and Dionysos, of Arabian tradition, and another stage in the long conflict which this middle section postulates between the “real” principle in Kronos and the geistig principle in “the liberating god” Dionysos, with Kronos exerting his power to deprive Dionysos of his godhead, though he could not deprive him of his being. Dionysos is therefore reduced to the state of a servant, and He is now in a condition between divine and human (p.307), though he retains the decisive power to regain his godhead through a struggle. Here he shows a likeness to the Phoenician Melkarth and by extension to Hercules. But not as an identity; rather a likeness, which, for the moment, he sets on one side (pp.307-8). Without directly relating this to his theory of the interaction of potencies on each other (the repression of A1, become B by its self-exclusion, by A2), he looks upon this apparent defeat as a “katabole”: a necessary moment of concentration of energies through resistance. It should be noted that the Greek origin for this word, “katabole” means “to establish as a foundation” (p.306). Thus, through their apparent defeats, the powers of the gods may be mobilised: i.e. may gain in potentiality, in a setting in which no energy is wasted, and energies are recharged from the opposition of the gods who for the moment are successful – and all within the drawn out conflict between those who represent the real and those who represent the geistig, with whom the future lies. A complement to this relationship will soon follow.
Because his interest here is more historical, he considers whether there is a relationship between the servants who are repressed by a higher god, even their fathers, and the Fatherhood of God in the New Testament and the Messiah as “Suffering Servant”. “The same personality, who appears to the gentiles, i.e. the heathens, as redeemer and saviour, in the New Testament, passes from the Old Testament to the New as Messiah. In mythology, gods as Wesen [=essences as reality] are not purely imagined [vorgestellte], but are at the same time real [wirkliche] Wesen. Dionysos in all of his forms (as Dionysos the equivalent form is god, which as Melkarth is [no more than a] servant), is a real divine potency, to which the [human] consciousness has a real relationship. By this relationship the truth of mythology is completely revealed in Christianity. The Messiah of the Old Testament could appear at the beginning as an imaginary person, but the success [of his actual appearance] has shown that He was a real Wesen, who, at the end of the whole process has really appeared, and appeared as the Only-begotten of the Father. “We see His glory”, which was not seen during the previous time. This personality appeared not “full of grace” and nothing else, but also “full of truth (difficult in itself to explain, but easy with our view-point)” (p.316). From the same basis which all true religions have, they have a unity which penetrates and unites them: the same powers and forces are in each, and “Since real cannot be separated from real, and the mythological religion is a real religion, there can be no other forces or potencies present to it than in the revealed religion; they exist in one manner in the former and another in the latter. If it said that the heathen religion is false, the reality is that it is not without all truth, but is only the true religion inverted [verkehrte]. Mythological phenomena contain conceptions, whose truth and correct form and Wesen was first given in the New Testament. For, considered in its whole development and interconnections, the religion of heathens is to be regarded as a Christianity which has produced itself naturally (for how could the transition from one to the other have been otherwise managed so easily and among so many people?), by comparison with which Judaism is only a Christianity which has not been developed” (pp.315-6). This identification has its logical working on the conception of when the Messiah began to suffer. “The Messiah suffered from the very beginning, being placed in a condition in which he was negated and so constrained, for he could only develop within the human consciousness, and there he exists as a pure potency, in consequence posited outside reality.” The position is buttressed by a Jewish Midrash, which shows him at work in Old Testament times, and by a further consideration of the interrelationship between the Seyende-potencies. We have already seen that when A2 reduced A1, become B, to its authentic status, it gained in potency. But a corresponding working takes place in A2. Its repression of A1 to its state as pure potency also develops A2, and, according to its nature, as positive. There would be no other possibility, and this also corrects the inauthentic negative working which A1 had inflicted on A2 by its self-exclusion as B: “The second potency was developed and glorified in the overcoming of B, in that because B is aroused for a second time, the second potency [A2] loses its glory, i.e. is placed in a condition of suffering – because suffering and glorification are, in a well known verse, set in opposition: if one member suffers, all the members suffer with him; and when one member is glorified, all of them are glorified with him” [I Cor.12,26] (p.317). Here he sees the glory of the Messiah, as well as His suffering, communicating itself universally from within the consciousness of those in whom He has come to exist, even before He became man.
Schelling goes to extreme lengths to establish the closest parallels between the Messiah and the pagan suffering servants: “as what follows shows, because of mankind’s fault, He is negated in His Godhead, and his place is [accordingly] determined, and particularly because, in this despised and lowly form, He is called with a very particular emphasis the Son of Man”. He bears the common “sickness” of all, which is the pain of the consciousness torn apart from which the mythological process derives, lurching from crisis to crisis on its way to a final relief (p.318). For Schelling there were no indications of the Messiah having the qualities of King, and even Lord (= God), at this moment; He was “nothing but [bloße] the Servant of God”, “corresponding with the parallel developments in paganism” (ib.), which made him resemble Dionysos, the servant whom Kronos, as the head of the powers of darkness, had deprived of his godhead. He was not a saviour promised for the future alone, but one whose relationship was to the consciousness of men in the present moment – and thus he took on the relationship to consciousness of a pagan god, active in the present (pp.318-9), but he took on also the Judeo-Christian function of a redeemer of men from their “wandering away from their end” (Abirren vom Ziel), for which they were created, which Schelling saw as “having progressed in consequence through the whole of paganism” (deren Folge durch das ganze Heidenthum sich fortsetzt) (p.319). And so it was Jesus Christ, not Melkarth (ib.) as identical with Hercules (p.327), who “would appear in the fullness of time” as “a divine personality”, already “working within paganism as a natural potency”. The question of His eternal godhead is therefore placed behind the conception of His being a pure potentiality for development without a substantial base, and His existence as a Messiah and as a suffering servant would be stages in His development from a pure potentiality (-A). This would be a base for a witness to “the necessity and eternity of the Christian idea”, not to be regarded as purely historical, and also for the truth of Christ’s Messiahship: arising “from the world”, yet from a basis reaching back to the “foundation of the world” (Weltgrund) (pp.320-1).
