Making the Eleatic Stranger: Parmenides and the Phenomenology of Non-Ordinary Reality

“Go, go, go, said the bird: human kind cannot bear very much reality” (T.S. Eliot, Burnt Norton).

“By this radiance, my child, I swear, by this bright orb which sees and hears us now, that from this being which you now behold, and which rules the world, you have your origin, child of the Sun!” (Ovid Metamorphoses, Book 1, trans. Martin).

“The wise see in their heart, in their spirit the bird anointed with the magic of Asura. The poets see him inside the ocean; the sages seek the footprints of his rays. The bird carries in his heart Speech that the divine youth spoke of inside the womb. The poets guard this revelation that shines like the sun in the footprint of Order. I have seen the cowherd who never tires, moving to and fro along the paths. Clothing himself in those that move towards the same center but spread apart, he rolls on and on inside the worlds” (Rig Veda 10.177, trans. Doniger).

Introduction

Though laid near in clear and simple words, Phoebus’s truth is difficult to grasp. Consider the injunction “Know Thyself”/ “Γνωθι σαυτον” emblazoned in gold on the forecourt of Apollo’s Temple at Delphi. Two straightforward words:

“Know”.

“Thyself”.

Yet the god’s command could easily take lifetimes to understand, much less fulfill.

One might be tempted to think that we would, in our self-obsessed age, be closer to satisfying the far shooter’s demand than the Greeks to whom it was first delivered. Have we not been weened on Polonius’s dictum, “to thine own self be true” (Hamlet 1.3) and sung ourselves since the days of Whitman?¹ Indeed, uncontent to sound our barbaric yawps over the roofs of the world, we have managed to screech ourselves into a variety of virtual ones. We have invented the field of psychotherapy to fabricate then dissect our individual neuroses, traumas, and personal histories, and provide us with “proper” diagnostic labels for our afflictions, labels we pin with pride as identities to be exhibited like rare insects on display. We have invented life-coaching to free us from limiting beliefs and help us to awaken the giants within. And we have invented marketing and the concept of the personal brand to commodify ourselves and connect with our own unique “tribe” (i.e. niche market). Given the time and attention thus devoted to the cultivation of the modern self, one might believe us closer to self-knowledge than our ancestors. Yet we aren’t, and, deep down, we know we aren’t. We remain as much an enigma to ourselves as ever,² and, by making our subjectivity into an object (whether it be one of the diseases of the psychotherapists, the comic book characters of the life coaches, or the commodities of the marketers), we have grown only yet more alienated from ourselves.

Despite our culture’s obsession with self-development, the ancient Greeks may have been in a better position to know themselves than we. To them, Apollo’s demand for self-knowledge would not have been seen as an injunction to articulate an idiosyncratic personality with its unique preferences and desires, but rather as a call to recognize the kind of being that one is. To live well, for the Greeks, is to live virtuously, to live with ἀρετή. But different kinds of beings have different virtues in virtue of their different natures. An excellent knife cuts well, and an excellent horse runs well, but it would be foolish to judge a horse as defective because it can’t slice bread. The ἀρετή of each thing depends on the kind of thing that it is. So, to flourish as humans, we must know ourselves, know what man is. When understood in this manner, the command to “Know Thyself” correlates with the command inscribed next to it at Delphi: “Nothing in Excess”.³ To know the kind of being you are is to keep within your bounds, and for us mortals, the dying ones, this primarily means avoiding the hubris of seeking what belongs only to the deathless gods, a life of unmixed good.⁴ Such a view is expressed in the famous passage about Zeus’s two urns in Book 24 of the Iliad. In it, Achilles tries to comfort king Priam by declaring:

“Such is the way the gods spun life for unfortunate mortals, that we live in unhappiness, but the gods themselves have no sorrows. There are two urns that stand on the door-sill of Zeus. They are unlike for the gifts they bestow: an urn of evils, an urn of blessings. If Zeus who delights in thunder mingles these and bestows them on man, he shifts, and moves now in evil, again in good fortune. But when Zeus bestows from the urn of sorrows, he makes a failure of man, and the evil hunger drives him over the shining earth, and he wanders respected neither of gods nor mortals” (Homer, Iliad XXIV, trans. Lattimore).

The best mortals can hope for is a mixed life of joy and sorrow; a life of unmixed good belongs only to the gods.

But problems remain even for this more classical approach carrying out Apollo’s injunction, since man’s being remains problematic. Into what are we inquiring in the question “what is man?” and, more fundamentally, what do we mean by the more fundamental question silently carried within it: “what is”? The classical view presupposes that the question “what is man” can be answered by identifying the appropriate natural kind to which he belongs. Man is, for example, a featherless biped, a rational animal, a political animal, a creation made in the image of God, a microcosm of the macrocosm, etc. But this strategy presupposes that Being can be hacked apart into natural kinds, that each being has an essential nature that falls under a natural kind, and that the best way of understanding Being and beings is to subsume beings under their corresponding natural kinds. But once we start examining these presuppositions in more detail, we see that they are far from obvious, and we are forced to address the question of Being head on. Heidegger, the twentieth century philosopher who perhaps more than any other forcefully put this question to the modern world, articulated the paradox as follows:

“Let us imagine … that this inconspicuous little ‘is’ could not be thought. What would become of our stay in the world, if this firm and constantly affirmed ‘is’ were denied us?

And yet, to make clear what ‘to be’ says we need only point to some being—a mountain, a house lying before us, a tree standing there. What do we point out when we help ourselves by such indications? We indicate a being, of course; but strictly speaking the indication comes to rest on the mountain, the house, the tree. Now we imagine that we have the answer to precisely what is still in question. For we do not, after all, inquire about a being as mountain, as house, as tree, as though we wanted to climb a mountain, move into a house, or plant a tree. We inquire about the mountain, about the house, about the tree as a given being, in order to give thought to the being of the mountain, the being of the house, the being of the tree.

We notice at once, it is true, that being is not attached to the mountain somewhere, or stuck to the house, or hanging from the tree. We notice, thus, the problematic that is designated with ‘being.’ Our question therefore becomes more questioning” (Heidegger, What is Called Thinking, 225-226).

Here Heidegger points to our tendency to explicate the nature of Being by furnishing a set of particular beings. We act as if this gesture explains how beings have their Being and what Being is, but Heidegger reveals that it does no such thing. When we point to a mountain, house, or tree, it’s not like their Being is stuck to them somewhere like a post-it note. Heidegger sees the history of Metaphysics, a history he takes to culminate in the rise of modern science and technology, as a prolonged attempt to avoid this question of Being.⁵ Yet the question, argues Heidegger, was asked at the very outset of what has come to be seen as Western metaphysics by the strange figure of Parmenides.⁶ We have largely ignored the man and his uncanny (unheimliche) message for all these years, since they challenge us too profoundly.⁷

The Conventional Story

Parmenides and the city of Elea have been, for the most part, elided from the current curriculum Western philosophy.⁸ If you were to be lucky enough to encounter them at all, you would probably hear something similar to the story I was told early in my philosophical education. According to this story, the city of Elea is famous for producing the so called Eleatic school of philosophy, of which Parmenides, Zeno, and Melissus are the chief representatives. And “The Eleatic worldview” promoted by this school denied “change and plurality” (Sedley, Parmenides and Melissus in the Cambridge Companion to Early Greek Philosophy, 113) by “ignoring perceptual appearances” and pursing instead a “rationalistic—i.e. a strictly logical—approach” (Calogero and Starkey, Eleaticism in Encyclopedia Britannica). Likewise, Parmenides’ importance is said to lie in being the primary exponent of this Eleatic position. Bertrand Russell articulates this standard narrative when he maintains in his popular A History of Western Philosophy that “what makes Parmenides historically important is that he invented a form of metaphysical argument that, in one form or another, is to be found in most subsequent metaphysicians down to and including Hegel. He is often said to have invented logic, but what he really invented was metaphysics based on logic.” This narrative is repeated in many other contemporary introductions to Parmenides’ thought. The Encyclopedia Britannica entry on Eleaticism for example, maintains that Parmenides, by eschewing the senses and relying on pure logic, is “the father of pure ontology” (Calogero and Starkey), and the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on Parmenides, which is in other respects more nuanced, nonetheless concludes by presenting him as the founder of an ontology sundered from theology.

“If Xenophanes can be seen as a founder of rational theology, then Parmenides’ distinction among the principal modes of being and his derivation of the attributes that must belong to what must be, simply as such, qualify him to be seen as the founder of metaphysics or ontology as a domain of inquiry distinct from theology” (Palmer, Parmenides in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy).

Kirk and Raven, likewise, present this position in their book The Presocratic Philosophers. In it, they claim that Parmenides’ Way of Truth “presents an unprecedented exercise in logical deduction: starting from the premise esti, ‘it is’, –in much the same way as Descartes started from the premise ‘cogito’—Parmenides proceeds, by the sole use of reason unaided by the senses, to deduce all that can be known about Being, and he ends by denying any truthful validity to the senses or any reality to what they appear to perceive” (266).

After thus setting forth the importance of Parmenides’ work, the instructor committed to the standard narrative will then, with a smirk, cursorily sketch some of Parmenides’ allegedly deductive arguments in order to dismiss them, showing how they turn on fundamental confusions between the existential and predicative uses of the word “is” and between de dicto and de re necessity. The lesson will then likely conclude by absolving Parmenides from his muddled thinking by pointing out that he was attempting to philosophize in an archaic age before the development of the “sophisticated” conceptual tools of analytic philosophy.⁹ At this point Parmenides is safely consigned to dustbin of history, never to be thought of again.

Yet, despite its popularity, the conventional story about Parmenides is misleading, and, as I shall argue, all of its main claims are false. Elea’s significance for the history of Western philosophy transcends being a mere location for the development of a so-called doctrine of Eleatic Monism, and Parmenides’ significance transcends being the spokesman of such a doctrine. Nor did Parmenides attempt to establish a rationalist metaphysics through deductive inference.¹⁰ Rather, both Elea and Parmenides are substantially weirder than we commonly assume, and their presence in the history of Western philosophy injects an irreducible element of high-strangeness into the very foundations of Western culture and thought.

In what follows I shall argue that Parmenides was a skilled shaman and experiencer and that his philosophical poem On Nature is best understood as an transcendental phenomenology of two forms of consciousness, with one section, the Way of Truth, focusing on the ecstatic experience of non-ordinary reality, and the other, the Way of Opinion, focusing on the everyday experience of ordinary reality.

The Strange Histories of Elea and Parmenides

Elea

The story of Parmenides is bound up with the history of the city of Elea, a history stranger and vastly more interesting than what is depicted in the standard narrative. Classicist, Peter Kingsley has collected the relevant historical data to show how remarkable Elea was. It was established as a colony of the Phocaeans, the people of Phocaea. The name “Phocaea” means city of seals,¹¹ the word for seal being φώκη, and Kingsley points out that seals had a special significance in Greek imagination. They were thought to be “the ideal amphibian: dwellers in two worlds”, equally at home on land and at sea,¹² magical beings capable of changing their shape and opening and closing the ocean’s doors.¹³ This, perhaps is why Homer declares them dear to Thetis “the sea’s lovely lady” and chief of the Nereids, and associates them with Proteus, the Old man of the Sea (Odyssey IV.404, and 451).

The Phocaeans, a great sea-faring people, lived up to their name. Like the Vikings of more recent times, they were explorers who ventured further than anyone thought possible at the time.¹⁴ Herodotus declares that “the Phocaeans were the earliest Greeks to make long voyages by sea; they opened up the Adriatic, Tyrrhenia, Iberia, and Tartessus” (Histories, I.163). Likewise, Phocaean accounts of their voyages up the coast of Spain contain our oldest references to England and Ireland.¹⁵ The 6^th century explorer Euthemenes voyaged from the Phocaean colony in Massalia, today’s Marseilles, out past the Straight of Gibraltar and down the coast of Africa to at least the Senegal, writing down scrupulously detailed observations about his journey.¹⁶ And Pytheas, “the greatest Greek explorer who ever lived”¹⁷ left Massalia and traveled north instead of south. He passed Britain, Ireland, and Scotland and arrived at “the solid sea” of the Arctic Circle,¹⁸ again, taking exacting measurements,¹⁹ measurements so precise that later astronomers used them to map the world.²⁰

And this was not the end of all the Phocaeans’ exploring. The city of Phocaea was located on the coast of western Anatolia, in what is today Turkey. It lay on the western end of a great caravan route, the so called ‘royal road’, connecting East and West,²¹ and the Phocaeans were intimately involved with the peoples and cultures of the East. For example, the sculptor Telephanes worked “for two generations of Persian kings,”²² and the Phocaeans were so heavily involved in trade with Egypt that they set up their own depots and places of worship there. According to Kingsley, for the Phocaeans, “Egypt wasn’t just some foreign land. It was part of the world they knew and lived and worked in.”²³

For further evidence of the extensive cultural exchange in the region, Kingsley points to the example of the nearby island of Samos, the home of Pythagoras. Legends speak of Pythagoras himself as a world traveler, journeying to Egypt, Phoenicia, Persia, Babylonia, and India to learn wisdom.²⁴ And Kingsley argues that these legends are not implausible given what we know of the culture at the time. Pythagoras’s father was said to have been a gem engraver, a profession which would have required extensive travel. As a gem engraver, he would have needed to learn the skills of engraving from Phoenicia and get his supplies from the East.²⁵ Additionally, there are the otherwise inexplicable reports of Pythagoras wearing pants, unusual attire in Greece, but customary in Persia.²⁶ And, furthermore, the Samian gem engraver, sculptor, and architect, Theodorus, who lived at the same time as Pythagoras, studied in Egypt and worked for the King of Persia. According to Kingsley, “there are good reasons to link him with some of the finest architecture produced right in the heart of ancient Persia itself.”²⁷ And further evidence for cultural syncretism can also be found in the famous temple of Hera at Samos, the Heraion. Kingsley points out that its 6^th century BC overhaul was “based on Egyptian models”²⁸ and that the offerings brought to it came from all over the world, including Bronze images from “the cult of Gula, the Babylonian goddess of healing”²⁹ and Peacocks from India.³⁰ Thus, despite the caricature of an insular Greece which somehow managed to create Western civilization ex nihilo, there was, in fact, a vital connection between East and West from the very beginnings of Western culture, especially among peoples like the Samians and Phocaeans.³¹

The Phocaeans were thus a remarkable people, and the story of the founding of Elea was no less remarkable. Indeed, the story of Elea’s founding is worthy of an epic and feels as if it could have come straight out of the Aeneid. Herodotus relates how, facing the aggressive expansion of the Persian Empire, the Phocaeans fortified their city with an elaborate wall, thanks to a generous gift from the Tartessian king Arganthonius with whom they were on good terms (Histories, I.163). But, since the Persians had by then discovered how to scale such walls by amassing earthworks outside them, the strategy proved to be futile (Histories, I.162). So, when Harpagus, general of the Persian armies, laid siege to their city and demanded their surrender, the Phocaeans undertook a more radical strategy of defending their city; they abandoned it. Herodotus narrates the event as follows:

“The Phocaeans… could not abide the thought of being enslaved and they requested a single day to debate the matter, after which they would give him their reply; they also asked him to pull his army back from the wall while they were deliberating. Harpagus gave them permission to go ahead with their deliberations, despite the fact that he was, as he told them, well aware of what they intended to do. So while Harpagus led his army away from the wall, the Phocaeans launched their penteconters [a type of ship], put their womenfolk, children, and all their personal effects on board, along with the statues and other dedicatory offerings from their sanctuaries, except those which were made out of bronze or stone or were paintings—anyway, once everything else was on board they embarked themselves and sailed to Chios. So the Persians gained control of a Phocaea that was emptied of men” (Histories I.164).

Thus, the Phocaeans, like the Trojans of Virgilian myth who abandoned the embers of a fallen Troy and ventured forth to found Rome, left the empty corpse of their city to the Persians while carrying with them its living spirit—its customs and its gods. This is why Herodotus highlights the fact that the Phocaeans made sure to take along all the “statues and dedicatory offerings from their sanctuaries” that they could carry. “They were”, as Kingsley observes, an “extremely conservative people”³² to whom their religion was of the upmost importance. They thus would have seen the preservation of their gods and sacred artifacts as a matter worthy of staking their lives on.

