If the gods are
aièn eóntes, as Hesiod says repeatedly, then Time and Being in Hesiod do not originate in the airy realm of Chaos or pure flux
. Time, Being, and
Chaos alike participate in an eternal state that precedes all beginning.
We can imagine Hesiod in the intro hymn saying, with the
Rig Vedic poet of 1.164.37-42:
"I do not understand what sort of thing I am here: though bound,
I roam about in secret by my thinking.
When the first-born of truth [=Agni] has come to me, only then do
I attain a share of this speech here."
"The syllable [
akṣare] of the verse [
ṛco] upon which all the gods have settled, is in the
highest heaven—
he who does not know that (syllable), what will he accomplish by his
verse? Only those who know it sit together here.
[...]
The buffalo-cow [=Speech] has bellowed, fashioning oceans. [...] she has a thousand
syllables in the highest heaven.
Seas flow everywhere from her: by that the four directions live,
from that the syllable flows, upon that does everything live."
“Then when the ancient dawns dawned forth, in the track of the cow a
great imperishable (syllable) [
akṣaram] was born [/was discerned] [
ví jajñe],
which tends to the commandments of the gods: great is the one and only
lordship of the gods.” - RV 3.55.1
Cosmogony and divine commands themselves rest on the imperishable sacred word, which is eternal divine power, and which is harnessed by the poet in an act of archetypal world-creation.
Who is it in
Shatapatha Brahmana that turns the inert chaos-Air into the cosmos? 6.1.1 tells us: “The
Rishis (seer-poets) assuredly.” And the Rishis are here the Pranas and the Pranas are the Rudras.
The archetypal poet is the vessel of the demiurgic power of sacred speech, harnessed from the eternal source to give form to the world.
His speech is cosmogony, and in this moment he embodies the god who conducts the speech in the eternal frame (Apollo/Cronus/Rudra). He is the mouthpiece and activated agent of the Demiurge god here.
Note here that Hesiod is given a laurel branch by the 9 muses, Apollo as their leader, while the Demiurge/shanachie (storyteller-poet) Fintan is given a branch by the double-3-named god of Eternity, Trefuilngid Tre-Eochair, to name and form and plant the
microcosm that is Ireland.
Finally, the word for
truth spoken by the voice of the Muses may imply the un-concealing or remembering of what lives eternally beyond the veil of ignorance and forgetfulness: the word is
alēthéă, etymologically "un-concealment/un-forgetting".
If what is true is what is un-concealed, then this implies a veil that has concealed a reality in the first place (contra Heidegger), giving us a structure of "Fundamental Reality > Veil of Ignorance > Truth attained by lifting the veil", a structure that is found in multiple Indo-European traditions: Irish, Vedic, arguably Norse. In this way
a-
lēthéă as the negation of
lēthē (forgetfulness) is comparable to
In-dui (the Un-Ignorant) as the negation that supersedes
Alldui, the great Veil of Ignorance, which follows from the Absolute in the Irish god genealogy of
Lebor Gabala Erenn.
Memory (
Mnēmosynē) being the mother of the Muses in Hesiod's introductory hymn drives this interpretation home, since Memory giving rise to the Muses and their true speech implies a reality before the process of forgetting in order for the Muses to remember it again, and for this to be called Truth.
We ought not throw out the earliest books of the
Rig Veda, and Hesiod, the earliest cosmogony of the Greeks, because we dislike this conclusion.
This would leave the us with nothing to stand on, not even Chaos, all to avoid what the texts make evident: we have here the most archaic Indo-European worldview, shared from Greece to India, to Ireland to Germania, and on into Rome.
Read thy Hesiod.
- O’Gravy, The Sun Riders
@solarcult