What then of his relationship to Dionysos if he surpassed Melkarth-Hercules in power and time? That Kronos should be prepared to sacrifice his own son Melkarth to Ouranos was so that “the fire of Kronos (in fact that of Ouranos) should not break out”. And so Kronos is given a “milder” appearance for the human consciousness, and a quality tenuously analogous to that of the Father of Jesus Christ who also “did not spare His own Son”, so that the reign of Ouranos in Kronos should not return. Mankind feared this, and wanted the work of the benefactor servant, and Kronos agreed with this because by the same gesture he would continue to exist over against Ouranos. By this separation out of the wills of Kronos and Ouranos prolonged, out of all proportion, their place in Hesiod by reference to the Phoenician Kronos tradition; there was no place for mankind to fear that there would be “a return to an absolute unity” (pp.322-323).
Schelling had distinguished between Melkarth and Hercules over against Dionysos, even though their function was the same. Was the natural potentiality within Dionysos to manifest itself in the Judeo-Christian Messiah, in Jesus Christ? This was too simple a solution for Schelling who was painstaking in drawing no more than a parallelism between them The Messiah’s function of suffering servant was according to the deeper presence of Christ, as the appropriate restorer of the original relationship from its pagan corruptions (cf. “gestörten Reflex”, p.320), in itself uncorrupted by His sufferings. In this opening of a space within the unacceptable absolute unity, “this other personality” (an expression used twice and evidently of Melkarth as a parallel to Christ) is made to emerge “to the [human] consciousness in what is an unconceivable manner” as a “helper of mankind” (p.325). Hesitantly, Schelling claims at this point to have explained the full significance of the sacrifice of Kronos, from which this emergence must be traced, for there is a two-sidedness, not a one-sidedness to this double pagan-Christian tradition; that is included in the reverence given to Kronos for his sacrifice – which results in the “security and development” (ihn … gewähren und fortbestehen lasse) of “the being cast out of the godhead” (der Gottheit entaußertes Wesen) (p.326), which he had as son of Kronos, which he must give up in order to be sacrificed, while Christ had not lost his Godhead either through His incarnation or His sacrificial death. That is the orthodox Christian position, but there will be some significance in the use here of a word in German with which Luther had used (perhaps invented) in translating εκενωσεν in Phil.2, 7: “entaußertes” (and on the same page, “aller Majestät sich entäußere und Knechtgestalt annehme”). The name of Melkarth is kept in the background here by references to “another personality”, and the evident reason is that, relying on the reader’s knowledge of Luther’s Bible translation, the allusion would be evident, that whilst there is no perfect identity between Melkarth and Christ, the verbal formulas of Saint Paul could also cover the functioning of Melkarth, for the same potencies were working in them both. And the same degree of speculatively supposed approximation between Dionysos and Christ might also be inferred. But firstly Melkarth’s relationship to Dionysos given at this point should be noticed. For the consciousness this “personality” is “a prototype or type”, “akin to (verwandte) Dionysos, with his anticipatory personality also indicated in the teaching [which he has given] on Kronos, not as Dionysos in his full godhead, but in just the same state, which has already been shown, that for the consciousness this personality is not equivalent to god, but can appear only as ungraspable median-reality [between a god and a non-god]” (p.326). Schelling had already given the same status to Dionysos in his transient condition of deprivation of his godhead (p.307). But Dionysos will win back his godhead through the (undetailed) downfall of Kronos to become Kybele, the Mother of the gods (v. infra), so his career will have an overall similarity: the development of a potency, even from a potency in its purity. There are two expressions in Schelling’s description of the Messiah as Son of Man which suggest that, in realising the same potencies as suffering servants, Dionysos and Christ come within a close distance of each other. Emphasising that the Messiah as Suffering Servant in Isaiah did not suffer only in the future as the fulfilment of prophesy but from the beginning, Schelling says “As a potency posited outside of the Godhead He is the Son of Man” [Als dieser außer der Gottheit gesetzte Potenz ist er des Menschen Sohn] – outside the Godhead He is pure potency: potency as uncompromised force. And that potency in its succeeding historical contexts is going to realise itself in presentations which will be contemporary with those of Dionysos and the other servants: “corresponding with the parallel development of paganism, the Messiah will be presented not yet as King and the Lord Himself [als der Herr selbst], but as nothing but the servant of God, the one who suffers, as the one who must pass through great pains and labour” (both citations p.318). So Schelling finds that they are a pair, not completely identical, but at that particular moment constituted in an analogous way: the godhead of Dionysos not yet re-gained, the Godhead of Christ not yet asserted.
It will be seen that this orientation prolongs the conflict between the real god in Kronos and the geistig god in Dionysos by extending it into the Jewish epoch, just as if the age of the Titans remained present! Although Schelling’ speculation is open to a greater degree, not only of overlapping but of an identification of pagan mythological realities (one must say this, if the gods have an authentic Wesen) with Christian realities, he kept his sense of an authentic divine dispensation and revelation in Christianity which reached to the bed-rock of religion, and which was appropriate to a believer. “It does not take away from the Holiness [= keine Entweihung] [of Jesus Christ as Son of God] if one recognises and points out that the truths which presented themselves partly concealed in the Old Testament, and came into the full light with Christianity, were also present in the distorted reflex of paganism” (p.320).