Once they arrived in Chios, the Phocaeans attempted to set up a new home by purchasing some islands in the area, the Oenussae, from the native Chians. But the Chians, knowing they were accomplished traders and fearing the economic competition they would bring, refused to sell (I.164). The Phocaeans were thus forced to set sail again. Remembering a colony their people had founded on Cyrnus (Corsica) twenty years earlier “on the advice of an oracle” (Ibid), they decided to set forth for it. But, before leaving for Cyrnus, they first stopped at Phocaea to kill the Persian contingent that had been stationed there, and, after they had done this, they “called down terrible curses on any of their number who stayed behind and did not take part in the expedition” (I. 165). They then sunk a piece of iron into the sea and vowed that they would not return home until the iron floated (Ibid). Yet, despite their vows and curses, the yearning for home proved to be too much for most of them. When the time came for them to depart from Chios for Cyrnus, “over half of their fellow citizens were so overcome by longing and sorrow for the city and the customs of their native land that they broke their promises and sailed back to Phocaea. The ones who kept their promises, however, set sail for the Oenussae” (Ibid.).

From there they sailed to Cyrnus, reconnected with their people, “and established their sanctuaries there” (1.166). They remained there for five years, but made enemies by “continually raiding all the local settlements”, proving to be enough of a problem that the Tyrrhenians and Carthogenians joined forces to eliminate them (Ibid). They engaged in combat, and the Phocaeans won the battle but lost the war, being so crippled by the melee that they could not withstand another engagement given that “they lost forty of their own ships and the twenty which survived had bent rams and so were unfit for active service” (Ibid).

So the Phocaeans were once more forced to gather their women, children, and gods and set sail. This time they sailed for Rhegium. They were, at this point, likely demoralized and confused. It had seemed they had done everything possible to preserve their culture, yet they continued to meet defeat after defeat. Even Apollo’s oracle appeared to have misled them in the past when it had told them to found a colony on Cyrnus. Yet, amid their doubt and despair, they encountered a wise man from Poseidonia who reinterpreted the oracle for them and restored their spirits.³³ He told them that the oracle had not, in fact, directed them to establish a colony on the island of Cyrnus, but for the hero Cyrnus. Kingsley observes that both possibilities are conveyed by the very same words in Greek. “Cyrnus may have been a name for Corsica but it was also the name of a mythical hero, a hero who had been the son of the greatest hero of all time—Heracles. The ‘on’ and the ‘for’: they’re different words in English, but ancient Greek was much more compact. One word in Greek often meant the same as two or three words in another language. It easily allowed for double meanings, even in everyday talk” (In the Dark Places of Wisdom, 23).

Once the Phocaeans realized the true meaning of the oracle, they established the city of Elea (1.167).³⁴ This, then, is the story of Elea’s founding and constitutes the true beginnings of Eleatic philosophy. It is a story of a daring and heroic people who tried desperately to preserve their traditions and religious practices, and, despite all indications to the contrary, miraculously succeeded.

Parmenides of Elea

We don’t know many of the details of Parmenides life, but the few we can gather suggest a striking portrait. As far as we can tell, Parmenides was likely among the first children born in Elea after its founding.³⁵ He was said to be the son of Pyres (P6a)³⁶ and to have been born into a wealthy noble family. Diogenes Laërtius recounts that Parmenides first studied with Xenophanes, known to the ancients as a great “castigator” (ἐπικόπτην) and “perverter of Homer” (Ὁμηραπάτην) on account of his biting critique of poetic religion, and as an opponent of Pythagoras (Lives 9.2.18 trans. Hicks).³⁷ But Parmenides then rejected Xenophanes, and turned instead to the Pythagorean Ameinias, “a poor man but of a noble character (καλὸς κἀγαθός)”, who better conformed to his own nascent philosophical outlook (P8 Laks and Most). According to Diogenes, himself citing an account from Sotion:

“It was this man [Ameinias] that he [Parmenides] preferred to follow, and when he died he founded a heroic shrine for him, as he was of noble birth and wealth, and it was by Ameinias, and not by Xenophanes, that he was guided toward stillness (ἡσυχία)” (P8 trans. Laks and Most, modified).

Diogenes here identifies two crucial aspects of Parmenides philosophical education that likely seem strange to us today. First, he declares that Parmenides was so affected by Ameinias’ teaching that he established a heroic shrine to him after he died. This would have been a lavish act. Heroes, in the ancient Greek world, were believed to be men who had shed their mortality and taken up a divine status.³⁸ Though below the Olympian gods, heroes were nonetheless immortal, and possessed numinal power to help and to harm.³⁹ For example, the warrior prophet Amphiaraus, one of the seven against Thebes, was said to have been swallowed alive by the earth during that famous battle. The Thebans, and later the Athenians, subsequently worshiped him as a hero, and he was thought to heal and give oracles to those who slept at his shrine.⁴⁰ So, in setting up a hero’s shrine for Ameinias, Parmenides was attributing a more than human status to his teacher.⁴¹ Indeed, given the nature of hero cults, it is likely that Parmenides would have believed himself to have remained in communication with Ameinias after his death. This likely strikes us as bizarre, since we can’t conceive of contact with the spirit world as playing any role whatsoever in philosophical education. Indeed, seances and fortune telling are frequently used as stock examples of bad epistemic practices in introductions to epistemology. Yet, given that such experiences shaped fundamental aspects of Parmenides’ philosophical outlook, we must take them seriously if we are to understand his work.

Diognenes’ second remark is likely just as puzzling to today’s readers. He claims it was because Ameinias taught him stillness (ἡσυχία) that Parmenides so admired him. Again, this sentiment is alien to the contemporary mind. We praise teachers of philosophy for their dynamic argumentation and sharpness of wit, not stillness and silence. Indeed, stillness strikes us more as a religious practice than a philosophical one, as is suggested by even the name Hesychasm, a tradition of Orthodox Christian mysticism. Yet, for Parmenides, the learning of silence was essential to philosophical education, and, so, on account of teaching him this silence, he erected for Ameinias a heroic shrine. These strange facts suggest that the philosophy practiced by Parmenides, the reputed founder of Western metaphysics, differs radically from the philosophy practiced today.⁴²

Archaeological discoveries in the twentieth century shed further light on Parmenides and his alien philosophy.From 1958 to 1962, in an unusual stroke of good fortune for the study of ancient philosophy, a series of marble inscriptions dating back to the first century AD were discovered in the region corresponding to ancient Elea which provide additional evidence regarding who Parmenides was and the kind of philosophy he practiced.

One of these inscriptions reads: Parmeneides son of Pyres Ouliades Physikos (P23).⁴³ Three significant facts stand out in this inscription. First, Kingsley points out that the spelling Parmeneides had previously been conjectured to be the original spelling spelling of Parmenides’ name. So, finding it here both vindicates that hypothesis and evinces that the inscription preserves an older tradition.⁴⁴ This, paired with the extremely conservative nature of Phocaean culture, gives us reason to believe that these inscriptions safeguard early information about Parmenides despite their later date. Next, the term Ouliades, a term which Kingsley traces back to the Anatolian region of Caria south of Phocaea,⁴⁵ means “son of Oulios”, a name for Apollo that designates his role as healer. Paradoxically, the adjective oulios, means “deadly” but also signifies Apollo’s healing power.⁴⁶ For example, Strabo records that “Both Milesians and Delians invoke an Apollo ‘Ulius,’ that is, as god of ‘health and healing,’ for the verb ‘ulein’ means ‘to be healthy’; whence the noun ‘ule’ and salutation, ‘both health and great joy to thee’; for Apollo is the god of healing” (Strabo, Geography, 14.1.6 trans. Jones). And, finally, the term Physikos can mean “inquirer into nature, or natural philosopher”, since it is used as a common designation for philosophers in the presocratic era,⁴⁷ but it also stands at the root of our concepts of the physicist and the physician.⁴⁸ According to Kingsley, “a physikos was someone who’s concerned with the basic principles of existence, who’s able to touch the bare bones of what things are—and also use the knowledge that he finds” (Dark Places, 142). The knowledge of the physikos, thus, concerned healing, “getting one’s life in order on every possible level and helping other people get their lives in order as well” (Ibid., 144). For such healers, claims Kingsley, “there’s no real healing until you come to discover what you are behind the world of the senses” (Ibid).

The emphasis on healing becomes even more pronounced in the other inscriptions found at the site. These additional busts were dedicated to other Oulis healers practicing in the lineage of Parmenides. The date of each is identified by the number of years since Parmenides’ passing, thus indicating that these healers revered Parmenides as their own founding hero. Just as Parmenides had done for Ameinius, so did they for Parmenides.⁴⁹

These inscriptions include two additional epithets—pholarchos and iatromantis—that shed additional light on the kind of healing Parmenides practiced. Kingsley explains that the term pholarchos is a combination of pholeos, a cave, lair, or den where animals hibernate, and archos, lord or chief.⁵⁰ The term pholarchos thus means “lord of the lair.” According to Kingsley, to be or to lie in a lair would thus have meant to enter “a state of suspended animation”⁵¹ , and, in the ancient world, one method of healing in particular employed such states, the method of incubation. Incubation was the practice wherein the sick would trek to holy sites and lay down to ‘sleep’ therein so as to enter an altered state of consciousness in the hopes that the deity or hero who resided there would visit them and either heal them directly or instruct them on how to heal.⁵² Even the later Neoplatonist philosopher Iamblichus would continue to attest to the widespread practice of incubation: “In Asclepius’s sanctuaries, diseases are arrested by divine dreams, and, because of the structure of nocturnal apparitions, the medical art has arisen from sacred dreams” (De Mysteriis 3.3 trans. Clarke, Dillon, and Hershbell).

In the ancient world, the entities people encountered through incubation were not taken to be merely subjective dream figures, but were considered to be objectively real. For example, when describing incubation, the poet Pindar relates the appearance of what in contemporary spiritualism would be called an aport, a physical materialization of an object. He relates the story of Belapheron and how he went to sleep at Athena’s shrine, met with her, and upon waking found a golden bridle she had left for him. He recounts this episode in the 13^th Olympian Ode as follows:

[Bellapheron] “once suffered much indeed in his yearning/ to yoke Pegasos, the snaky Gorgon’s/ son, beside the spring, / until, that is, the maiden Pallas brought him the bridle/ with the golden bands, when his dream suddenly became/ reality and she spoke, ‘are you asleep, Prince of Aiolos’ race?/ Come, take this horse charm,/ and, sacrificing a white bull,/ show it to your father, the Horsetamer.’/ So much did the maiden of the dark aegis/ seem to say to him as he slept/ in the darkness, and he leapt to his feet./ He took the marvel that lay beside him and gladly sought out the local seer,/ the son of Koiranos, to whom he revealed the entire/ outcome of the affair, how he slept the night on the/ goddess’ alter at the bidding of that seer’s oracle,/ and how the very daughter/ of Zeus whose spear is the thunderbolt gave him/ the spirit-taming gold./ The seer commanded him to heed the dream/ as quickly as possible, and, upon sacrificing/ a strong-footed victim to the mighty Earthholder,/ to erect at once an alter to Athena Hippia./ The gods’ power easily brings into being even/ what one would swear is impossible and beyond hope” (Pindar, Olympian Odes, 13.62-84. trans. Race).

In this story of incubation, Pindar declares that the dream world becomes reality. Athena literally appears before Belapheron, speaks audible words to him, and leaves a golden bridle for him as a physical gift. And, as was the case in incubatory practices, Belapheron then goes to a seer to help him understand his experience.

Iamblichus similarly attests to the reality of such encounters when he distinguishes between divine, or “god sent” dreams, from ordinary ones.⁵³ Such dreams do not occur in the standard way.

“On the contrary, either when sleep departs, just as we are awakening, it is possible to hear a sudden voice guiding us about things to be done, or the voices are heard between waking and going to sleep, or even when wholly awake. And sometimes an intangible and incorporeal spirit encircles those lying down, so that there is no visual perception of it, but some other awareness and self-consciousness. When entering, it makes a whooshing sound, and diffuses itself in all directions without any contact, and it does wondrous works by way of freeing both soul and body from their sufferings. At other times, however, when a light shines brightly and peacefully, not only is the sight of the eye possessed, but closed up after previously being quite open. And the other senses are awake and consciously aware of how the gods shine forth in the light, and with a clear understanding they both hear what they say, and know what they do. This is observed even more fully when the sight is active and also the mind, with full vigor, understands the things done, and there is a response at the same time in those observing.

These dreams, then, being numerous and quite different, do not resemble anything human. But dream-sleep and possession of the eyes, a seizure similar to a blackout, a state between sleep and wakefulness, and presently a stirring or complete wakefulness, all of these are divine and fit for reception of the gods, and they are sent by the gods themselves, and such things precede it, a part of the divine epiphany” (De Mysteriis 3.2 trans. Clarke, Dillon, and Hershbell).

Here Iambichus describes encounters with the gods that occur not only in dreams, but also in altered states of consciousness between sleep and wakefulness and “even when wholly awake”. Sometimes these entities are perceived with a subtle sense, but other times they are encountered sensibly. They make a “whooshing”, “piping”, or “hissing” sound (ῥοῖζος)⁵⁴ upon entering and have direct healing effects on the mind and body. The eyes behold a bright light, and the senses perceive how entities shine forth in that light and can discern what they speak and what they do. And these interactions can occur, claims Iamblichus, when the mind is in a state of “full vigor” and “complete wakefulness”.

Likewise Aristides, a man who sought healing through incubation at Aesclepius’ Epidaurian Temple, provides a similar testimony concerning the reality of these encounters.⁵⁵ Aristides, speaking of how he was provided with a remedy for his illness, attests:

“It [the remedy] was revealed in the clearest way possible, just as countless other things also made the presence of the god manifest. For I seemed almost to touch him and to perceive that he himself was coming, and to be halfway between sleep and waking and to want to get the power of vision and to be anxious lest he depart beforehand, and to have turned my ears to listen, sometimes as in a dream, sometimes as in a waking vision, and my hair was standing on end and tears of joy (came forth), and the weight of knowledge was no burden—what man could even set these things forth in words? But if he is one of the initiates, then he knows and understands” (Aristides, Oratio XLVII, 31-35, entry 417 in Edestein, Aesclepius: A Collection and Interpretation of the Testimonies, p. 210-211).

Again, Aristides reports a real encounter with a spiritual intelligence, not a mere dream. The “presence of the god” is manifest “in the clearest way possible”. The encounter is tactual, as he almost touches the god, and his hairs stand on end. And it occurs not in sleep, but in a state “halfway between sleep and waking”, and even at times “in a waking vision.” These sorts of cases provide ample evidence for the fact that the people who engaged in incubation believed themselves to be in contact with intelligent non-human entities who were capable of communicating with and healing them.

One skill is essential to the practice of incubation, stillness (‘ησυχια), the skill Parmenides learned from Ameineas the Pythagorean. According to Kingsley,

“What’s important [in incubation] is that you would do absolutely nothing. The point came when you wouldn’t struggle or make an effort. You’d just have to surrender to your condition. You would lie down as if you were dead; wait without eating or moving, sometimes for days at a time. And you’d wait for healing to come from somewhere else, from another level of awareness and another level of being” (Dark Places, 80).

This brings us to the term pholarchos. A pholarchos, or lord of the lair, is one who would oversee this process. Strabo describes some of the activities of these lords of the lair when talking about the Charonium (or entrance to the underworld) in Caria, an Anatolian region south of Phocaea.⁵⁶ Strabo explains:

“On the road between the Tralleis and Nysa is a village of the Nysaeans, not far from the city, Acharaca, where is the Plutonium, with a costly sacred precinct and a shrine to Pluto and Core [Persephone], and also the Charonium, a cave that lies above the sacred precinct, by nature wonderful; for they say that those who are diseased and give heed to the cures prescribed by these gods resort thither and live in the village near the cave among the experienced priests, who on their behalf sleep in the cave and through dreams prescribe cures. These are also the men who invoke the healing power of the gods. And they often bring the sick into the cave and leave them there, to remain in stillness (‘ησυχια), like animals in their lurking-holes (φωλεός), without food for many days. And sometimes the sick give heed also to their own dreams, but still they use those other men, as priests to initiate them into the mysteries and to counsel them. To all others the place is forbidden and deadly” (Strabo, Geography, 14.1.44 trans. Jones modified).

The lords of the lair are thus vital to the process of incubation. Without them, the holy site would remain “forbidden and deadly.” Strabo depicts these priests as ministering in several ways. Sometimes they themselves ‘sleep’ in the cave so as to converse with entities who can then prescribe cures for the sick or channel their healing powers through the priests. Other times, they bring the sick into the cave and supervise them as they lie without food or water for several days, hoping for a personal encounter with the entities. If they succeed in making contact, the priests will then counsel them and help them interpret their experience. The term “pholarchos” thus indicates that healers working in the lineage of Parmenides, in order to teach and to heal, routinely employed non-ordinary states of consciousness and claimed to connect with strange beings normally invisible to us.