At the beginning of the lecture, Schelling had characterised the early period in mythology in categories which related to the Phoenician account by Sanchoniathon of relations between the gods, quoted by Eusebius, which had little in common with Hesiod’s Theogonia: “there is a continual change between emergence and decline of the geistig, which was always being posited but always sank back into materiality” (p.286). At the beginning the distinction between Kronos and Ouranos is not such as Hesiod describes it. “Kronos is not a substantially different god from Ouranos, his predecessor; Ouranos is a god of simple universality, whilst Kronos is, unlike him, the god who exists with an opposition, a god to last for a determined time: Ouranos already touched with the geistig [principle], and in consequence [of containing this conditioning from another principle] a concrete god” (p.287).
Here Schelling feels at liberty to introduce the process of development to contain the improvements which will emerge as, with more certainty, it develops towards the geistig. This would lead to a special development of the geistig principle in Melkarth, as the only son of Kronos: “in opposition to Kronos, a permanent purely geistig, purely [positively] causative potency which, by its nature can only be one.” Phoenician gods were supposed to have filled out their years by being the kings of cities, and Kronos is said to have offered his son in sacrifice to Ouranos in order to save his city from destruction by a plague (p. 313). Thus he himself seems to have acted more in accordance with the geistig principle, though self-interest was also present. This was reported by Eusebius in words from Diodore of Sicily which resembled those of Saint Paul, that “the Father did not spare [His Son”: Rom 11,21] (p.313 and n.1). Schelling heightens the particular elements in the story which will increase a plausible parallelism between Melkarth (as also Hercules and Dionysos) and the Sacrifice in obedience to the heavenly Father of Christ as Suffering Servant.
Schelling’s fourteenth lecture ends with an overall interpretation of the sacrifice by Kronos of Melkarth, beginning from the terrestrial facts of the occurrence of extraordinary calamities and the yearly human sacrifice of sons. It is explicitly not confined to the events in human consciousness, but interprets these events, even the event of Kronos’s sacrifice, not as what concerns only the gods, but as in some way historical – at least, as historical as Kronos becoming a king in the Phoenician tradition. Earthly sacrifices and the dispositions and acts of the gods are seen as a unity, where Schelling takes the sacrifice of Melkarth to the limit of assimilation to the Messianic self-offering in obedience to the Heavenly Father, but falling short.
The reader is expected to accept a movement among and in the categories, even if it must escape them. He must continue to accept the shorthand of historical writing here except for a single interpretation made according to the algebra of his categories referring to the potencies, and therefore to the potencies in the human consciousness (p.325); the sustained shorthand embodies an interaction between it and the gods acting on it from without.
He interprets the activity of Kronos virtually exclusively according to the Phoenician tradition and not according to the data of Hesiod, adding his own speculative perspectives, and in this section these are proper to it. Kronos exists in unity with Ouranos; sometimes the identity is complete, at others the difference is marked when Kronos displays a geistig element in his character (pp.286-7). But he is always capable of falling back on that unity and identity with Ouranos, which was consistently averse to the freedom which mankind wished to retain. Kronos displays the basis he has in Ouranos for this consistent unity, and the undeviating necessity which arises from it, and yet a mildness emerges, part disinterested and part selfish, in his sacrifice of Melkarth: all belonging to the crux of any speculation which, for whatever reason, must be made about a plurality in unity. This is reflected in the human apprehension about how the affairs of the gods will turn out; mankind feels itself menaced by an unannounced reversion to the inflexible unity and necessity experienced under Ouranos. Human sacrifice will turn out to be the only ground which presents itself to conciliate Kronos so that he does not revert to an identity with Ouranos. Finally his own will to remain as Kronos, in distinction from Ouranos, provides the counterweight of his concession to Ouranos to offer Melkarth as his own son. The enormous tension remains between the power of the gods, but the gesture succeeds in establishing a mitigation of the universal power of Ouranos as containing Kronos, with no mention of limitation in time or limitation in extent. But that tension continues, even though its absoluteness is bent back. Taking into account other fragments of Schelling’s speculation, one discerns that his speculative theme is the expansion through conflict of the geistig principle, due to its enabling more capacities from the Verstand; the real principle is gradually over-balanced before it is, with Christian revelation, finally defeated. The tension continues and mounts so to speak quantitatively and qualitatively until the cosmos, both natural and geistig, dies with the death of Christ the Messiah, to be recapitulated in His triumph.