The second major title contained in the inscriptions at Elea, iatromantis, has similar implications. The term “ἰατρόμαντις” is derived from “ἰατρός”, meaning healer, and “μάντις” meaning prophet, and so means “healing prophet”. According to Kingsley, these healing prophets healed specifically through their prophecy, their ability “to contact and then talk from another level of consciousness.”⁵⁷ In ancient Greek culture, “prophecy was what came first—the ability to look behind the scenes, see what others don’t. The healing followed as a matter of course.”⁵⁸ In short, an ἰατρόμαντις is what today would be called a shamanic healer. A shaman, according to Mircea Eliade’s classical definition, is a “great master of ecstasy”. Shamans have mastered the techniques of ecstasy, techniques which allow them to enter expanded states of awareness. In these states, they perceive and and act within a different world than the one confronting ordinary consciousness, and, in that other world, they make contact with beings normally invisible to the naked eye. Shamans then use the power conferred by these beings to heal their people.⁵⁹ Eliade explains:

Shamans are “separated from the rest of the community by the intensity of their own religious experience. In other words, it would be more correct to class shamanism among the mysticisms than with what is commonly called a religion…. In contrast to the state of affairs in Christianity…, people who profess to be shamanists accord considerable importance to the ecstatic experiences of their shamans; these experiences concern them personally and immediately; for it is the shamans who, by their trances, cure them, accompany their dead to the ‘realm of shades,’ and serve as mediators between them and their gods, celestial or infernal, greater or lesser. This small mystical elite not only directs the community’s religious life but, as it were, guards its ‘soul.’ The shaman is the great specialist in the human soul; he alone ‘sees’ it, for he knows its ‘form’ and destiny” (Eliade, Shamanism, 8).

The term ἰατρόμαντις thus places Parmenides, and those who followed him, in the company of other Greek shamanic figures such as Abaris the Hyperborean, Aristeas, Hermotimus of Clazomenae, Epimenides of Crete, Pythagoras, and Empedocles, all of whom performed miraculous feats in virtue of their connection to an invisible realm.

In this manner, twentieth century discoveries reveal Parmenides as an ouliades, a son of Apollo, a pholarchus, a lord of a lair and master of the process of incubation, and an iatromantis, a shamanic healer priest. All of these terms are interconnected in that they imply a form consciousness that differs from ordinary consciousness and present a world distinct from the ordinary world.⁶⁰

Anthropologist Michael Harner has called this different form of consciousness the Shamanic State of Consciousness, or (SSC), and distinguished it from the Ordinary State of Consciousness, or (OSC). Each of these states reveals a corresponding world: The ordinary world, or what Carlos Casteneda termed “ordinary reality”, for OSC, and the non-ordinary world, or “non-ordinary reality”, for SSC. Harner explains:

“‘Fantasy’ can be said to be a term applied by a person in the OSC to what is experienced in the SSC. Conversely, a person in the SSC may perceive the experiences of the OSC to be illusory in SSC terms. Both are right, as viewed from their own particular states of consciousness…. The myth of the SSC is ordinary reality; and the myth of the OSC is non-ordinary reality” (Harner, Way of the Shaman).

Understanding this historical context of Parmenides’ life and thought will allow us to apprehend core components of his philosophy that otherwise remain elusive.

Parmenides’ Work

Parmenides is said to have written a single philosophical work which has come to be called “On Nature”, though this title is almost surely a later invention. This work was not composed in prose, but in hexameter verse, the language of Homer, Hesiod, and the Delphic Oracle.⁶¹ Parmenides thus delivered his philosophy as an oracular poem, rather than as the kind treatise we are accustomed to today. Unfortunately, as with the works of other presocratic philosophers, the extant fragments of this poem have been preserved only in quotations from later authors.

The poem itself is traditionally divided into three sections: i) a proem which describes Parmenides’ journey to meet an unnamed goddess, ii) a section in which this goddess discloses to Parmenides the unshakable heart of truth, and iii) a section in which she recounts the opinions of mortals (in whom there is no true faith). The first two sections are better preserved than the third, the contents of which must largely be pieced together from summaries of later authors rather than from direct quotations. Let’s examine each of these sections in turn.

Proem

Parmenides begins with a proem wherein he recounts his journey through the sky to the house of an unnamed goddess who greets him kindly and gives him a message to convey to the world. It goes as follows:

“The mares that carry me as far as spirit (θυμός) might reach, were bringing me onward, after having led me and set me down on the daimon’s many-worded road, which carries through all towns the man who knows (εἰδότα φῶτα). It was on this road that I was being carried: for on it the much-knowing horses were carrying me, straining at the chariot, and maidens (κουραί) were leading the way. The axle blazing in the naves let loose the loud, far reaching call of a flute (σύριγγος) (for it was being driven on by two whirling wheels, one on each side), when the maidens of the Sun (ἡλιάδες κουραί) hastened to escort me, after they had left behind the palace of Night towards the light and had thrust the veils away from their heads with their hands.

That is where the gate of the paths of Night and Day is, and a lintel and a stone threshold hold it on both sides. Itself ethereal, it is occupied by great doors, and much-punishing Justice holds its alternating keys. The maidens, speaking gently to her with mild words,⁶² wisely persuaded her to thrust quickly back for them the bolted bar from the gate. And when it flew open it made a gaping chasm (χάσμα) of the doors, after rotating in turn in their pipes (σύριγξιν) the two bronze pivots fastened with pegs and rivets. There, through them, the maidens guided the chariot and horses straight along the way. And the goddess received me graciously, grasped my right hand in her own hand, and uttered an oracle,⁶³ addressing me in this manner:

O Kouros, consort of (συνάορος) deathless charioteers, you who have come to our home by the mares that carry you! Rejoice (χαῖρ᾽)! For it is in no wise an evil fate (μοῖρα κακὴ) that has sent you forth to travel this road (for indeed it is far from mortal men and beyond the trodden path), but Right (Θέμις) and Justice (Δίκη). It is necessary that you learn everything, both the untrembling heart of well-convincing (εὐπείθεος) truth and the opinions of mortal men, in which there is no true faith (πίστις). But nonetheless you will learn these things too: how it is needful for opinings to be acceptable, penetrating all through all” (D4, trans. Laks and Most, modified).

In its broadest outline, Parmenides’ proem depicts a journey in which the author, described as a kouros, or young man, is carried in an otherworldly chariot that blazes brightly and emits a strange piping sound. This chariot is drawn on by horses that are full of knowledge, and the Heliades, the daughters of the Sun, serve as its charioteers and his intimate companions. They carry him onward till they reach the gate to the house of Night and Day which is guarded by Justice. The Heliades entreat her, and she opens the doors for them upon their request. They then escort the kouros across the threshold and into the house. There he is greeted kindly by the mistress of the house, an unnamed goddess, and she tells him that he must learn both the unshakable heart of truth, and the opinions of mortals in whom there is no truth faith.

Poetic Correspondences

The images in the proem are evocative in their own right, but they become even more meaningful when we understand the mythical landscape to which Parmenides alludes. For Parmenides evokes a common mythological universe that would have been familiar to his audience. To begin with, Parmenides’ description of his destination, the house of Night and Day, would have called to mind Hesiod’s depiction of the underworld. According to Hesiod, Tartarus stands below “the roots of the earth and of the barren sea” (Theogony, 726-728, trans. Most), and, like the Parmenidean house of Night and Day which lies far from the trodden paths of men, it lies “at the farthest part of huge earth” (Ibid., 731). And, like the pivots in the gates of the house, the gates of Tartarus are made of bronze (Ibid., 732-733).

Hesiod continues:

“That is where the sources and limits of the dark earth are, and of murky Tartarus, of the barren sea, and of the starry sky, of everything, one after another, distressful, dank, things which even the gods hate: a great chasm (χάσμα), whose bottom one would not reach in a whole long year, once one was inside the gates, but one would be borne hither and thither by one distressful blast after another—it is terrible for the immortal gods as well, this monstrosity; and the terrible houses of dark Night stand there, shrouded in black clouds” (736-745).

This depiction of the underworld as holding the sources and limits of earth and starry sky, calls to mind Parmenides’ description of the gate to the house of day and night which has a stone threshold, but is itself ethereal. And Hesiod’s description of the chasm that would confront one upon passing through the gates echoes Parmenides’ description of the gaping chasm that was created as the doors to the house flew open. Hesiod likewise here locates the houses of Night towards which Parmenides travels in his proem. Hesiod elaborates:

“In front of these, Iapetus’ son [Atlas] holds the broad sky with his head and tireless hands, standing immovable, where Night and Day passing each greet one another as they cross the great bronze threshold. The one is about to go in and the other is going out the door, and never does the house hold them both inside, but always the one goes out from the house and passes over the earth, while the other in turn remaining inside the house waits for the time of her own departure, until it comes. The one holds much seeing light for those on earth, but the other holds Sleep in her hands, the brother of Death—deadly night, shrouded in murky cloud” (746-757).

Here Hesiod describes the same “gate of the paths of Night and Day” mentioned by Parmenides. And he also describes Day and Night’s alternating sequence of departure and arrival, just as Parmenides depicts Justice, the keeper of the gates, as holding “its alternating keys” (κληῗδας ἀμοιβούς).

And Hesiod was not the only ancient author who articulated such a description of the underworld. Laura Steele, for example, drawing on the work of Wolfgang Hempel, has shown how the world of Parmenides’ poem also mirrors elements from Babylonian mythology. According to this mythology, the sun-god Shamash, would retire to his house in the underworld every evening, a house guarded by bolted doors which was watched over by Justice. For example, Steele cites a passage in a Babylonian sunset prayer which reads as follows:

“O Shamash, when you enter heaven’s interior,/ May the pure bolt of heaven greet you, /May the door of heaven salute you./ May Justice, your beloved vizier, bring you straight in” (Cited in Steele, Mesopotamian Elements in the Proem of Parmenides, 585).

The identification of Justice as the gatekeeper of the house is likely grounded in the diurnal alternation between light and darkness, since justice is equated with cosmic order, and one of the most primordial ways we experience that order is through the regular sequence in which day follows night and night follows day.⁶⁴ The poetic tradition of Homer and Hesiod similarly includes Justice (along with her sisters Lawfulness and Peace) as one of the Horae (the Seasons), and declares that together these guard the gates of heaven and Olympus.⁶⁵

The Language of Initiation

Associations with the lower world are further emphasized by the language of initiation running throughout the proem. The terms “kouros” and “the man who knows” were technical terms used in mystery religions to describe those initiated into their rites.⁶⁶ Kingsley, for example, notes that the term “kouros” “was closely connected with initiation. The kouros stands at the borderline between the world of the human and the world of the divine; has access to them both, and is loved and recognized by them both” (Dark Places, 72). The kouros connects to this divine world by undertaking a journey wherein, if he is successful, he will establish a relation with a guardian spirit. Kingsley explains:

“That other world is the world of the gods where the kouros finds a source of nourishment and guidance that nothing in the ordinary world of humans can ever give him; where if he is lucky, divinely protected, he can encounter the divinity who will become his immortal parent and teacher and guide” (Kingsley, Reality, 32).

Likewise, the facts i) that the kouros’s path is identified with the path of the daimon,⁶⁷ ii) that the Heliades utter secret words to allow the kouros to pass the threshold⁶⁸, iii) that the goddess is unnamed,⁶⁹ and iv) that she assures Parmenides that “no evil fate” has sent him,⁷⁰ all would have been associated with mystery rites in the ancient world. A common theme in such rites was, once more, the undertaking of a journey, while alive, to the realm of the dead to secure a better afterlife. According to historian of religion Walter Burkert, “the mysteries, taking from death its terror, are the guarantee of a better fate in the afterworld” (Greek Religion). We see this, for example, in Euripides’ depiction of Hercules as successfully carrying off Cerberus on account of having been initiated into the Eleusinian mysteries. Hercules, in this work, declares that he bested Cerberus “in a fight, for I had been fortunate enough to witness the secret rites of the initiated” (Euripides, Heracles, 613, trans. Coleridge modified). Similarly, the Homeric hymn to Demeter declares:

“Demeter revealed her sacred rites to the kings who give justice…teaching her mysteries to them all, sacred things not to be transgressed, asked about, or uttered: great awe of the gods stops the voice. Blest are earth bound mortals who have seen these rites, but the uninitiate, who has no share in them, never has the same lot when dead in misty darkness” (Homeric Hymn to Demeter, 476-482, trans. Rayor).

Pindar, likewise, espouses this view of the Eleusinian mysteries in a fragment preserved by Clement of Alexandria. In it, Pindar declares, “blessed is he who sees them [i.e. the mysteries] and goes beneath the earth; he knows the end of life and knows its Zeus-given beginning” (Pindar Fragment, 137a trans. Race). And, in the same manner, Sophocles proclaims: “Thrice blessed are those mortals who have seen these rites and thus enter into Hades: for them alone there is life, for the others all is misery” (Fragment 837 trans. Burkert).

The Myth of Phaethon

In addition to its associations with the underworld and initiations, the imagery in Parmenides’ proem would have called to mind a very particular myth⁷¹ for its original audience: the myth of Phaethon.⁷² According to this myth, Phaethon was a young man of divine parentage, the son of the sun god Helios⁷³ and (depending on the version of the story) either a mortal woman or a nymph. One day, Phaethon goes to visit a supposed friend who calls his paternity into question and accuses his mother of deception. Shaken, Phaethon returns home and asks his mother for proof of his divine ancestry. His mother, outraged at the insult from Phaethon’s erstwhile friend, swears that Helios is indeed his father and encourages him to go to him and ask for proof of his legitimate sonship. Phaethon then makes the journey to the House of the Sun and is greeted kindly by his father. He asks his father for some proof of his divine paternity so as to stop the mouths of gossips. Helios accedes to his son’s request and swears by the river Styx that Phaethon shall have as proof anything he desires. Fatefully, Phaethon desires to ride his father’s chariot, the chariot of the Sun. Upon hearing this request, Helios immediately repents of his offer, yet he cannot renege on his promise, since he has sworn by the river Styx. He thus attempts to dissuade his son from undertaking this perilous journey, warning him of the many dangers involved and of how no one besides himself, not even Zeus, is capable of steering his unruly horses through their hazardous course, and exclaiming:

“What you desire is most dangerous! You seek a gift that is too great for you, beyond your strength, beyond your boyish years; your fate is mortal: what you ask for isn’t” (Ovid Metamorphoses, II.54-56, trans. Martin).

Unrelenting, Phaethon, mounts his father’s chariot, and begins to carry the sun up through its diurnal path. Yet he is soon overwhelmed and loses control of the horses, scorching earth and heaven in the process.⁷⁴ In order to prevent the earth from being incinerated, Zeus strikes Phaethon dead with a thunderbolt which hurls him to the earth where he falls into the river Eradnus.⁷⁵ His sisters, the Heliades, come there to mourn him, and they remain so long they transform into poplar trees, their tears turning to amber.

The parallels to Parmenides’ poem are striking. Parmenides, like Phaethon, mounts a chariot through the heavens which carries him all the way back to the house of the sun behind the gates of day and night. Like the chariot of the sun, Parmenides’ chariot blazes brightly, and “the road of the daimon” that Parmenides follows was a name for the sun’s path through the sky (Pindar, Olympian Ode, 7.39). And, finally, the Heliades feature prominently in both tales.

Yet the contrasts between these two stories are also evident and indicate what Parmenides wants to uniquely emphasize in his poem. While Phaethon’s desires lead to destruction, Parmenides’ desires lead to eternal life. He travels as far as his θυμός, his spirit or desire, can reach, and is welcomed kindly by the goddess who opens his eyes to eternal Being. While Phaethon is unsure of his parentage, ignorant of how to steer his father’s chariot, and oblivious to the dangers posed by his actions despite his father’s clear warnings, Parmenides is one who knows. While Phaethon dares greatly and fails, Parmenides dares greatly and succeeds. While Phaethon falls dead to the earth, Parmenides crosses into the underworld while alive. While Phaethon is welcomed by and speaks with the sun god his father and fails to heed his warnings, Parmenides is welcomed by and speaks with an unnamed goddess and presumably accepts her revelations (given that he has delivered them to us). And while the Heliades mourn for their lost brother Phaethon along the Eradnus river, they happily guide Parmenides to the house of the gates of day and night and escort him inside. In short, whereas the story of Phaethon is a warning against human hubris and the attempt to encroach on the domain of the gods, Parmenides’ story is a proclamation of good news, a story of what happens when man’s yearning for the divine is preceded by grace and drawn back to its source.

Furthermore, Parmenides’ depiction of his close relation with the Heliades, a relation described by the word συνάορος, meaning companion or consort,⁷⁶ and his gracious reception by the goddess would likely have also brought to mind Hesiod’s story of Phaethon narrated in the Theogony. According to Hesiod’s tale Phaethon was the son of the goddess Eos (Dawn) and Cephalus.

“To Cephalus she bore a splendid son, powerful Phaethon, a man equal to the gods. While he was young, a delicate spirited child, and still possessed the tender flower of glorious youth, smile-loving Aphrodite snatched him away, and made him her innermost temple-keeper in her holy temples, a divine spirit” (Hesiod, Theogony 986-991 trans. Most).

Here the theme of divinization hinted at in Parmenides’ proem is stated explicitly: Phaethon is “a man equal to the gods”. And like Parmenides who is described as a kouros, or a young man, Phaethon is described as a “young delicate spirited child”, still possessing “the tender flower of glorious youth.” And the theme of abduction is portrayed clearly in both tales. Parmenides takes pains to emphasize that he “is carried” to his destination, using the verb “to carry” four times within the first four lines of the poem, and he stresses that he is led by the Heliades, presumably sent by the goddess to fetch him and bring him into her inner sanctum. And this theme of abduction is also central to Hesiod’s account of Phaethon. It constitutes the backdrop to the story, since, in other versions of the myth, Phaethon’s father Cephalus was himself snatched away by Phaethon’s mother, the goddess Eos.⁷⁷ And it also functions as the main theme of the story, a story in which Aphrodite carries Phaethon away to serve as her temple keeper and makes him “a divine spirit.”

Taking Things Literally

The proem’s central themes — the journey to the underworld, the initiation into the mysteries, and the portrayal of a successful Phaethon — when paired with the historical background of Greek shamanism set forth earlier, open the path to a new interpretation of Parmenides’ great work. Allegorical interpretations have been dominant since the days of Sextus Empiricus who identified “the mares that carry” the kouros with “impulses and irrational desires of the soul”, “the maidens” with “sensations”, and the “two whirling wheels” with “the ears” hinting “allegorically at hearing” (R8). Such allegorical interpretations construe the journey depicted in the proem as a metaphor for the mind’s turning away from sensation, or what Sellars would later call “the Manifest Image”, and towards an abstract use of the understanding, or what Sellars would later call “the Scientific Image”. Yet the fact that Parmenides was a practicing shaman (i.e. an oulis, iatromantis, and pholoarchos) who had mastered stillness, not only allows for, but renders likely, another possibility: Parmenides was describing a literal journey into non-ordinary reality and his interactions with the entities who reside there.

Recall the details of Parmenides’ journey. To begin with, he is carried up into the sky, or abducted, by the Heliades who are nymphs and daughters of the Sun. To the Greek mind, nymphs were, like creatures of fairy lore from other cultures, non-human intelligences.⁷⁸ They were thought to be nature spirits who were normally invisible, but nonetheless capable of appearing and interacting with humans in a physical form. And the fact that the particular nymphs with whom Parmenides interacts are the daughters of the Sun suggests that they are luminous.

Furthermore, Parmenides is carried through the sky in some kind of craft, the chariot of the sun. The image of the sun itself suggests that this vehicle would have resembled a glowing orb. Yet the chariot of the sun is also depicted throughout Greek mythology as having a distinctive shape, that of a golden bowl. For example, in Aeschylus’s lost tragedy concerning the Heliades, someone laments for Phaethon:

“Where, in the west, is the bowl wrought by Hephaestus, the bowl of thy sire, speeding wherein he crosseth the mighty, swelling stream that girdleth the earth, fleeing the gloom of holy night of sable steeds” (Aeschylus, Heliades, fragment (33)69). trans. Smyth).

And classicist Herbert Weir Symth points out that this depiction of the sun’s chariot as a bowl was common, not just in Ancient Greece, but also in the broader Indo-European tradition. He elaborates:

“To explain the rising of the Sun in the east after it had set in the west, Greek fancy invented the myth that the Sun-god possessed a golden bowl, in which he, together with his steeds, was carried during the night across the ocean to the place of his rising. When Heracles was journeying to Erythea to capture the oxen of Geryon, Helios lent his bowl to the hero; who, in Gerhard’s Auserlesene griechische Vasenbilder, pl. 109, is pictured sitting therein. In the Veda and in Germanic and Lettic myths the Sun appears in the form of a golden bowl” (Aeschylus, Fragments, trans. Smyth, 403).

And Parmenides provides some additional details about this craft. He notes that it glows and emits a strange hissing or piping sound, since it is driven on by two whirling wheels, and is pulled by “much-knowing” horses who can take one as far as one might desire without needing to be prompted. The path through the sky taken by this craft is identified with “the path of the daimon” and “the paths of night and day”, and is said to belong to the “man who knows.” This path leads to another world, a world usually invisible to us.

Upon reaching his destination, he is confronted by an imposing being, a guardian of the threshold, who allows him to pass only after the Heliades speak to her to vouchsafe his entry. In the crossing of the threshold there is once more the suggestion of a strange sound, when the sockets in the doors are described as pipes. (Parmenides here uses the same word he used to describe the strange sound emitted by the chariot of the sun).

Once he passes the threshold and is escorted into the house, Parmenides is confronted by yet another entity. She is apparently the leader of the others and was responsible for bringing him there. She greets him warmly and informs him that he was summoned to her home, far from the trodden path of mortal men, so that she could teach him something important. She then proceeds to instruct him both about the nature of fundamental reality, and about the opinions of mortal men.

When spelled out in this manner, it becomes clear that Parmenides’ account parallels those of others who claim to have made contact with another world. For example, the description of a path through the sky upon which the “man who knows” travels mirrors similar concepts in ancient Indian thought. Jaques Vallee, for example, points out that the Surya Siddhanta, an ancient astronomical text, maintains that “below the moon and above the clouds revolve the Siddhas [perfected men] and the Vidyaharas [possessors of knowledge]” and he observes how “Indian tradition holds that the Siddhas could become ‘very heavy at will or as light as a feather, travel through space and disappear from sight” (Vallee, Passport to Magonia). Or again, Parmenides’ account of the much-much knowing horses, gleaming chariot, and whirling wheels calls to mind the Old Testament story of the prophet Ezekiel’s vision of God at the Chebar river where he encounters living creatures and wheels within wheels. The prophet declares:

“And now I looked at the living creatures, I saw a wheel on the earth beside the living creatures, one for each of the four of them. As for the appearance of the wheels and their construction: their appearance was like the gleaming of beryl. And the four had the same likeness, their appearance and construction as it were a wheel within a wheel. When they went, they went in any of the four directions without turning as they went. And their rims were tall and awesome, and the rims of all four were full of eyes all around. And when the living creatures went, the wheels went beside them; and when the living creatures rose from the earth, the wheels rose. Wherever the spirit wanted to go, they went, and the wheels rose along with them, for the spirit of the living creatures was in the wheels” (Ezekiel 1:15-20 ESV).

And the parallels continue even into the contemporary world. Consider, for example, the experiences of those who report having been abducted by aliens. Psychiatrist John Mack observes that, in such cases, there is “often a humming or vibratory sensation at the onset of the experience” (Mack, Abduction, 14), and that “the first indication that an abduction is about to occur might be an unexplained intense blue or white light that floods the bedroom, an odd buzzing or humming sound… or even the direct sighting of one or more humanoid beings in the room, and, of course, the close-up sighting of a strange craft” (Ibid., 18). Here, again, we have the same features enumerated in Parmenides’ account: a blazing light, a strange piping sound, an encounter with humanoid nymphs (and various other non-human entities), and a strange craft that flies through the sky.

It is worth noting the details of the some of the particular testimonies recorded by Mack to show how closely they correspond Parmenides’ account. One person, going under the name Jerry, claims to have “had a number of ‘nightmares’ in which she would awaken paralyzed, hear ‘buzzing and ringing and whirring noises’ in her head, and see humanoid beings in her room” (Ibid., 106).

Another experiencer, going under the name of Will, recounts a more detailed story involving humming, lights, flying through the air, crossing a threshold, and an interaction with a luminous being:

“Will told us of a dramatic encounter that had occurred in 1980, when he and his wife were sailing from Bermuda to New England. He was awakened at about three in the morning by a kind of humming sound that he had never heard before. He came up the companionway ladder, he said, and off the starboard side of the boat, he saw a ‘city of lights.’ The ‘thing’ looked huge and was ‘pretty well defined.’ It had ‘multiple levels’ and ‘lights around it,’ appearing as if ‘the lights are coming from inside if that’s possible.’ He noticed that the huge object was ‘not in’ nor ‘on’ the water. ‘So it’s somehow above the water, and I’m saying that doesn’t make sense.

Then, Will said, ‘the light changes. There is a different pitch to it. The frequency changes. The vibration actually, I can begin to feel the vibration now, somehow in my body.’ He was upset as he recalled what followed. ‘I can feel the tracks of tears on my face. They’re very, very cool. All of a sudden I’m in the air. I’m not really inside a tunnel, but that would be one way of describing it. There is a differentiation between this column that’s around me and surrounding space.’ He felt around him ‘a complete immersion in diffuse light, and there’s a vibration that I’m aware of…. It’s completely familiar now. I’m just in a rush to get from here to there. All of a sudden I know that I’m passing through, literally a threshold. Then I’m there. I’m inside. Someone recognizes me.

Inside the craft Will felt that he was somehow different, no longer ‘the guy that left the sailboat.’ Around him were tall figures, perhaps seven or eight feet in height, that appeared to be translucent. ‘There’s a beauty that doesn’t make any sense.’ He was crying now. ‘I don’t know why they’re beautiful, because they don’t look like they’re beautiful…. They have a bluish tint. I guess there are extremities, but I don’t see well defined arms and limbs.’ When he looked into the beings, all he could see was light or ‘light structures. Luminous is a better word than translucent’” (Mack, Passport to the Cosmos, 95).

Or again, consider the testimony of someone going under the name Andrea which again involves a humming sound, light, the crossing of a threshold, and an encounter with luminous beings:

“Andrea attributes to the light itself the energy to float her out of the house up to a spaceship… She was awakened by a humming sound that seemed to surround the house and a flash of bright blue light ‘like a big headlight of a car.’ She felt afraid but found that she could not move, and her whole body began to vibrate. She recalled seeing two small thin beings with huge heads, large eyes, and long arms and legs, one of whom was holding a stick or rod that he pressed on the back of her ear. ‘They’re very skinny,’ she remembered, and ‘they look like they’re made of light. But then underneath there’s some physicalness to them like bones. They’re not bones though.’ One of the beings made strong eye contact with her (‘his eyes are on my eyes’), and this seemed somehow to get her up out of the bed.

After this Andrea recalled that she ‘floated’ feet first ‘right through’ the glass of the window, which was ‘just amazing to me.’ Then she floated, still feet first, high over the trees and could see the road below, which seemed to be illuminated by the same light. The floating power was ‘in the light,’ she said. It seemed to form a line or thread that extended from her navel to the beings. It also seemed as if ‘streamers’ of light were coming out from one of the beings to her body. These threads of light seemed to be used to pull her up to the ship.

This light or energy seemed to Andrea to bring about changes in her body. ‘I’m not a body anymore,’ she recalled, as she passed through the glass. ‘My body is expanding completely into the glass…. The cells completely explode and expand, and that’s how I go through the window… because the glass is just nothing. The glass is just like light just like light going through light.’ ‘I’m light,’ she recalled. ‘My whole body—they similarly turn my body to light” (Ibid., 97-98).

In addition to these parallels, the beings these people encounter are, like Parmenides’ unnamed goddess, intent on instruction, teaching them about both ultimate reality and earthly life. A woman by the name of Sara, for example, identifies an alien being as “her first real teacher” (Mack, Abduction, 199), and attributes her passion for philosophy and spirituality to her “lifelong encounters with alien beings” (Ibid. 206). And it is interesting to note that, like Parmenides’ teacher, these alien instructors are frequently female. For example, a man going by the name of Peter describes one female entity “that was to be his teacher”, characterizing her as his “guardian” and someone who was to “watch for” him (Ibid., 314). Likewise, a man going by the name of Ed chronicles his own experience with a female instructor. He recounts that “her attitude was ‘now we’ll get down to business… like a teacher. You might settle your students by telling them a light story when they first come in the classroom, just get them settled, focused, and then kind of lead them into… then she started explaining things to me” (Ibid., 39). Like the goddess who welcomes Parmenides, this entity first makes sure that her student is settled, before going on to actually deliver her instruction. And, in another interesting parallel, this entity is said to be accompanied by others that serve her “as her supporting staff” (Ibid., 41), just as the Heliades appear to be carrying out the bidding of the Parmenides’ unnamed goddess.

And these parallels hold not only in the manner of teaching, but also in the content taught. Just as Parmenides’ goddess sets out to expound the unity of Being in “the unshakable heart of well convincing truth”, so too do these beings pronounce a cosmic unity. Mack explains their doctrine as follows:

“The alien beings that abductees speak about seem to many of them to come from another domain that is felt to be closer to the source of being or primary creation. They have been described, however homely their appearance, as intermediaries or emissaries from God, even as angels….The acknowledgment of their existence, after the initial ontological shock, is sometimes… the first step in the opening of consciousness to a universe that is no longer simply material. Abductees come to appreciate that the universe is filled with intelligence and is itself intelligent. They develop a sense of awe before a mysterious cosmos that becomes sacred and ensouled. The sense of separation from all the rest of creation breaks down and the experience of oneness becomes an essential aspect of the evolution of the abductees’ consciousness” (Mack, Abduction, 405).

Or again,

“[They] experience a kind of ecstasy which… can reach orgasmic proportions as they feel themselves open through their experiences… to a divine source or creative center of being in the cosmos. This source is, to the abductees, inexpressibly luminous and filled with color, and they may weep when they find themselves in its presence, for separation from it was painful beyond words….As their experiences are brought into full consciousness, some abductees come to feel increasingly a sense of oneness with all beings and all creation” (Mack, Abduction, 406).

Here Mack describes an experience of unity similar to the doctrines explicated by the goddess in the Way of Truth. And the contention that the universe is itself intelligent mirrors the goddess’s famous contention that “it is the same, to think and also to be” (D6).

And the parallels extend not only to the goddess’s Way of Truth, but also to her Way of Opinion. Consider again the testimony of the man called “Ed” concerning the teaching of the female being he encountered. He says that “she explained things in ‘scientific, logical terms… elucidating a series of interrelated concepts, that these are the laws of the universe, specifying in detail these concepts’” (Ibid., 40). After setting forth the laws of the cosmos, she then judges human society by those laws, demonstrating how we are on a self destructive path. She informs him about “the way humans are conducting themselves here in terms of international politics, our environment, our violence to each other, our food, and all that. And she kept on explaining the laws of the universe are this way, and it’s like, if you’re driving on the wrong side of the road, what’s going to happen inevitably, you know. It’s like here are the laws, and here’s the way you humans conduct your affairs, and slam, bang, you know, it’s inevitable” (Ibid., 40).

Like Parmenides’ goddess, these entities not only teach about the unity at the heart of reality, but also explain the laws governing the cosmos, and how human society falls under those laws. The doctrines these beings deliver thus mirrors the teaching in both the Way of Truth and the Way of Opinion.

From such parallels, we can conclude that Parmenidean philosophy relates not only to ancient shamanism, but also to the contemporary phenomenon of alien abduction. And these correspondences to both past and present encounters with extraordinary reality support the possibility of a literal interpretation of the proem. On such an interpretation, Parmenides really did journey to another realm and interact with non-human intelligences who conveyed to him a message to deliver. Adopting a literal reading of the proem will allow us to articulate a novel interpretation of the arguments in the rest of Parmenides’ work. We shall begin with the Way of Truth, and then continue to the Way of Opinion.

The Way of Truth

To Be or Not to Be

The goddess begins the Way of Truth as follows:

“Come now, as for me, I shall speak—and as for you, carry away (κομίσαι) my tale (μῦθον) when you have heard it, so as to preserve it—what are the only roads of investigation (διζήσιος) for thinking (νοῆσαι): The one, ‘it is’ (εστιν) and it is not possible that ‘it is not’ (οὐκ ἔστι μὴ εἶναι), is the path of persuasion (πειθοῦς), for it accompanies truth (ἀληθείῃ γὰρ ὀπηδεῖ); the other, that ‘it is not’ (οὐκ εστιν) and it is necessary that “it is not” (χρεών ἐστι μὴ εἶναι)⁷⁹— truly, I show you (φράζω) this to be a path wholly without tidings (παναπευφεα).⁸⁰ For you could not know (γνοίης) that which is not (for this cannot be accomplished (ἀνυστόν)) nor could you point it out (φράσαις).

For it is the very same, to think and also to be (τό γάρ αὐτό νοεῖν εστιν τε καὶ εἶναι)” (D6 trans. Laks and Most modified).