There is a necessity lying in the nature of Kronos that he should offer Melkarth to Ouranos. There is in him also a wild aversion to a developed [gebildeten] human life which derives from his older nature in his identification with Ouranos, “the universal, all-consuming god” (p.322). The reader must then interpret the dualities-in-unity without the blockages erected by dualities in human experience, and also present in human geometry. “In his particularity, Kronos is himself precisely in giving up Melkarth. But the consciousness in Kronos of the universal god experiences the fear that he might cease to be Kronos and take on again his old absolute consuming nature.” This fear is communicated from human devotees. In particular, great and universal disasters occasion this fear, which threaten the existence of the whole state, which has gained order ands cohesion under Melkarth. When, as a consequence of a defeat, or an uncontrollable plague, which produced a state of panic, the people of Carthage, originally a Phoenician colony, feared that there might be a reversion back to the situation of a previous age. “So this sacrifice [of their sons] is not so much offered to Kronos as to Ouranos, the original god, just as in the passage quoted [above] from Sanchoniathon about Kronos himself, who brings his only son as a burnt offering to Ouranos” [the context sees him as a king, bringing a victim like the human offering made by anyone else], “(in order to make good the distance between them, Kronos brings the offering, reducing him to the condition of a servant; it is all a concession which he makes to Ouranos) – Kronos can only exist over against Ouranos by casting out his son. So the menacing god shall be reconciled to the human race in its present condition, with its whole present ordering and its cultural life [Gesittung], because he stands in relationship to what is to be reconciled to an all-consuming and flaming god, and will be burnt with fire. … In this way Ouranos will be empowered [vermöchten] to grant to mankind, through Kronos and through Melkarth as the giver of salvation and peace, that it will never relapse again from its dualism to be swallowed up and consumed into its original unity. For as long as the consciousness [of men] remained whole [ganz] and undivided within that, it would be experienced as nothing but frightful. But with the communication of a duality and the consequent freedom, mankind can only regard a return into an absolute unity with dread.” Here Schelling refers to recorded evidence of this dread among those who had emerged from a prehistorical condition, and “after a city life in the historical period had been established as a result of a struggle or [in some way] gained”. But the unity in the duality of Ouranos and Kronos remains, and only in Kronos is the basis of a choice: “the god must be induced to remain as Kronos, and not to return to the past.” (pp.322-3).
Here the involvement of the whole human race in this bid to induce Kronos to remain as Kronos is noteworthy, even though the historical event might be limited to a certain time and place in the past. An appraisal of the argument so far cannot ignore that this continuing unity of the godhead, which contains only a precarious possibility of passing into duality, derives from the Phoenician tradition of Kronos. It corresponds with neither the letter of Hesiod’s Theogonia, nor with Schelling’s later speculative derivation of the gods from “the god” in Janus-Chaos, and his appearance in isolation as Dionysos, separated out from the Titan-Olympian succession, which nevertheless, by Zeus and Demeter, begot and ceaselessly brought him to a third birth. With its limited connections to what precedes and follows it, it can only be regarded as a speculative essay which sees how far a parallelism posited for the pagan and Christian developments, according to their evidences and traditions, might be derived from the same, even separably instantiated, potentialities. It is (for all of the seriousness of the issues) a sketch of a conflation of the experiences of human consciousness being confronted with a unified historical experience of a single god, precariously open to pass with no degree of certainty into a duality without losing his unity. The alignment is made with the Phoenician Kronos (and less strictly with the Greek), taking especial note of the practices of the Phoenician colony of Carthage, and with the Canaanite Baal and Moloch, keeping in view Abraham’s preparedness to sacrifice Isaac in obedience to God, as also the contamination of the Israelite settlers’ practice from the Canaanite dwellers. The condition for this reduction back to a unity in divinity and a universality in significance was the ignoring of the Titan and Olympian succession in Greek mythology: the emergence of Geistigkeit is in confrontation with the starkly projected previous “realism”. Geistigkeit passes into a proto-plurality through the final triumphs of the three geistig figures of Melkarth and Hercules (of Egypt as well as Greece), linked with Dionysos, even though they are regarded as having the same principle. Only the first opening out of a duality-in-unity is considered, so that a universal consequence can derive from a single act of universal significance, which entails that Melkarth is also described as “the second person of the godhead”, which would make him as indistinguishable from the other two saving and suffering servants.
The final condition of Dionysos in the third figure, in a state of being brought to birth: begotten by Zeus of Demeter as “the god”, sees him as a special individual, whose presence has been invading and now excelling that of Zeus. Thus he will differ from his appearance in this middle section. And yet there could be a unity between the two parts, in that the unity and the status which he had in the third part might have been prepared for by his historical unity with Melkarth and Hercules, in which Schelling was prepared lightly to designate even Melkarth as the second person of the godhead, and then without Hesiod’s adjuncts of Titans and Olympians. After a corresponding reconstruction which entailed a simplification of the three, for which there is no trace, this might have been taken over as a non-immediate base for his greater role in the third part.
The factual carrying out of the human sacrifice of the sons of men cannot be contained within a mythological experience as assumed elsewhere to belong to consciousness, even while attributing a Wesen-reality to the gods; it must pass into factual, historical sequencing. In his summary Schelling says that he has shown that Kronos’s sacrifice must have been for conciliation [Versöhnopfer] rather than for thanksgiving (p.323), even though this latter commemorates something given gratuitously by a god, which could be withdrawn [versagt]. The devotees were anxious that the offering of Melkarth should be more than a possibility; he must be consumed, excluded from being,[13] but so far it has been argued that Kronos must exclude “the second person of the godhead from his divinity, not from his being … this has been only accepted as a fact, without being properly conceived”. It has been supposed that “this second potency … has been given a place and a position”, and that “once given it could not be withdrawn” (ib.).