This passage begins with Parmenides’ prophetic commission. It is the goddess who shall speak, and Parmenides is commanded to carry her words into the mortal world. In light of Parmenides’ shamanic background, we can, once more, take this account literally. We need not read this section as some kind of grand rhetorical scheme on Parmenides’ part to lend added weight to his arguments. Rather, Parmenides is simply reporting on what he actually experienced. Indeed, the sort of encounter described by Parmenides is again not unique, but a familiar occurrence in prophetic literature. Consider again the case of the Old Testament prophet Ezekiel.⁸¹ He recounts his calling as follows:

“And he [the LORD] said to me, “Son of man, stand on your feet, and I will speak with you.” And as he spoke to me, the Spirit entered into me and set me on my feet, and I heard him speaking to me. And he said to me, “Son of man, I send you to the people of Israel, to nations of rebels, who have rebelled against me. They and their fathers have transgressed against me to this very day. The descendants also are impudent and stubborn: I send you to them, and you shall say to them, ‘Thus says the Lord God.’ And whether they hear or refuse to hear (for they are a rebellious house) they will know that a prophet has been among them. And you, son of man, be not afraid of them, nor be afraid of their words, though briers and thorns are with you and you sit on scorpions. Be not afraid of their words, nor be dismayed at their looks, for they are a rebellious house. And you shall speak my words to them, whether they hear or refuse to hear, for they are a rebellious house” (Ezekiel 2:1-7 ESV).

In this passage, Ezekiel, like Parmenides, is confronted by a divinity and given a message to deliver to his people. He is “sent to them” to say “thus says the Lord God”, and through his words, whether heeded or not, the people will know that “a prophet has been among them.” Parmenides has been given a similar charge by the goddess as he is called to carry her words of Being to an ignorant people.

After commissioning Parmenides, the goddess then commences with her discourse proper. In it, she distinguishes between two seemingly mutually exclusive and jointly exhaustive roads by which thinking can seek satisfaction. She identifies the first road with (i) necessary existence, “ ‘it is’ and it is not possible that ‘it is not’,” and (ii) persuasion, and argues for the latter by asserting that this path attends truth (or reality). The second road, in contrast, she identifies with (i) necessary non-existence by claiming that “ ‘it is not’ and it is necessary that “it is not”, and (ii) contends that it is “a path wholly without tidings”. She offers two arguments for the tidinglessness of this path. First, she argues that one cannot know that which is not, since it simply “cannot be accomplished”, and second, she contends that one cannot point out what is not. She then reveals that both arguments for the tidninglessness of the path of non-being are grounded in the identification of thinking and being— “for it is the very same, to think and to be”.

Standard interpretations take Parmenides to here present a deductive argument. One might, for example, begin with the concept of “a being”, “a necessary being”, “being an F” (where F stands for some essential property of a thing), or “being an intentional object”, and then attempt to reconstruct Parmenides’ argument deductively on that basis. The problem with such accounts is that they end up attributing bad arguments to Parmenides and then account for the failures of these arguments along familiar patronizing lines, explaining them in light of the supposed crudity of the concepts with which he was forced to work (living as he did before Kripke). Consider, for example, the deductive reading most straightforwardly suggested by the text, the attempt to deduce the properties of Being from the concept of a necessary being. Yet, even if we were able to deduce properties like eternity or indestructibility from the concept of a necessary being, it’s not clear how we could bridge the gap between such metaphysical properties and the epistemic properties of persuasiveness and the accompanying of truth that Parmenides ascribes to the path of Being. One might grant, for example, that such a necessary being may exist, but contend that would so far transcend us and our cognitive capacities that we could never know it. On such a scenario, the mere existence of a necessary being would have little, if any, persuasive force. And the same holds for the property of accompanying the truth: A necessary being may exist, but its mere existence does not guarantee that any predicate that I might ascribe to it would genuinely apply to it or result in a true proposition. For example, suppose that the science of arithmetic exists necessarily. Just because it does so does not guarantee that every predicate I might apply to it is true. I might, for example, maintain that it is decidable, that every truth within it can be formally proven through its own axioms, but later discover that it is, in fact, undecidable.⁸²

These sorts of concerns have led Kingsley to deny that the goddess is attempting to make any sort of rational argument, claiming:

“Any sensible person who has read this [passage] and been told that it’s a foundational text for the western science of logic would have every good reason to die of laughter. Everything about it is absurd. It’s absurd in what it says, absurd in its vagueness and obscurity; and its careful, measured tone creates an illusory impression of reasonableness that makes everything about it even more nonsensically obscure. Nonsense is what it sounds like. And nonsense is what this is, because there is nothing here to do with our familiar world of the senses. What Parmenides is saying comes from another world” (Kingsley, Reality, 60).

Yet Kingsley is too quick to reject reason. Though her argument does not resemble the kinds of arguments put forward by contemporary analytic philosophers, this by no means implies that the goddess offers no argument whatsoever. Indeed, one wonders whether Kingsley would draw the same conclusions concerning the pronouncements of other famous philosophers, and maintain that they too are speaking in riddles, “pure mystery”, “sheer obscurity”, and propounding an “initiatory logic” (Kingsley, Reality 61, 68), when they say things such as:

“The possibility, indeed even the necessity of these categories rests on the relation that the entire sensibility, and with it also all possible appearances, have to the original apperception, in which everything is necessarily in agreement with the conditions of thoughoughgoing unity of self-consciousness, i.e., must stand under universal functions of synthesis, namely of the synthesis in accordance with concepts, as that in which alone apperception can demonstrate a priori its thoroughgoing and necessary identity” (Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A112).

Or

“Thus the supersensible world, which is the inverted world, has at the same time overarched the other world and has it within it; it is for itself the inverted world, i.e. the inversion of itself; it is itself and its opposite in one unity. Only thus is it difference as inner difference, or difference in its own self, or difference as an infinity” (Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, § 160).

Or

“The nothing itself does not attract; it is essentially repelling. But this repulsion is itself as such a parting gesture toward beings that are submerging as a whole. This wholly repelling gesture toward beings that are in retreat as a whole, which is the action of the nothing that oppresses Dasein in anxiety, is the essence of the nothing: nihilation. It is neither an annihilation of beings nor does it spring from a negation. Nihilation will not submit to calculation in terms of annihilation and negation. The nothing itself nihilates” (Heidegger, What is Metaphysics?).

Even if we were to agree with Kingsley as to the fundamentally religious character of Parmenides’ thought, this religious dimension need not rule out rational argument. Biblical writers, for example, appeal to reason (Isa 1:18, Ps 34:8, 1 Pet 3:15), and the ontological argument, a foundational argument in Western metaphysics and philosophical theology, was originally set forth as a prayer (Anselm, Proslogion).

In fact, cognizance of Parmenides’ identity as an iatromantis figure allows us to formulate an alternative reading of the goddess’s argument that can avoid the problems of standard deductive accounts. For, if we take the goddess to be propounding a transcendental, rather than merely deductive method, the connection between the metaphysical and epistemological attributes of the path of Being becomes clear. Transcendental arguments, unlike standard deductive arguments, begin with some given fact, often a fact about consciousness, and then go on to elucidate the conditions for the possibility of that fact. For example, Kant famously began with experience, the familiar apprehension of some object having a property, and claimed that for such experience to be possible, something would need to be given to us in space and time (through the forms of intuition), and we would need to be able to apply some basic concepts to it (which he called categories). This would hold true regardless of what the individual experience might be. You might experience a rose as red, a flash of lightning as brilliant, or a mountain as majestic. In each case, the experience in question is given in space and time and is conceptually structured. Thus Kant held that transcendental inquiries, like deductive ones, hold a priori, prior to or independent of any particular experience,⁸³ and, in like manner, Husserl took himself to provide a transcendental phenomenology by bracketing the world of empirical objects and examining instead the structures given in pure consciousness.⁸⁴

Now, suppose that we began our inquiry not with ordinary human experiences of flowers, and lightning, and mountains, but with ecstatic experiences that take us beyond the bounds of mundane consciousness. In other words, what if we attempted to provide a transcendental phenomenology of shamanic states of consciousness rather than the ordinary states of consciousness that most philosophers focus upon? This unfamiliar route, I contend, is the one the goddess recommends in the Way of Truth.

To begin with, the goddess’s language in (D6) suggests that her argument will turn on the examination of some conscious state. After commissioning Parmenides as her prophet, she sets forth the two roads for thinking (νοῆσαι) and concludes by proclaiming that to think (νοεῖν) and to be are the same. Today we think about thinking in a particular way, distinguishing thought, for example, from sensation, or perhaps separating the abstract contents of thought from the thinking mind to form a domain of pure logic.⁸⁵ But this is not what the Greeks had in mind with the verb νοεῖν which we often translate as “to think” or the noun νόος which we often translate as reason, thought, or intellect. Νοέω, for example, could mean not only “I think”, but also “I perceive”, “apprehend”, or “take notice”.⁸⁶ And νόος could mean not only “intellect”, but also “mind” in the more general sense of that which perceives, remembers, feels, or intends.⁸⁷ In short, “to think” in this sense, concerns consciously apprehending something in some way or other, rather than specifically apprehending it as a propositional content of thought (as distinct, for example, from perception, feeling, or imagination). Thus Homer uses forms of νοεῖν to describe Nestor seeing horses (Il. 10:550), Helen recognizing Aphrodite by her beautiful throat, breasts, and eyes (Il.3.396), or Penelope failing to perceive that the man standing before her is her husband Odysseus (Od. 19.478-479).

And the goddess’s concern with conscious apprehension is also indicated by the other words she uses in this passage. For example, Heidegger has famously argued that ἀλήθεια, the Greek word for truth, is the negation of λήθη the Greek word for forgetting, oblivion, or concealment and so translates it as “unconcealment” (Unverborgenheit).⁸⁸ Likewise, γιγνώσκειν, the verb meaning to know, think, or form a judgment can also also mean to discern, distinguish, recognize, or be aware of, and can even signify carnal knowledge (Matt 1:25). And φράζειν, a verb the goddess uses to characterize the type of demonstration she offers, similarly concerns conscious experience and primarily means to point out or show. It is used, for instance, by Homer to describe the place pointed out by Achilles upon which to construct Patroclus’ funeral pyre (Il. 23.138) and Eurykleia’s recognition of Odysseus’ scar (Od. 23:75), and by Pindar when he asks his fellow citizens to show him the home of his fathers (Pindar, Pyth. 4.117).

The language used in (D6) thus indicates that the goddess’s argument will involve the elucidation of some type of conscious state.⁸⁹ Indeed, she then goes on to specify the particular kind of conscious state she has in mind: the encounter with Necessary Being. Yet, there are actually many different forms of such an encounter, since there are various types of necessary beings, and various modes of apprehending them. So we will need to determine just what sort of experience and necessary object the goddess is directing us towards in this passage. For example, a Platonist about numbers, properties, and propositions, will consider all of these to be necessary objects. So, in this scenario, thinking of the number three, the property of being bipedal, or the proposition that “the tallest man in Athens is a man” would all be states of consciousness in which one encounters a necessary being. However, these sorts of necessaria, though the first to come to mind for contemporary philosophers, are not our only options. And this is a good thing, since it appears that the standard sorts of necessaria fail to ground the goddess’s epistemic claims about the Way of Truth. For example, even if a propositional content were to exist necessarily, the mere thinking of it need not suffice to persuade one to believe it, much less guarantee its truth.

Yet, there is a well documented type of experience of Necessary Being capable of grounding the goddess’s epistemic claims: the direct experience of God, the “I am that I am” (Ex 3:14). Such direct mystical encounters with the divine are said to constitute a special form of knowledge. Consider, for example, some notable Christian testimonies concerning this kind of experience. (For accounts from other religious traditions see William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience, Lectures 16 and 17, Mysticism).

The medieval poet Dante attests to his direct experience of divine light as follows:

“I believe that from the keenness of the living ray that I endured, I would have been undone had I withdrawn my eyes from it. And I remember that, on this account, I grew more bold and thus sustained my gaze until I reached the Goodness that is infinite. O plenitude of grace, by which I could presume to fix my eyes upon eternal light until my sight was spent on it. In its depth I saw contained, by love into a single volume bound, the pages scattered through the universe: substances, accidents, and the interplay between them, as though they were conflated in such ways that what I tell is but a simple light….. Thus all my mind, absorbed, was gazing, fixed, unmoving and intent, becoming more enraptured in its gazing. He who beholds that light is so enthralled that he would never willingly consent to turn away from it for any other sight, because the good that is the object of the will is held and gathered in perfection there that elsewhere would imperfect show” (Dante, Paradiso, Canto 33, Trans. Hollander).

Here Dante is transfixed by a divine light that reveals itself as the Infinite Good, the true object of all desire, containing everything, all substances, accidents, and relations, within its own simple luminosity.

Likewise, the great theologian and mystic Meister Eckhart testifies to finding so much pleasure in the experience of union with God that even the pains of hell would be easy to bear. He declares:

“A man who is established thus in God’s will wants nothing but what is God’s will and what is God. If he were sick he would not want to be well. To him all pain is pleasure, all multiplicity is bare simplicity, if he is truly established in the will of God. Even though it meant the pains of hell it would be a joy and happiness to him. He is free and has left self behind, and must be free of whatever is to come in to him: if my eye is to perceive color, it must be free of all color. If I see a blue or white color, the sight of my eye which sees the color, the very thing that sees, is the same as that which is seen by the eye. The eye with which I see God is the same eye with which God sees me: my eye and God’s eye are one eye, one seeing, one knowing, and one love” (Meister Eckhart, Sermon 57 in The Complete Mystical Works of Meister Eckhart, 297-298).

Here Eckhart attests to an experience of divinization wherein one knows God in God’s own knowledge of Himself and loves God in God’s own love of Himself. In such a state, multiplicity is reduced to simplicity, and all the pains of mortal existence are sublated in the beatific vision.

And finally, Jacob Boehme, the protestant visionary who inspired the philosophy of Hegel, attests to his experience of all things in God as follows:

“In one quarter of an hour I saw and knew more than if I had been many years together at an university. For I saw and knew the Being of all things, the Byss and the Abyss, and the eternal generation of the holy Trinity, the descent and original of the world and of all creatures through the divine wisdom. I knew and saw in myself all the three worlds, the external and visible world being of a procreation or external birth from both the internal and spiritual worlds; and I saw and knew the whole working essence, in the evil and in the good, and the mutual original and existence; and likewise how the fruitful bearing womb of eternity brought forth. So that I did not only greatly wonder at it, but did also exceedingly rejoice, albeit I could very hardly apprehend the same in my external man and set it down with the pen. For I had a thorough view of the universe as in a chaos, wherein all things are couched and wrapt up, but it was impossible for me to explicate the same” (Jacob Boehme, cited in William James, Varieties of Religious Experience, 358. n.1).

Boehme, like Dante and Eckhart, here attests to the metaphysical and epistemological character of his experience. In it, he sees the Being of things, the Abyss of God, and the origin of Trinitarian life. And in so doing he knows, “through the divine wisdom”, all created things, including aspects of himself previously hidden from view.

Attending to these kinds of experiences allows us to articulate an interpretation of the goddess’s argument which avoids the difficulties of standard deductive readings. First, by identifying the path of Being pointed out by the goddess with the direct experience of God, we can account for the positive epistemic features attributed to this route. To begin with, such a direct vision of God would be persuasive, indeed, more persuasive than any other sort of experience, since mystical experiences have what William James has called a “noetic quality”. James explains, “although similar to states of feeling, mystical states seem to those who experience them to be also states of knowledge. They are states of insight into depths of truth unplumbed by the discursive intellect” (James, Varieties of Religious Experience, 295). Hence, if such an experience were to constitute the path of Being, we could explain why the goddess would call this path “the path of persuasion”.

Furtheremore, this identification also explains why the goddess would say that it “accompanies ἀλήθεια”. For it is easy to see how ἀλήθεια, in all its possible significations, would attend that path. If we understand ἀλήθεια epistemologically as the sort of truth that attends propositional content, then the vision of God would attend such truth. In seeing God, one sees how all things abide in God. One sees, like Dante, “substances, accidents, and the interplay between them”, or like Boehme, “the descent and original of the world and of all creatures”, “the whole working essence”, and “how the fruitful bearing womb of eternity brought forth”. One grasps a theory of everything by beholding all things in the divine mind. Likewise, if we take ἀλήθεια in its more metaphysical connotation as signifying what is real or genuine (as opposed to false semblances), then, once more, the vision of God would attend truth, since, in it, one would be confronted with Reality at its most genuine. One would see the realm of “truth unveiled, truth as it is in and for itself…God…in his eternal essence before the creation of nature and finite mind” (Hegel, Science of Logic, trans. Giovanni 21.34). And finally, if, as Heidegger suggests, we take ἀλήθεια in the phenomenological sense of unconcealedness, then, yet again, the vision of God would attend truth. For to see God in this manner would be to see the deus revelatus, to see Reality, not through a mirror darkly, but face to face (1 Cor 3:12).