To perform an act of sacrifice with Melkarth, both Kronos and Melkarth must be reduced to a human status. Here Schelling uses the same simple geometrical conception which he uses elsewhere to indicate the change in the relations between the gods in theogenic production, and there in close association with the potencies, but here “potentiality” is used in a more general sense. In Schelling’s much used image of a circle, Kronos must cease to be central and become peripheral, and in making himself peripheral, Melkarth, who depends from him as the second god, will also be reduced. They will be reduced to their potentiality, and from this potentiality Kronos will realise himself in human form. He will restore himself to a divine status from his potentiality after the sacrifice is performed, but it belongs to the sacrifice in view, a burnt sacrifice – a holocaust, that Melkarth will be eliminated from his being as he has been eliminated from his godhead. Here Schelling can invoke not a law, only a metaphysical relationship. A divine power, a “numen”, still keeps their consciousness in being. The argument is then a fortiori: no man could remain a man unless he had an openness to the divinity in his consciousness; he would be nothing but a higher animal. But why then would the “second personality” not raise himself “into manhood and actuality – as was the case with Kronos?” Kronos is here supposed to have dealt with Melkarth other than he had dealt with himself; even though he would have had the godly quality of immortality: “with the divinity, what has once happened cannot be taken back,” but if it were a question of a man disappearing as a being with a consciousness of god, he might continue as belonging to “the highest class of animals” (p.324). The reality and its record in the consciousness are therefore governed by different procedures. Their difference explains how there can be a real annihilation of a god without an annihilation in the consciousness. The complete argument shows that a mythological unity of historical reality and consciousness throughout this figure is intended, in fact demonstrated by the fact that the now human Melkarth would no longer be a god if his father had so decreed, even when he remained a god in his own consciousness.
Elsewhere, even when the gods are regarded as Wesen without being, the mythological process is located in the consciousness. Here, where the habitat of the gods is given a place in a unity with human consciousness, but also outside of it, their dual existence can provide a way to understand the commerce between Kronos and his son. Again the devotees of both play an active role.
All the above will have taken place outside the consciousness, but in the consciousness of devotees the presence of Melkarth continues alongside that of Kronos, even when the latter “becomes again exclusive [ausschließlich]”: i.e. as divine reality allows no place for his son, burnt as a sacrifice to Ouranos. So there are two presences of Kronos: Kronos in the world of divine necessity, only subordinate to the completely universal Ouranos, a consuming fire; and Kronos in the consciousness, now regarded as “[the] natural [world]” (p.324), while Melkarth, as an arising geistig god, emerging as A1, is reduced back to his potentiality by A². In the first, the divine reality, Kronos is necessarily disposed to consume him completely, but in the world of consciousness, as a helper and servant, Melkarth appears as offered by Kronos, and before the real god – Ouranos in Kronos – as in an act of renunciation, putting outside himself any claim to majesty, and to take on the form of a servant. In the mythological consciousness, where “everything is caught up into a state of eternal initiatives and happenings [ewiges Ausschließen und Geschehen], Melkarth is in the state of always being offered by Kronos, with Kronos intent always on annihilating him completely”. Thus the mythological consciousness represents the situation, present in the divine reality as an act complete and passed over, as a time-extended state of active offering and passive acceptance. In the consciousness, Melkarth devotees are relieved by his service even at the cost of his annihilation, but the divine reality is that Ouranos has taken him as victim as, through the there totally compliant Kronos, he exerts his power to reduce everything to a universal unity around himself. “For the human race this is a cause of the greatest anxiety, which expresses itself in great calamities on a national scale. It is the moment to attempt to conciliate Kronos to mitigate his anger” and return to the situation as the consciousness saw it. Here he uses an expression used by Hesiod about Kronos’s devouring his children: “that he would not devour Melkarth, the bringer of peace and salvation, in his own being,” though he would in the being of others. His devotees now want Melkarth to continue in existence, not to be a holocaust whose utility is limited if he is sacrificed only to restore the universality and unity of Ouranos. The devotees have adjusted themselves to the new situation in the divine reality, which is distributed to the consciousnesses which refuse to accept the absolute act of Kronos in Ouranos. And “what else can they offer more realistically to the god than their own individual children, given [to this god], that they burn them with fire, so that the fire of Kronos (in fact of Ouranos) should not burst out and consume his own son, so that Kronos should pass him over to remain with the world and with humanity. So the offering [of their own sons] was not a thanksgiving offering to the god who had not spared his own son, however attractive and natural this view might appear in the equivalent expressions of Diodore of Sicily, already given. Rather it was a sacrifice for the conciliation of the angry god. In an way unfathomable for humanity [Melkarth] was in the consciousness itself the other personality – indeed not in a divine form, but dwelling amongst the human race, a being who was a servant and helper, [for whom this would be] an offering, which must induce the god not to remove this helper of men” (ib.).
The consequence of this interpretation is not that Kronos was reverenced for his not sparing his own son, and so a close parallelism with Saint Paul’s expression about the sacrifice of Christ is lost, but for his sparing him so that he might remain, even as a Wesen, rendered alien from the godhead, to be a helper and saviour – where Kronos, in the consciousness, would have appeared amenable to the sacrifices of the children, while, in the divine reality, remaining obdurate in his identity with Ouranos (pp.323-6). The key phrase about the final state of Melkarth, that he himself would be “dwelling among the human race”, is necessary in order to complete the developments together of the unity postulated for the divine reality and the natural consciousness. It would be open for a limited period with Kronos as a king of a Phoenician city. For a being who has taken on humanity for the purpose of being sacrificed there would be no need to invoke for him the shadowy but real Wesen-existence of the gods. It gives to Melkarth a likeness to the Incarnate Christ, Who was the Suffering Servant par excellence.
Schelling says that he has made the sacrifice understandable, which otherwise it is not (p.326). In reviewing especially its final interpretation, in which it has gained a logical coherence which is often absent from mythological narrative, one can say that this is not by an emendation of existing commentary, but by an adaption made to the narrative itself. Schelling feels the liberty to rewrite the narratives according to his own intuitions, his sense of proportion, all contained within his artistry, conscious that he has been painstaking in reviewing all the evidence which was at hand. Mythology gains in coherence from the untidiness in which tradition and evidence presented themselves. Order is given, but to units more defined through artistic selectivity, where difference of origin and consequent coherence cannot be surmounted. Here, despite the information on the Phoenician tradition of Kronos provided by Greek Church Fathers, it has to remain largely untouched by the Greek tradition of Hesiod. And these adaptions, more historical than philosophical, have detached it from his other philosophical figures which he intended to cover the same material.
Finally he considers its inclusion of Melkarth as a forerunner of Dionysius within the setting of Kronos, even though it ignores Hesiod’s material on Kronos with the Titans and the Olympians, and prolongs Kronos’s presence, and Melkarth’s with him, without any evident limits, even though the indications are that Kronos, become a human king and offering Melkarth as a human victim, was making a human interference in a period of calamities, in identity with a people dissatisfied with the conduct of a universal god acting in identity with another, whom they nevertheless considered to be moveable by human sacrifice. Melkarth is not portrayed with the fullness of the divinity being won and eventually regained by Dionysos. To Schelling’s son-editor the significance of his sacrifice in the Phoenician tradition, with an interpretation which sees him operating from the same potency, ultimately from the name natural forces and potencies as Christ as suffering Messiah, may have seemed a part of a preparation, which continued in the next two lectures, to introduce Dionysos in the third figure as “the god” of Greek mythology: as identical with Janus-Chaos at the beginning and, finally, as an individual god separated from and superior to the Olympian gods at the end, and, because superior, present in them all, even in Zeus. There he will be appreciated in a new esoteric dimension, deriving from a reserve (but from where?) of geistig power, engendered by the Olympian Zeus and given birth by Demeter: a stage towards a conclusion, from which the other gods have by then detached themselves, to enjoy a harmonious ease reflected in the pages of Hesiod[14] – in which this climax, which is still no completion, has no place.
Lecture 15:
With the geistig potency as participated by Melkarth circumscribed (preserving his divine consciousness in himself and in his devotees, but still being sacrificed by Kronos though visibly supported by their human sacrifices and retained thereby as the helper of men in an unresolved tension), Schelling turns to Hercules, in whom the participated geistig potency registers a further advance. As a final labour he fires his own pyre to find relief from his sickness, contracted especially through being touched by the polluted blood of Nessos, though partly by his separation from Kronos, and goes to the heavens: made a god among the gods and marrying into them. Thus the geistig potency makes a positive advance – but Dionysos was always a god.
Schelling took even greater liberties with Kronos in this lecture, and all within what I have called this “historical” figure. Ouranos as the foundation of Kronos, and Kronos as exhibiting at times an identity with Ouranos, posited an essentially successive polytheism. The absolute unity was opened out into a precarious duality by the sacrifice of Melkarth, now without his godhead and reduced to manhood. He had not persisted in the state of being sacrificed to Ouranos, but was allowed to dwell along men. Here Schelling expands on the nature of Hercules, without his identity with Melkarth: even though it begins with an assertion of it (“one and the same person” p.327). Without being so formally defined, his status is expressed in terms usually reserved for Dionysos as the “god of the second potency – the liberator”. Yet with a qualification: “the relative geistig – but he is not this absolutely, not without determinations, but for a determinate aspect [Moment] of consciousness” (p.344). In Egypt he is “older than Dionysos (p.328), a “forerunner to Dionysos in the consciousness”, yet “his earliest appearance followed directly on the moment when [Dionysos] was melted into one godhead with Ourania” (p.340). He was celebrated is his own ancient mysteries by men in women’s clothes (p.341). He remained a stranger to the “organic and independent core of Greek mythology” (p.332), but he belonged to a period before his heroism was replaced by that in Homer’s works (ib.). Schelling emphasised his great strength, because no other hero had forced his way into the underworld (p.337), and equally his weaknesses: his Messiah-like bearing of the sickness of others (p.328), and his madness (like Dionysos), when he threw his own children and his brothers’ into the fire (pp.339-40), and his becoming a woman, thus sinking too deeply to be an ideal of manly perfection (p.340). And taking his Messiah-like characteristics to Christ-like proportions, but in a way very unlike Christ, “participating in all the weaknesses, and all the appearances of sickness of mankind”, he must – with an ambiguous “simul justus et peccator” – “although without sin, take our guilt upon himself” (p.342).
An “evil side had accumulated in him in his service of Kronos”, even though he was an early moment of Dionysos, participating in the god of the second potency but not to the point of identity – whereas Dionysos had undoubtedly been a god, from which, in order to become a god, he must be released.
This takes place in a dramatic synthesis which Schelling plays out moment by moment. The centaur, Nessos, had taken Hercules’ wife, Dejanira, to the other side of a river, and Hercules wounded him mortally with an arrow shot. Dying, Nessos gave her his blood-stained garment, which she must pass to Hercules. Circumstances had contrived to make her and Hercules uncertain of each other, and this made them both for a few critical moments uncertain about what to do; the resolution came out of this uncertainty. Nessos had concentrated all of his evil into the blood, and when his flesh touched it, Hercules was burnt up from the extreme pain which it caused him. And then the intensity of the pain was intensified by the pain of a final separation from the real god (=Kronos), which had already begun. Altogether its unbearableness resulted in Hercules’ willing that his whole human nature should be burnt on a wood-pile prepared by himself, so that he might find in that a healing for all his sickness. As flames and thunder burst out from the fire, Hercules went to heaven, where he was reconciled with Hera, married to Hebe the goddess of youth, and lived as an immortal god. He left his image [eidolon], soulless and like a shade, in the underworld (pp.343-4).