Second, this interpretation allows us to explain why the goddess rejects the alternate path, the path of necessary non-being. On this interpretation, just as the necessary being in question is of a particular kind, so too is the allegedly necessary non-being. Just as we were not referring to necessaria such as numbers, properties, or propositions, when formulating the way of Being, so too are we not referring to various impossibilia (such as those that would be designated by the set of all self-membered sets, the property of being a human orange, and propositions of the form A & ~A) when formulating the way of non-being. Here non-being is identified not with the failure of anything in the world to satisfy some given description, but with there being no world at all. Sheer oblivion would be the impossible object that defines the way of non-being. Kant attempts to clarify this sort of necessary oblivion when he distinguishes between the logical and material elements of possibility. To say something is logically possible is to say it satisfies the principle of non-contradiction, yet, such a logical element of possibility, according to Kant, presupposes an even more fundamental type of possibility, the material element of possibility, the fact that something is there to be thought at all.⁹⁰ Hence, what we mean by necessary non-being, in this case, is an absolutely empty world. A “world” wherein there could be no one to think and nothing to be thought.

When we identify the path of Being with the direct experience of God and the path of non-being with the putative experience of a necessarily empty “world”, then it becomes clear why the goddess would endorse the first path and reject the second as absurd. If one were, in a transcendental manner, to take the mystical experience of God as a given, then one could derive both the existence of God and the knowledge of the existence of God as conditions of its possibility in light of that experience’s unique epistemic features. Now, God, as Necessary Being, must exist at all possible worlds, and this entails that there could be no empty worlds, much less necessarily empty ones. And, since the path of non-being is identified with the alleged experience of a necessarily empty world, that path proves to be impossible. If one were to experience the mystical vision of necessary Being, the absurdity of the attempt to follow the path of necessary non-being would be obvious.⁹¹

Furthermore, this interpretation allows for a practical as well as theoretical argument for the superiority of the path of Being over that of non-being. Classicists have pointed out that the image of a path leading to a fork in the road and the resulting choice between two ways is chiefly associated with the choice between the two destinies one faces upon death. Plato, for example, describes such a choice when he claims that Minos, Rhadamatus, and Aecus will “serve as judges in the meadow, at the three way-crossing from which the two roads go on, the one to the Isles of the Blessed and the other to Tartarus” (Gorgias, 524a). Here Plato depicts a choice between an afterlife of reward in the Isles of the Blessed or punishment in Tartarus. Furthermore, classicists have also observed how “not to be” and “to be without tidings” are euphemisms for death.⁹² So, when the goddess offers the choice between the paths of Being and non-being, she is offering a choice between the experience of the fullness of divine life and absolute oblivion as a second death. Again, to those who have experienced the former, the choice is obvious. Those who have tasted the honey in the honeycomb know that it is sweet (Ps 34:8).

Finally, this interpretation can explain why the goddess would affirm that “it is the very same, to think and also to be” (D6). Recall that mystical experiences are experiences of oneness in which man is absorbed in God and thinks God through God’s own mind. Reality is, in this manner, experienced as simple. In such an experience there is no distinction between one’s own eye and God’s eye, “all multiplicity is bare simplicity” (Eckhart), all distinctions between properties are “conflated in… a simple light” (Dante), and one perceives “the Being of all things” (Boehme). According to William James such unity is a distinctive mark of mystical experience. He observes that ‘this overcoming of all the usual barriers between the individual and the Absolute is the great mystic achievement. In mystic states we both become one with the Absolute and we become aware of our oneness” (James, Varieties of Religious Experience, Mysticism). In such Unity, there would be no real distinction between God’s Being and His Mind, between His Mind and the contents of His Mind, and between the contents of His Mind and existing beings.⁹³ In philosophical theology, this understanding of the divine nature was called the doctrine of divine simplicity.⁹⁴ The unity presented in mystical experience thus allows us to explain the goddess’s otherwise puzzling identification of thinking and being. To think and to be are the same, since, for God, they are the same, and the initiate would know this fact through direct experience.

The goddess further elaborates the relation between thought and being in ecstatic experience in the following fragment:

“Behold (λεῦσσε) those things which, though far off (ἀπεόντα), are nevertheless steadfastly near (παρεόντα) to thought (νόωι). For it cannot sever what is (ἑόν) from holding fast (ἔχεσθαι) to what is (ἑόντος), whether it is dispersed in any and every way (πάντῃ πάντως) through the world (κατὰ κόσμον) or is collected together” (Trans. Laks and Most, modified, D10).⁹⁵

Here the goddess once more makes her case by asking us to look on as she points out key features of a particular kind of experience. She claims that in such an experience even things that seem far, are, in fact, steadfastly near to thought, and argues that this nearness is grounded in the fact that thought cannot sever being from holding fast to being. Again, the goddesses’ claim most clearly applies to the mystical experience of God.⁹⁶ In light of divine simplicity, the divine mind cannot sunder itself from divine being, nor separate one divine attribute from another.

The goddess’s claim also applies to ecstatic experiences of a less elevated variety. The shaman, for instance, is said in his journeys to transcend the limits of physical space so as to apprehend distant objects.⁹⁷ Perhaps the most literal manifestation of this shamanic transcendence of space is the phenomenon of bilocation. Pythagoras, for example, was said to be able to converse with friends in Metapontum and Tauromenium at the same time (Porphyry, Life of Pythagoras, § 27)⁹⁸, and Aristeas was said to have conversed with a man from one town, while his body lay, seemingly lifeless at a Fuller’s shop in a different town (Herodotus, Histories IV.13-16). In such states, one would quite literally see how what is holds fast to what is, despite seemingly being “dispersed through the world”. And there are similar stories of shamans reaching outside of the normal flow of time. In prophecy, for example, the shaman is able to perceive future events, and Pythagoras was said to have been aware of his own past lives and those of his followers. Porphry recounts:

“Many of his associates he reminded of the lives lived by their souls before they were bound to their present body, and by irrefutable arguments demonstrated that he had been Euphorbus, the son of Panothus” (Porphyry, Life of Pythagoras, §26).

Epimenides, likewise, is reported to have fallen asleep in a cave of the nymphs and to have awoken to find fifty seven years had elapsed, and Aristeas is said to have reappeared to human society after being absent for two hundred and forty years, claiming to have been traveling with Apollo. In this regard, it is also interesting to note that the verb in our passage (D10) which has been translated as “holding fast” is a form of ἔχω, which Homer uses to describe the way that the gods inhabit heaven (Il. 21.267) or Mount Olympos (Il. 5.890), or how the nymphs haunt the high mountain places, springs, and meadows (Od. 6.123). This suggests that the goddess maintains that the way being holds to being despite being dispersed through the world or collected together is akin to the way that non-human intelligences relate to space and time.

Mortal vs Divine Consciousness

Thus, to those granted the vision of Being, the choice between paths has always already been made. It was a forgone conclusion from the start. The goddess explains: “The decision (κρίσις) on these matters depends on this: ‘is’ or ‘is not’. Well, it has been decided, as is necessary, to abandon the one [scil. road] as unthinkable, unnameable (for it is not the true road), and [deciding] thereby that the other, by consequence, exists and is real” (D8). The choice between Being and non-being is decided in the vision of the former. Being crowns its graces.

Yet the goddess also warns of another illusory path to be avoided, the Way of Mortal Opinion. She declares:

“It is needful (χρὴ) to say and to think that that which is is, for it is to be, whereas nothing⁹⁹ is not: that is precisely what I bid you to ponder (φράζεσθαι). For such is the first road of investigation from which <I keep> you <away>, but then also from this one, which mortals who know nothing fashion for themselves (πλάττονται), two headed! For the helplessness (ἀμηχανίη) in their breast directs their wandering mind (πλαγκτὸν νόον); and they are borne along, deaf and likewise blind, stupefied, tribes undecided (ἄκριτα φῦλα)¹⁰⁰, who suppose that “to be and not to be” is the same and not the same, and that for all the path is backward-turning” (Laks and Most, modified, D7).

Note how the goddess’s language once more indicates the crucial role that consciousness plays in her argument. The verb φράζειν, to point out or show, is again used here. In (D6) The goddess shows (φράζω)that the path of non-being is a path without tidings and argues that it you could never point out (φράσαις) such a path. Now the goddess commands Parmenides to point out to himself (φράζεσθαι), i.e. muse upon or ponder, anew that Being is and Nothing is not (D7).

After reminding Parmenides of the futility of the path of non-being, the goddess then warns him against the equally fruitless path of mortal opinion. She does not paint a flattering picture of mankind in the process. From her divine perspective, men are ignorant, double minded creatures, their wandering minds directed by their hearts’ helplessness, passively carried along by the forces that manipulate them, deaf, blind, stupefied, and undecided. Their fundamental error, claims the goddess, lies in confusing Being and non-being, and holding them at once to be both identical and different. In their confusion, the mortal path is forever “backward-turning”, circling back on itself, since men never make the decision to pursue Being or non-being. Instead, they hover at the crossroads, like the undecided in the vestibule to Dante’s Inferno who are driven on by stinging wasps to wander in circles, rejected by both Heaven and Hell for refusing to choose between them (Dante, Inferno III).¹⁰¹

Mortals thus stand in marked contrast to the kouros described earlier in the proem. Whereas the kouros has the power to attain his desire, since he is carried as far as his θυμός might take him, the hearts of mortal men are helpless.¹⁰² Whereas the kouros walks the path of the one who knows, mortal men lack knowledge and remain deaf, blind, and stupefied. And, whereas the kouros is escorted “straight along the way” into the house of the goddess, the wandering minds of men drive them in barren circles.

While the goddess pronounced the path of non-being an impossibility, she declares the path of mortal opinion an illusion, a confused and confusing fiction concocted by the mortal mind. Indeed, she claims that sheer habit is its primary motivating force. She warns in a later fragment:

“For never at all could you master this: that things that are are not. But as for you, keep the mind (νόημα) away from this road of investigation and do not let much-experienced (πολύπειρον) habit force you down onto this road, to ply a heedless eye and roaring ear and tongue—no, by the word (λόγῳ)¹⁰³ choose (κρῖναι) the much-contested refutation (ἔλεγχον) spoken (ῥηθέντα) by me. There remains (λείπεται) only the word (μῦθος) of the path: ‘Is’ ” (trans. Laks and Most, modified, D8).

According to the goddess, those who tread the mortal path not only mistakenly consider the way of non-being to be a viable option, by maintaining that “things that are are not”, but they also conflate that way with the way of Being. But as the goddess has previously demonstrated, for those who have experienced the Absolute, the way of non-being is, in fact, no way at all. The mortal perspective is thus based on a fundamental confusion, and the entire worldview that flows from that confusion proves to be illusory. People adopt the mortal viewpoint not on account of reason, but out of mere habit, specifically the habit of inattention.

It is interesting to note how, despite the standard depiction of Parmenides as the opponent of sense-experience, the goddess does not condemn experience as such in this passage. She warns against neither eye nor ear, but only of the heedless eye, the eye which cannot see, and the roaring ear, the ear that cannot hear over one’s own shouting tongue. In fact, the goddess’s overarching transcendental argument in the poem presupposes a direct experience of Being. Parmenides is asked, at the end of the passage cited above, to choose “by the word”, but the only word that remains at this point is that of Being. For the path of Being is the only path that accounts for the conditions of the possibility of mystical experience.

Signs and Wonders

The Two Signs on the Mortal Path

The goddess further clarifies the distinction between the Way of Being and the Way of Mortal Opinion by distinguishing between the types of signs that attend them. The goddess has already noted that the fundamental confusion of Mortal Opinion is its failure to discriminate between Being and Non-being, and that the main temptation towards accepting this confusion is the blind adherence to habit. She then goes on to further specify what this mortal confusion between Being and Non-being consists in by explaining the nature of the signs men fabricate for themselves. She declares:

“For they [i.e. mortals] have laid down for themselves (κατέθεντο) [two] forms (μορφᾶς) to name (ὀνομάζειν) two ways of knowing (γνώμας), of which one is not necessary—in which they wander—and they have sundered (ἐκρίναντο) the living frame into opposites and posited (ἔθεντο) signs (σήματα) separate (χωρίς) from each other: for the one, the ethereal fire of flame, being mild, very light in weight, the same as itself everywhere, and not the same as the other one; and that one too, in itself, the opposite, night without light, a dense and heavy body” (Trans. Laks and Most, modified, D8).

The goddess here claims that men fashion two opposed signs, each of which is taken to correspond to both i) a mode of being (μορφᾶς), and ii) a mode of knowledge (γνώμας). In viewing reality exclusively through these opposing signs, mankind sunders “the living frame into opposites” and separates beings from one another. These two exclusive signs are fire (which is, for example, luminous, mild, light, and rarefied), and night (which is dark, harsh, heavy, and dense). From the mortal viewpoint, everything in the cosmos is thought to be constituted from these two fundamental natural kinds, and grasped through these two corresponding modes of representation by the mind.

It is thus the positing of the two opposed signs of light and night that generates the mortal confusion between Being and Non-Being. For each of these signs is taken to be what it is intrinsically, “to be the same as itself everywhere.” Fire, for example, is thought to be intrinsically luminous; it is what it is independently of its relations to anything else. And, in like manner, night is thought to be intrinsically dark; it too is what it is independently of its relations to other things. But, at the same time, each is taken not to be the other. An essential feature of fire’s luminosity, for instance, is its not being dark, and an essential feature of night’s darkness is its not being light. In this manner, ordinary consciousness represents being and non-being as both identical and non-identical.

Though the goddess’s technical description of light and night will likely strike us as archaic, the picture she presents does seem to track our everyday human experience. Consider, for example, our experience of space and time.¹⁰⁴ Each point of space seems to be an independent unit, a here that is what it is independently of any other point in space. Yet, such a here can only be individuated in terms of its relation every other here. It is this here because it is not there. The same goes for our experience of time. I experience a moment of time, a now, that is what it is independently of any other time. Yet, I can only individuate that now, that particular point of time, by relating it to all other possible points of time. It is now, because it is not then. And the same goes for our perceptual and conceptual experiences.¹⁰⁵ I might perceive a book as rectangular, and that rectangularity would seem to be an intrinsic property. It is what it is apart from its relations to anything else. Yet, in order for me to see the rectangularity of the book, I need to distinguish its edges from the rest of the visual field. To see the book as rectangular, I need to see that it is not, the table on which it rests, or the wall in front of which it stands. Or again, I might conceive of Socrates as a human, and the property of being human seems to be what it is apart from its relation to anything else. Yet, at the same time, it seems that the concept human means what it does only by negating other concepts. For example, from the fact that Socrates is a human, I can infer that he is not a cloud or an orange.

In this manner, the goddess’s doctrine of the two signs that mark the road of Mortal Opinion appears to capture our ordinary human experience. The world represented by the mind of man is a world that wavers back and forth between “is” and “is not”. And, as the goddess observes, this worldview is recommended largely through habit. It’s not as if we woke up one day, thought through things thoroughly, and decided to apprehend the world through representations of space and time and the finite concepts of the understanding. This worldview, instead, was something we were thrown into at birth and defines the ordinary reality to which we are accustomed.

The Many Signs on the Path of Being

In contrast to the familiar signs marking the path of Mortal Opinion, strange signs attend the path of Being. To begin with, rather than only two, the goddess proclaims that there are very many signs that announce Being’s way. She maintains:

“On this one [i.e. the path of Being] there are signs, very many of them: that being, it is uncreated (ἀγένητον), indestructible (ἀνώλεθρον), whole (οὖλον), unique (μουνογενές), unmoved (ἀτρεμές) and eternal (ἀτέλεστον) (Trans. Laks and Most, modified, D8).

The path of Being has an abundance of signs. The goddess lists six, but there may well be more. Furthermore, instead of functioning as binary opposites, as do signs on the mortal way (e.g. light/ dark, hot/cold, light/ heavy, etc.), these divine signs, as will be made clear in the goddess’s subsequent arguments, are mutually implicating. So, instead of excluding one another, each ellucidates all others, like a set of mirrors reflecting to infinity. Or, to borrow an analogy from Trinitarian doctrine, each divine sign stands in perichoresis, or mutual encircling, with the others. In the words of St. Augustine:

“They are infinite in themselves. So both each are in each, and all in each, and each in all, and all in all, and all are one. Let him who sees this, whether in part, or ‘through a glass and in an enigma,’ rejoice in knowing God; and let him honor Him as God, and give thanks; but let him who does not see it, strive to see it through piety, not cavil at it through blindness” (Augustine, De Trinitate, 6.10 trans. Haddan).

Being’s signs thus do not stand in the sorts of exclusion relations that attend those on the mortal path. For instance, from the fact that Being is unbegotten (ἀγέννητος), we cannot infer that it is not uniquely begotten (μουνογενής) as we would if these were mortal concepts.