It was his final labour to pass through this ordeal, but Dionysos was “named as a god the moment he stepped into the light”, even if there was an incidental likeness when the mortal mother of Dionysos, Semele, was burnt up in the embrace of Zeus in which he was conceived (p.345). And Schelling finishes his lecture with a reference to the lines of Lucretius on the oppression of mankind under the weight of the religion of Kronos (p.349), which was now ended by the preservation of Melkarth from his death as a servant, the consent of Hercules to his own purgation and his consequent apotheosis, and the virtual preservation of the geistig Dionysos, immune from contamination by the real.
Lecture 16:
The summary begins with a look forward to the later, third figure which is essentially the emergence of Dionysos as “the liberating god”. Kronos is taken from the scene by his transformation into Kybele, the Phrygian mother of the gods, with her significance for the beginning of true polytheism after the monotheism of Ouranos-Kronos, but the text is imperfectly adjusted to this. Kronos’s previous subjugation of Dionysos had energised his subsequent rise; Kronos-Kybele is cut off from his previous history and becomes relatively mild – as plains are produced after mountain peaks. Instead of the stars, meteoric stones which have fallen to the earth are worshipped as Kybele, as her progeny people Egyptian, Indian and Greek mythology.
The historical dimension also dominates the sixteenth lecture, which introduces Kybele as the “Mother of the Gods”, especially linked to Phrygia and the surrounding region. The orgies and tumults which surrounded her cultus are not interpreted purely as signs of relief from an oppressive religious era. “The cause which provokes the orgiastic manifestation is simply speaking the liberating god [=Dionysos], but its basis, its subject is the real principle [=Kronos], now in effect tottering, reeling with no more self-control, become quite powerless” (p.351). The figure in all these three lectures envisages a unity of consciousness and reality. To give to the gods this double ambit, and not to confine them to the functioning of the potencies in the consciousness, stands out like an experimental setting which assures a linkage of the historical settings of the cults with the gods’ pure Wesen-existence, because it had become evident to Schelling that to attach mythology to the exclusive functioning of mind might handle their natures, their origin and their activities only in relationship to themselves, and would not correspond to the real practices in which mythology expressed itself. Schelling was not satisfied with his previous grounding, even if the later figure in the lecture series can be taken as more final in his conception. For all the cultic practices and beliefs are included in exoteric mythology, and there Dionysos is brought to a final supremacy through its functioning. The inner content of the exoteric will be the esoteric which is the essential. The less essential had continued through the Titans and the Olympians, with Kronos active even until now as we shall see, but Zeus’s triumph becomes insignificant as he is revealed to be animated by Dionysos – even though the exoteric finally produces the true esoteric reality, as Dionysos remains in a state of purest theogony, brought to birth by Demeter from Zeus, for Dionysos, as “the god” can alone satisfy her now revealed esoteric capacities, which suffered at the disappearance of Kronos. But here Schelling manages a way for the disappearance of Kronos, which maintains a new form of monotheism within polytheism, to which the later figure makes no reference.
That is, a disappearance of Kronos as Kronos. Schelling retains him as a centre of unity even though the Ouranos-Kronos unity is not yet ended: he is, in his “displaced consciousness”, “not able to be overcome by the ideal god, but disposed towards a real overcoming” (p.353). A new balance of forces not confined to consciousness tips the preponderance of the geistig over the real. The balance of forces went back to the first emergence of Dionysos, with the “melting” of Ourania, that is Ouranos turned woman and emasculated, into him but, according to this figure, still with the power to terrify, as she gave birth to Dionysos. But Kronos was then re-empowered from the real principle, and could deprive him then of his existence as a god. That birth, Schelling says, was from the consciousness alone as a basis, which was realised in an appearance (p.353). It did not place Dionysos in a strong position, and it was not surprising that the power of the heavens, working through Kronos, with Ouranos as his inner reality, was too great for this realisation. (It was unknown to Hesiod, and is attested to in the Arabian-derived tradition.) But Kybele, as the Mother of the Gods, made “the consciousness as a basis for an already active god”. Ourania gave birth to “a pure possibility, not overcoming” the real by the geistig principle, whilst Kybele gave birth to “the reality (the beginning of the passage to the real overcoming)”, of which the first, a seeming defeat for the geistig principle, was the “last, decisive katabole for the arising of polytheism”: the concentration of energies through their apparent downfall was the condition which must precede every advance (p. 353). To complete the thought: Kronos had regained his power in his overthrowing of Dionysos. Between Kronos and Kybele there was this difference, that “in Kronos the heavens [Gestirn] always ruled” (p.349); but with Kybele “a sympathy from nature for human suffering revealed itself … the astral religion ceased in her. … in her the stars which had before always been geistig took on an earthly form and an earthly Wesen” (p.360). And this decline was energised in Kronos’s defeat – Kronos as Kronos – of Dionysius: his success created the conditions for Dionysos definitive rise.