And the mutually implicating nature of these divine signs also explains an erstwhile puzzling fragment. In this fragment, the goddess declares:

“In common, for me, is the point from which I shall begin: for I shall return there once again later” (D5).

Given that each sign elucidates all others, one could start at any point and proceed through the whole to return once more to the beginning. This sort of fruitful circularity, wherein one spirals ever upward into deeper knowledge of Being, contrasts with the empty circularity of the mortal path which forever flits between Being and Non-being.

The goddess then examines the signs of Being and reveals how each is contained in the other and in the experience of the Absolute. In summarizing the goddess’s arguments, I’ll depart from her order of exposition, and examine each of the signs in turn: Being i) increate (ἀγένητον), ii) indestructible (ἀνώλεθρον), iii) whole (οὖλον), iv) unique (μουνογενές), v) unmoved (ἀτρεμές) and vi) eternal (ἀτέλεστον).

1. Increate (ἀγένητον)

Aseity, existence without having been created by another, is a sign of necessary Being. Consider again the direct experience of God. As noted earlier, such an experience would an experience of something necessary, something which cannot not be. Now if such Being were created, then there would be a possible world at which it was not, namely, the world in which it had not been created. Yet this would mean that necessary Being is not, in fact, necessary, since, by definition, necessary Being would exist at all possible worlds. So, necessary Being cannot be created; it is essentially increate.

The goddess articulates this core insight in several ways. She begins with the question: “What birth could you seek for it [i.e. Being]? How, from what could it have grown?” (D8). She then argues that necessary Being could not have been generated from necessary Non-being, when she answers “not from what is not—I shall not allow you to say or to think this: for it cannot be said nor thought that ‘is not’ ” (D8). The goddess here appears to be setting forth an additional transcendental argument. The proponent of the thesis that Being, in the strong sense of the word, is created from Nothing, in the strong sense of the word, is committed to the following proposition: (C) necessary Being is created by necessary Non-being. Now, as noted earlier, such necessary Non-being would constitute an empty world, a world in which there would be no propositional content. Thus, in such a world, (C) cannot be said or thought. In other words, the falsehood of (C) is a condition for the possibility of entertaining or asserting (C).

The goddess next, laying the foundation for later cosmological arguments, contends that, even if one were, contrary to fact, to be able to think necessary Non-being, it would be absurd to think that anything could be generated from such a world. She maintains, “neither will any force of belief (πίστις) ever affirm that out of what is not something is born beside itself” (D8). The idea here is presumably that, if something is created, then something must have created it. But, if the world were completely empty, as would be the case with necessary non-Being, then there would be no something to do the creating. Hence, nothing could have been created from necessary Non-being, and, thus, necessary Being could not have been created from it.

The goddess then refutes the suggestion that necessary Being could be created by an object of human opinion, something composed of a mixture of being and non-being (or light and night). She points out that, in such a scenario, necessary Being would have to be generated in time, and given our experience of time, this would mean that it must be created at some particular moment as opposed to another. But this leads to difficulties. The goddess begins by asking, “what need could have compelled it to grow later rather than sooner, if it had had nothing for a beginning” (D8)? This question suggests two arguments. First, the goddess may be once more laying the groundwork for later metaphysics by articulating a principle of sufficient reason. According to such a principle, for any fact F, there exists some reason that explains F. This principle seems to express a fundamental need of reason, and inquiry appears to stagnate without it. So, if necessary Being were to be generated at a particular moment in time, let’s say, t₄, then there must be some reason why it was created at just that moment and not another such as t₁, t₂, or t₃. Yet it doesn’t appear that such a reason can be provided, since each moment of time is indifferent in terms of its suitability for the creation of necessary Being. This, then, leads to the second argument. The defender of the creation of necessary Being might attempt to appeal to the some particular state of affairs at a given time to explain why that moment was more propitious for creating it than any other. Yet, this approach reveals an even deeper problem than the violation of the principle of sufficient reason. As observed earlier, the very idea of necessary Being coming into existence at all is incoherent. As the goddess declares, “so it is necessary that it either be completely or not at all” (D8). To say that necessary being was created by a contingent object in the mortal world, would be to say that there was a time in which Being was not. But this could not hold true for necessary Being.

The goddess also shows how Being’s aseity follows from its eternality, as the two signs mutually implicate each other. She explains: “For if it was born, it is not, not any more than if it is going to be someday, in this way birth is extinguished” (D8). To be eternal, on this conception, is to escape the flow of time. It is to exist in a timeless present untouched by past and future. Something eternal is thus not the kind of thing that was, and then is no more, or will be, but isn’t. But if Being were to be created by something in the world of human opinion, then it would, contra the doctrine of eternality, have to come to be in time.

2. Indestructible (ἀνώλεθρον)

The goddess similarly shows how Being’s eternality implies its indestructibility, proclaiming that the argument articulated above reveals how “unknowable destruction” is extinguished (D8). If Being were to be destroyed, then it would have had to have existed up to a given point in time, been annihilated, and then longer exist. But this is impossible given the eternality of Being. If Being abides in an eternal now outside of the flow of time, then it cannot be destroyed in time.

The goddess also reveals how indestructibility follows from wholeness. She instructs: “Nor is it divisible, since as a whole it is similar, nor at all more here, which would prevent it from cohering, nor at all weaker, but as a whole it is full of being. That is why as a whole it is continuous: for what is is adjacent to what is” (D8). Two arguments are again suggested here. First, the goddess indicates that as a genuine whole, Being must fully cohere with itself, and this complete coherence renders division impossible. One might then observe that destruction appears to be co-extensive with the loss of some or all of a thing’s essential components.¹⁰⁶ A house, for example, is destroyed by an earthquake when its walls and roof collapse. But, since Being admits no division, no components can be removed, much less any essential ones. And, so, Being cannot be destroyed. Second, one might observe that destruction appears to involve the exploitation of a weak point in a given system. For example, even Achilles, the strongest of Homeric warriors, was said to have been killed by an attack on his heal, his only vulnerable point.¹⁰⁷ But Being, given that it is whole, has no weak point to be exploited, and so cannot be destroyed.

3. Whole (οὖλον)

Being’s wholeness shines forth from several other features of Being. The goddess first shows how Being’s wholeness follows from its necessity, proclaiming: “For strong necessity (κρατερὴ ἀνάγκη) holds it fast within the bonds (ἐν δεσμοῖσιν) of the limit (πείρατος), which confines it on all sides. That is why it is not allowed that what is be incomplete. For it is not lacking; if it were, it would lack everything” (D8). Consider again Being as encountered in mystical experience. It is presented as absolutely necessary, admitting of no Non-being. In other words, Being can lack nothing, and if it were to lack something, it would be a (different) kind of being, not necessary Being. And, since to lack nothing is to be whole, wholeness is a condition of the possibility of the experience of the Absolute.

In this manner, the goddess contrasts necessary Being with the beings that exist for mortal opinion. For, in being defined in terms of both light and darkness, each of which is taken as something that both is and is not, the objects of mortal opinion essentially lack wholeness, whereas wholeness is essential to necessary Being. This contrast is reinforced by the language used in this passage. Fierce necessity, for mortals, brings suffering and death. For example, Hektor, in his famous speech before the Skaian Gate, uses the term “strong necessity” (κρατερὴ ἀνάγκη) to describe the horrors to befall his wife Andromache after his death as she is dragged off to slavery (Il.6.458). And the language of the bonds of limit also reinforces the idea of slavery and even death (Il.6.143). But these same terms have no such power over Being. Strong necessity and its bonds of limit serve only to ensure its wholeness and perfection.

Second, Being’s wholeness is also implied by the identity of thought and Being. The goddess explains: “This is the same: to think (νοεῖν) and the thought that ‘is’ (ἔστι νόημα). For not without being (ἐόντος), in which it [scil. thinking] is betrothed [alt. spoken of or named] (πεφατισμένον), will you find thinking (εὑρήσεις τὸ νοεῖν). For nothing else is or will be besides what is, since Fate (Μοῖρα) has bound (ἐπέδησεν) this to be whole (οὖλον) and unmovable (ἀκίνητον): so that its name (ὄνομα) will be all the things about which mortals have established, convinced that they are true, that they are born and are destroyed, are and are not, change their place and modify their bright color” (trans. Laks and Most, modified, D8).

Consider again the mystical experience in which my eye which sees God is identical to God’s eye which sees me. Here, thinking is identical to what is thought, since one is aware of the Absolute through the same awareness that it is aware of itself. This divine thinking cannot be sundered from the fullness of the divine nature in which it is betrothed to all the rest of the divine attributes, attributes which ultimately point to simplicity. Divine thought, then, would essentially be whole, grasping the entirety of the divine nature. If the content of divine thought were to lack something, it would no longer be the thought of the Absolute. So, a condition of the possibility of mystical experience is that Being be whole.

And once more, the malefic language used to describe the objects of mortal opinion, proves to be benefic when applied to Being. Μοῖρα the goddess of fate, is usually associated with evil and death (Il. 4.517, 5.613, 18.119, 19.87). Strictly speaking, μοῖρα means a part or portion. For example, it could be a portion of meat, or a portion of war booty, or the limited portion of life granted to mortals. Yet, paradoxically, Being’s portion is to be whole, to be incapable of being portioned up. And, once more, the binding usually associated with slavery or death (Il. 4.517, Od. 3.269) becomes, for Being, a binding to wholeness and perfection.

Third, the goddess shows how Being’s inability to be limited by non-being implies that it must be whole. She observes:

“Moreover, since its limit is most distant, it is completed (τετελεσμένον) on every side, similar to the volume of a well-rounded ball, everywhere balanced equally starting from its center: for neither is there nonbeing (οὐκ ἑὸν), which could stop it from reaching what is similar to it; nor is there being so that of being there would would be more here and less there, since as a whole it is inviolable. For, equal to itself on every side, it maintains itself in its limits, similarly” (trans. Laks and Most, D8).

The goddess here proclaims that Being cannot be limited by non-being. One might consider Being as limited by non-being in one of two ways: either through necessary nonbeing or through the non-being constitutive of the objects of mortal opinion. But Being could not be limited by necessary non-being, since there would be nothing there to do the limiting. Likewise, Being could not be limited by the contingent beings of mortal experience, since, in order for them to do so, Being would have to admit to the same kind of mixture of being and non-being that they do (being “more here and less there”), but it doesn’t. And so, since Being cannot be limited by necessary non-being or the contingent beings of mortal experience, it stretches out fully in all directions, which is to say, it is whole. The limits imposed upon it, limits which are most distant, are self imposed limits. “Equal to itself on every side, it maintains itself in its limits, similarly”.

4. Unique (μουνογενές)

The wholeness of Being also secures its uniqueness. As the goddess has previously observed, “since Fate (Μοῖρα) has bound this to be whole”, “nothing else is or will be besides what is” (D8). Suppose (i) that Being is whole and lacks nothing and (ii) that there are two such beings. Since, according to (ii), these two beings are distinct, there must be some kind of difference between them. Whatever this difference might consist in, it must be possessed by one of these beings as opposed to the other, and this implies that one of these beings would lack something possesed by the other. But according to (i) Being is whole and lacks nothing. So, either one or both of the beings posited in (ii) cannot be equivalent to the Being affirmed in (i). As a result, if Being is whole, there could be only one such Being, which is to say, it would have to be unique.

5. Unmoved (ἀτρεμές)

Being’s unmovability follows from its uniqueness and wholeness. The goddess explains their relations as follows: “Remaining the same and in the same it rests in itself and thus remains stable there; for powerful necessity holds it fast within the bonds of the limit, which confines it on all sides” (D8).

Two arguments are suggested by the goddess’s observations here. First, as unique, Being remains the same and rests in the same, and “thus remains stable there”. Motion is a relation between two things, even if one of those “things” is empty space. But, since Being is unique, there is nothing outside of itself in which it could move, and, since it is simple, it has no parts that could move relative to one another. Therefore motion cannot apply to Being, and hence it is unmovable.

Moreover, the second half of the quote suggests an argument from wholeness. Being remains stable since “powerful necessity holds it fast within the bonds of the limit, which confines it on all sides.” If Being were to move, it would undergo some form of change, and thus either lose or gain something. But this is ruled out by Being’s wholeness. If it were to lose something, it would no longer be whole, and thus no longer be Being. And, if it were to gain something, it would not have been whole prior to gaining that thing, and thus would not have been Being. Likewise, the goddess suggests that all the considerations motivating wholeness serve to motivate unmovability as well, when she proclaims : “Destiny (Μοῖρα) has bound this [i.e. Being] to be whole and unmovable” (D8).

6. Eternal (ἀτέλεστον)

And the goddess also shows how wholeness implies eternity. She proclaims that Being “was not, nor will it be at some time, since it is now, together, whole, one, continuous” (D8). The time experienced in everyday consciousness is essentially incomplete. Things are, indeed, given to us in a present, but it is a present come from a past that is no more, and hastening towards a future yet to be.¹⁰⁸ The present, for us, is fleeting. But this is neither how one experiences time in mystical experience nor how the Reality in that experience relates to time. For Being’s essential wholeness would exclude the kind of partial existence depicted in our ordinary experience of time. So Being must be outside of time as commonly understood, and instead exist in the fullness of something like an eternal now.

Likewise, when the goddess queries, after once more contrasting necessary Being with necessary non-being and maintaining that only the road of Being exists, “how then could what is exist afterward?” (D8), she may be pointing out how Being’s necessity implies its eternity. One might think that an object’s movement through time, corresponds to certain possibilities becoming actual for it. As something moves from t₁ to t₂, it moves from a state of affairs in which the possibility of being at t₂ had not been actual, to one in which it is actual. Now, this would imply that anything that moves through time will have certain possibilities that are not actual for it. And so, since necessary Being has no unactualized possibilities, it cannot move through time, that is, necessary Being must be eternal.

And the goddess also points out how umoveability, uncreatedness, and invincibility imply eternity. She declares, “moreover, motionless within the limits of its great bonds, it is without beginning, without ending, since birth and destruction went wandering very far away—true belief thrust them away” (D8). Note first how the passage through time constitutes a kind of motion. Thus, since Being is unmoved, it could not pass through time, and so must be eternal. Furthermore, the fact that Being is uncreated also rules out temporality. For to pass through time, perpetually occupying a new ephemeral “now”, would be akin to being created anew at each present moment. Thus, if Being is uncreated, it must also be eternal. And finally, the passage through time can be likened to a kind of destruction. The past dies in the present, which will itself be destroyed as the future comes to be. So, if Being is indestructible, then it could not be subject to the flow of time.

In this manner, the goddess reveals the signs of Being to be mutually elucidating. To see Being’s necessity and its identity with thought is also to perceive its aseity, indestructibility, wholeness, uniqueness, unmovability, and eternality. Like mirrors reflecting each other to infinity, to catch sight of one of Being’s modes of presentation, is to catch sight of all of them, as they draw one ever further up and further in to the unshaken heart of truth.

The Way of Opinion

Though the goddess cautions Parmenides against the Way of Mortal Opinion, she nonetheless thoroughly explicates it. She segues to this final section of the poem as follows:

“At this point, for you I stop the sure word (πιστόν λόγον) and what is perceived (νόημα) concerning truth (ἀμφὶς ἀληθείης); from here on learn mortal opinions (δόξας) by listening to the deceptive (ἀπατηλόν) order (κόσμον) of my words” (Trans. Laks and Most, modified D8).

Having proclaimed the faithful and true word of Being, the goddess now changes her style and annouces that henceforth her words will be adorned with deception. Whereas, in the Way of Truth, the goddess elucidated the conditions of the possibility of the vision of God, the goddess will here, in the Way of Opinion, examine the world as structured by mortal ways of knowing, i.e., through the fundamental distinction between light and night and their incompatibility relations. For example, in a passage that may constitute the conclusion of the section, after the goddess has “explained the organization of the perceptibles”, she declares: “In this way, according to opinion, these things have been born and now are, and later, having grown strong, starting from that point they will come to their end. For these things, humans have established a name that designates each one” (Simplicius, trans. Laks and Most, D62). The Way of Opinion thus examines what comes to be and passes away, the domain Plato would later call “the realm of becoming”, and explains how humans, through their distinctively mortal modes of representation, establish names for the beings populating this realm.

Unfortunately, only a handful of quotations remain from the Way of Opinion, and scholars speculate that we may have, at best, only ten percent of this final section of the poem.¹⁰⁹ In it, the goddess provides a complete description of the world as it appears to mortals, using the fundamental principles of light and night to give an give an account of the generation of the gods (a theogony), of earth and heaven (a cosmology), and of the various creatures living on earth, including man. Plutarch, for instance, summaries the contents of the Way of Opinion as follows:

“Parmenides has also described in his poem the arrangements of the world, and after he has mixed the elements, the bright and the dark, he produces all the phenomena out of them and by means of them. For he has said many things about the earth, the heavens, the sun, the moon and the heavenly bodies, and he recounts the origin of human beings” (Against Colotes, trans. Laks and Most, D9).