There is a godly tragic aspect to this in the succeeding counter-phase – and here Schelling allows theory and imagination to supplant the texts and the tradition. In order to bring him to birth in the consciousness as based on the real, the balance of forces is reversed for the final time, Kronos is transformed into a female god as Kybele,[15] losing his manhood (p.352). A later tradition asserts that he was emasculated by Zeus (p.363): not exactly as an embodiment of the geistig principle, but, as the etymology of her names indicates, with her head sinking and rising, signifying, in relationship to the “higher god” – which must now be the geistig Dionysos - “a wavering and staggering consciousness” (pp.352-4). The overall development of Kybele is clear: “Everything about Kybele indicates a descent” [Herabkommen, descendere] (p, 354). At this stage Dionysus enters (whether through a second birth as a god or from a state of external servitude is not explained), and asserts himself over Kronos become Kybele (hence the “wavering and staggering”) as, spent, the head wags up and down (ib.), he sinks into a not as yet final state of defeat, which is for gods and men a state of liberation. Ouranos-Ourania had a heavenly power, but Kybele as mother of the gods has vacated the heavens; Schelling interprets the worship of her in meteoric stones fallen from the heavens as a proof of this, which thereby relates this part of mythology to historical facts (p.357).
The change in Kybele-Kronos is greater than the minimal fluctuation in Ouranos-Kronos, and it derives from the triumph of the geistig principle in Dionysos, though how that occurred is not brought into focus.
Schelling tries to find significance in the descriptions of ceremonies in which, represented by a woman, she is drawn, silent and sitting in an undistinguished ceremonial cart, in seeming triumph. The polytheism which is to derive from this Mother of the gods is indicated by the empty seats. She is identified with the development of cities, and the spears carried before her signify the wars through which a bourgeois society is to be established. So she will have her eulogists, who do not understand that the welcome expression of motherliness cannot be permanent, for the motherliness of a god is intended as a source of other gods; the role is necessary but transient. Egyptian, Indian and Greek mythologies will derive from her, each with their establishment history. Because she was also the final relative monotheist god, Kronos is forgotten as her personal history is expunged, for Kronos was so transformed in her that he became mild externally. But even as historians created flattering personal histories for her, the cries for a justice not less than human for the gods is not less heard. And the evil does emerge in proximity to her in the heterosexual demon Attis, said (but not by Schelling who imposes his own time-scale on the activities of the gods) to have been seeded by Zeus (and how then to conciliate the genesis of the plurality of the Titans with her own geniture of a plurality?) from Kybele, whose wildness so terrified the other gods that they castrated him. Schelling omits most of this, leaving Kronos-Kybele with a partial respectability which is an advance on that of Kronos as Kronos. Probably the reason was to metre through her the state of the advancing triumph of the geistig principle over the real.
[1] op cit. (Guthrie p.25), citing Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, Die Glaube der Hellenen vol.1 (Berlin 1931) p,17.
[2] Ph.d.Myth. SW II,2 p.591. The references are to the 1st edn.: Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schellings sämmtliche Werke, Pt.1 vv.1-10, Pt.2 vv.1-4 (sometimes numbered 1-14) Stuttgart 1856-61. The original page numbers are added at the page-heads in the rearranged lithograph edn., Schellings Werke, 6 main vv. + 6 Suppl vv. (Munich 1927-34, & reprints). Nachlaßband with other fragm of Die Weltalter (Munich 1946). The original page numbering is given at the page-heads in the two partial editions; i) S. ausgewählte Werke (Wissensch. Buchgesell. Darmstadt); ii) F.W.J.S. Ausgewählte Schriften (=Suhrkamp paperback: 6 vv. Frankfurt 1985).
[3] ib. p.672.
[4] ib. p.159.
[5] ib. p.153.
[6] ib. p.156.
[7] ib. p.156.
[8] ib. p. 156.
[9] Ib. pp.160-1.
[10] Mentioned by Schelling in his 1815 lecture Ueber die Gottheiten von Samothrake: SW I,8 p.349, and n.22: “Axieros is Demeter, Axiokersa is Persephone, Axiokersos is Hades” (to which he adds Kasmilos – Hermes). On Mnasea v. book rev. of Cappelletto in Bryn Mawr Classical Review of 13 Feb. 2006. Mnasea’s reference is taken from a Scholion of Alexander of Rhodes on The Argonauts (I, 917), numbered 27 among his (‘Mnaseas Patrensis’) in Fragmenta historicorum Graecorum vol.2 (ed. K. Muller, Paris 1849). This identification of the Kabiri with the offspring of Kronos will seem anachronistic to us – even with concessions to their not being subject to our time. Schelling returns to the theme in the lecture (pp.354-5, nn.47-9, cf. n.29): “that Axiokersa is Persephone is not to be doubted … [she] is only Ceres, .. only the mother in another form … their names and pictures are often confused.”
[11] Monsignor Alfred Gilbey, for many years Catholic University chaplain at Cambridge.
[12] The use of the German word seems to be the best solution in this translation, by which an English readership is warned to be attentive to a special nuance. “Geist” in German means not only “spirit” (with its confused and negative connotations) but “mind” (again with special nuances). But German makes the distinction in the corresponding adjectives: “geistlich”, for a spiritual and especially religious context (without those connotations), and “geistig” for an intellectual context.
[13] At this stage it was “unavoidable” that they should assure themselves against the possibility that “the god given benefactor might be refused”, so he must be “taken out from being, which meant to be completely consumed” (p,323), At a later stage, the devotees did not want to lose Melkarth; but Kronos still wished to annihilate him, but could be satisfied in consuming their own children (p.325).
[14] After the „completely free and level-headed unfolding” of the repressed plurality “which we find, e.g. in the Theogonia of Hesiod”, “polytheism itself brought to its completion is a great liberation” (ib.643).
[15] Schelling had probably picked up a tradition that, born of Zeus (which gave him status), the god Agdistis was hermaphroditic, and as castrated became Kybele, or even that Kybele was herself hermaphroditic, for the two become merged – quite apart from her later consort, the demon Attis.