In short, the final section of the poem aims to provide a complete and accurate account of empirical reality. The goddess’s teaching in this section is distinct from the teachings of other presocratic philosophers, and, when considered from a scientific point of view, its cosmology constitutes an advance over previous models. For example, it is said to include the first historical formulation of the sphericality of the earth¹¹⁰ and of heliophotism¹¹¹, the view that the moon reflects the light of the sun rather than possessing a light of its own. Likewise, within the Greek tradition, it is thought to include the first identification of Venus as both the morning and evening star,¹¹² and to constitute the first attempt to investigate heredity and the differentiation between male and female embryos.¹¹³

From such observations, contemporary philosophers conclude that Parmenides’ empirical investigations have been historically underrated. Graham, for instance declares:

“Whatever position we take about the role of Parmenides’ cosmology in relation to his philosophy, we need to stop ignoring or patronizing him as an astronomer and scientist. The most remarkable burst of creative energy in early Greek astronomy begins with the speculations of Parmenides. The greatest ontologist and most abstract philosopher among the Presocratics is also the best theoretical scientist of his time” (Graham, Science before Socrates, 96).

And Mansfeld similarly maintains that Parmenides’ poem “is as an important a contribution to the development of…science as” his “ontology” was (Mansfeld, Parmenides from Right to Left, 6).

Yet these observations lead to an interpretive puzzle. If, in the section on Mortal Opinion, the goddess sought to express truths about our empirical world, then why would she warn Parmenides against taking this route, exposing it as a circular path of the ignorant (D7), declaring those formulating it to lack true faith (D4), and announcing up front that her words in this section will be deceitful (D9)? If the Way of Truth implies that, fundamentally, the objects of human opinion are illusions derived from the confused modes of representation constitutive of mortal experience, that, as the ancient philosopher Colotes famously charged, “the inhabited cities of Europe and Asia” do not really exist on Parmenides’ scheme (R53a), then why would it attempt to articulate true things about that non-existent empirical world?¹¹⁴

Thankfully, the goddess answers this question at the very outset of the Way of Opinion. She explains the purpose of her instruction in this section as follows:

“I tell you this orderly arrangement of the universe (διάκοσμον), all seeming (ἐοικότα πάντα),¹¹⁵ so that no (οὐ μή ποτέ τίς) way of knowing (γνώμη) of mortals (βροτῶν) might ever drive past (παρελάσσῃ) you” ( Trans. Laks and Most modified, D8).

Here the goddess pronounces a dialectical reason for delivering her teaching to Parmenides. She will articulate the realm of mere seeming, so that no mortal mode of cognition will ever get past him. Parmenides, as an initiate, has been granted a divine form of cognition in the Way of Truth, but, given that he will be returning to the mortal world to deliver the goddess’s message to us, there is a danger that he will be fall back into the realm of illusion. The goddess thus sets forth the Way of Opinion to forearm Parmenides against the coming onslaught of appearances and equip him to resist the blandishments of the world.

And, in this passage, the goddess further contrasts mortal and divine consciousness through her allusions to scenes from Homer’s Odyssey. Kingsley has pointed out that the way she expresses negation in this passage, οὐ μή ποτέ τίς, would call to mind the scene in which Odysseus tells the cyclops Polyphemus that his name is “nobody”, οὔτις, so that, after blinding him, when the other cyclopes gather around Polyphemus as he cries out in pain, he will tell them that “nobody” hurt him. Odysseus then puns off of an alternative way to say say nobody, μή τίς, to allude to, μῆτις, the word for wisdom or skill.¹¹⁶ And, a further allusion to Homeric epic can also be seen in the use of the verb

παρελαύνειν, to drive past. Kingsley takes this verb to refer to the chariot race at the funeral games for Patroclus in the Iliad (23.256-650), but the context better fits Odysseus’ voyage past the Sirens in the Odyssey.¹¹⁷ In this scene, Odysseus manages to listen to the Sirens’ enchanted song as he sails past them, lashed to the mast of his ship, the rest of his crew’s ears stopped fast with wax. The Sirens sing:

“Come this way, honored Odysseus, great glory of the Achaians, and stay your ship, so that you can listen here to our singing; for no one else has ever sailed past (παρήλασε) this place in his black ship until he has listened to the honey-sweet voice that issues from our lips; then goes on, well pleased, knowing more (πλείονα εἰδώς) than ever he did; for we know (ἴδμεν) everything (πάνθ᾽) that the Arigives and Trojans did and suffered in wide Troy through the gods’ despite. Over all the generous earth we know everything that happens (ἴδμεν δ᾽, ὅσσα γένηται ἐπὶ χθονὶ πουλυβοτείρῃ)” (Od. 12.184-191 trans. Lattimore).

And Odysseus recounts:

“So they sang, in sweet utterance, and the heart within me desired to listen, and I signaled my companions to set me free, nodding my brows, but they leaned on and rowed hard…. But when they had rowed on past (παρήλασαν) the Sirens, and we could no longer hear their voices and lost the sound of their singing, presently my eager companions took away from their ears the beeswax with which I had stopped them. Then they set me free from my lashings” (Od. 12.192-200, trans. Lattimore).

By alluding to these two scenes from the Odyssey, the goddess likens Parmendies both to the Cyclops Polyphemus and to the Sirens and declares that she will teach him mortal opinion, so that unlike them, he will not be outdone by human trickery. Note how both the Cyclopes and the Sirens stand decidedly outside of the mortal sphere. The Cyclopes neither build cities nor practice agriculture, but “put all their trust in the immortal gods” to provide for them (Od. 9.106f), and the knowledge and magical songs of the Sirens set them apart from the human world (see passages above). Parmenides is thus treated as one who belongs to this other world; by his intercourse with the goddess, he has become a denizen of the fairy realm. Unlike Odysseus, who rejected the nymph Calypso’s offer of immortality (Od. 5.135-136) so as to achieve his human nostos, Parmenides has accepted the goddess’s offer of theosis.

Thus, in presenting her account of the universe structured by human cognition, the goddess aims to present an essentially illusory world, the world of Maya. Though she intends her account to be detailed, systematic, and superior to its rivals, she does not take it to be ultimately true. Instead, her goal in setting forth the Way of Opinion is to protect Parmenides from becoming ensnared by mortal appearances. In short, the goddess intends her instruction in this section to be taken dialectically. Her account can be thought of as a kind of inverted Kantianism in this regard.¹¹⁸ Whereas Kant’s transcendental dialectic aims to show how we are led into error when we attempt to make judgments about what transcends what can be given in the ordinary human experience of space and time, the goddess’s Way of Opinion seeks to reveal how we are deceived when we attempt to make judgments about what is confined to such experience. For Kant, we can know appearances, but not transcendent reality, while, for the goddess, we can know transcendent reality, but not mere appearance. Kant’s conclusion follows from the fact that he confines his investigation exclusively to ordinary states of human consciousness. Because the goddess takes into account expanded states of awareness ignored by Kant and other philosophers, her teaching comes to radically different conclusions.

Dialectical interpretations, such as the one I have proposed, have fallen on hard times of late. Contemporary interpreters claim that such readings saddle “Parmenides with the preposterous and literally untenable view that nothing in one’s experience, not even one’s own self, exists” (Palmer, 178). The case against the dialectical interpretation is most forcefully stated by Tor. He contends that, in light of the detailed and insightful scientific accounts provided in the Way of Opinion:

“It strains credulity to suppose that, in developing such systematic, ambitious and specific cosmological accounts, Parmenides’ sole or even primary motivation was simply to construct ‘an exemplar of all erroneous systems’ or merely to exemplify an entirely general metaphysical confusion. Nor is it clear what the dialectical or inoculative benefit consists in. In Doxa, the goddess presented particular, concrete theories concerning, say, the source of the moon’s light (B14–15; A42) or the embryological processes by which children become similar to one parent or the other (A54). By elaborating these theories, and adding thereby nothing to Alêtheia’s remarks about such processes as motion and coming-to-be, the goddess perhaps deters Parmenides from rival astronomical and embryological accounts, but she does not thereby inoculate him against astronomical and embryological accounts as such, nor, again, does she thereby display an entirely general critique of cosmology as such” (Tor, 165).

Tor here presents two main critiques of the dialectical reading. First, he contends that it “strains credulity” to believe that Parmenides would develop a novel, detailed, and systematic cosmology, one which constituted a scientific advance over previous models, if his motivations were primarily dialectical. The argument here seems to be i) that Parmenides appears to present his cosmology as an accurate depiction of the empirical world and ii) that this putative accuracy is inconsistent with the dialectical interpretation’s contention that the main purpose of the section is to dissuade us from accepting the reality of that world. Second, Tor argues that if we examine the fragments in question, there is no evidence of a dialectical teaching. In these passages we find neither a general critique of cosmology as such nor anything that would “innoculate” the reader against it. In short, Tor’s contention is that the extant fragments of the Way of Opinion contain only expositions of a positive cosmology and reveal no traces of a dialectical argument.

Thankfully, the kind of dialectical interpretation sketched above, one grounded in the contrast between divine and mortal modes of cognition, has the resources to answer both objections. In response to the first objection, note, first, that statements can be accurate, or even, in some sense, true, even when they fail to represent actual reality. For example, it is accurate to say that Pikachu is an electric type, even though there are no actual Pokemon in the world. And, not only can such statements be accurate, but some of them can be more accurate than others. The assertion that Pikachu is an electric type is, for instance, is more accurate than the assertion that he is a grass type. Furthermore, an avid fan might attempt to develop a novel, detailed, and systematic description of the world of Pokemon, all while remaining fully cognizant of the fact that the world he articulates is not the real world.

At this point, one might object that even in the above mentioned scenario, it is difficult to believe that anyone would construct such an account for purely dialectical purposes. Yet, to see how one might have a dialectical motive to construct an accurate and systematic characterization of a fictional world, imagine a case like that described in Plato’s allegory of the cave, in which people are raised from birth in a simulated environment. To continue with our video game analogy, suppose that this population has been raised in an immersive VR environment so that the only “reality” they have ever experienced is the reality presented to them in the game. And, suppose further, that someone had been taken out of that virtual world, and was shown the real one. If, afterward, that person were to go back into the simulated world, as Parmenides must do to carry the goddess’s message back to the mortal realm, there would be a danger of being seduced by the power of the immersive experience and of forgetting what one had learned about the reality outside of the game. In such a scenario, one might attempt to construct the most accurate description of the game world available, so that, if one were to return to that world, he or she could remain cognizant of the fact that it was, indeed, a world of illusion. As the saying goes, forewarned is forearmed. Or, to use a different analogy, just as the prisoner seeking to escape incarceration will require an accurate map of the prison, so too do we, if we hope to evade the world of maya and commune with the divine, have need of an accurate map of the world as it appears to the human mind. Thus, we can see how the goddess’s “novel, detailed, and systematic cosmology” could be motivated by a dialectical agenda.

Likewise, in response to the second objection that there is no textual evidence of a dialectical intention, it should be noted, first, that arguments from absence carry little weight in contexts where the majority of a text is absent. Recall that scholars estimate that our extant fragments preserve only ten percent of the Way of Opinion, so ninety percent of this section is missing. In contexts such as this, scholarly speculation, and even consensus, can be easily overturned with the discovery of new manuscript evidence, as was the case for Orphic and Empedocles scholarship when the contents of the Derveni and Strasbourg papyri were discovered.¹¹⁹

Moreover, we do have textual evidence of a dialectical intent in the Way of Opinion. To begin with, recall that the goddess has already expressly stated her dialectical purpose for the section in (D8), when she contrasted the sure word (πιστόν λόγον) of the Way of Truth, with the deceptive order (ἀπατηλόν κόσμον) of her words in the Way of Opinion, and proclaimed that she teaches him this deceptive way so that no mortal mode of cognition (γνώμη) might ever get past him. Indeed, it is hard to imagine the goddess putting the matter any more clearly. She is teaching Parmenides the Way of Opinion so that he can resist the seductions of ordinary human consciousness.

Furthermore, the goddess’s dialectical purpose is also evinced within her exposition of the world of human experience. For example, the theogony presented in the poem was said to be as brutal as that of Hesiod and to have included “castrations, enchainments of each other, and many other deeds of violence” (R56b, from Plato’s Symposium, Trans. Laks and Most). And Cicero attests:

“But in this [scil. Heaven that Parmenides calls god], no one could suspect either a divine shape or sensation. And he has many monsters too, for he assigns to a god war, discord, greed, and the other things of this sort, which are destroyed by sickness, sleep, forgetting, or old age; and the same for the stars…” (R59, from Cicero’s On the Nature of the Gods, trans. Laks and Most).

In presenting a theogony of a familiar anthropological sort wherein the gods admit of all manner of moral and physical defects, the goddess would be offering something unacceptable to one has experienced the mystical vision articulated in the Way of Truth or understood its doctrine. Indeed, other philosophers of the era such as Xenophanes and Pherecydes were critical of, and sought to reform, these crass anthropropmophic depictions of the divine nature. The most straightforward explanation of why the goddess would expound such an unacceptable theogony, rather than trying to modify it as others did, is that she has set it forth dialectically. If one trusts mortal appearances, one is led to unacceptable results.

Indeed, even the goddess herself appears to curse the cosmos presented in the Way of Opinion. When speaking of the originary goddess who steers all things (D14b), fashions the other gods (D16), and dispatches souls through the cycle of reincarnation (D61), she declares that this deity “begins the hateful birth and mingling of all things, leading the female to mingle with the male and again, in the opposite direction, the male with the female” (D14b trans. Laks and Most). The goddess thus explicitly rejects as hateful the world articulated in the Way of Opinion. Again, such a negative judgment evinces the goddess’s dialectical intention in articulating the world of human experience. To those initiated into the divine cognition elucidated in the Way of Truth, the depiction of the cosmos that presents itself to mortal cognition will appear as something hateful, and thus to be avoided.

And similar problems attend the goddess’s anthropological teachings. Theophrastus summarizes the the epistemology of the Way of Opinion as follows:

“Parmenides […] [scil. explains sensation] by the similar […]. Parmenides did not define anything at all except that, the elements being two in number, knowledge is in accordance with the one that prevails. For when the hot or the cold dominates, the thought becomes different. The better and purer one of the two is the one produced by what is hot; but this one too requires a certain commensurability. […] For he speaks of sensation and thinking as being the same thing; this is why, for him, both memory and forgetting come about from these elements by their mixture. […] But the fact that he also explains sensation by one of the contraries taken by itself is clear from the passages in which he says that a corpse does not perceive light, heat, and sound, because fire has withdrawn, but does perceive cold, silence, and the contraries, and in general that everything that exists possesses some knowledge” (Theophrastus, On Sensations, D52).

Recall that human cognition, according to the Way of Opinion, is structured by two opposing principles: light and night. Theophrastus here equates these with the elements of hot and cold, and associates them with two alternative ways of knowing. The possession of heat, for example, allows one to know objects that are light, hot, and emit sound, while the possession of cold, in contrast, allows one to know objects that are dark, cold, and silent. Thus, a corpse, since it has grown cold, would know silence, but would not know sound, and a soul, if it were hot, would perceive sound, but not silence. Similarly, if Theophrastus also means to associate motion with heat, and stillness with cold, then the cold corpse would know stillness, and the hot soul would know motion. Now, such an epistemology would lead to paradoxes for those who have taken up the Parmendean life and adopted the doctrines of the Way of Truth. Recall, for example, that silence was essential for the practice of incubation. But, according to the Way of Opinion, a corpse, because it is cold, would have a better understanding of silence than a living soul, since the living soul remains hot and is to that extent incapable of knowing silence. This would, for example, lead to the paradoxical result that a corpse would make for a better iatromantis and pholarchos in that respect than would a living soul. Or again, if heat is correlated with motion and cold with stillness (ἡσυχία), the fundamental skill Parmenides learned from his teacher Ameinias, then a lifeless corpse would be both better able to practice philosophy and better equipped to know the unmovability of Being, than would a living soul, since the soul, in virtue of its heat, could not know stillness. Such results would likely strike those committed to the Way of Truth as absurd, and again suggest a dialectical purpose in the Way of Opinion.¹²⁰ Thus, in light of these observations, contemporary arguments should not dissuade us for taking the goddess at her word when she declares that she teaches the Way of Opinion to equip Parmenides to resist the illusions inherent in mortal cognition.

Conclusion

Parmenides, speaking on behalf of the unnamed goddess, thus calls on us to choose between two realities and two corresponding states of consciousness. We can either awaken and heed the call of Being, the “I am that I am”, which gives itself in mystical experience, or we can continue to slumber in the realm of light and night fabricated by the human mind.

In our beginning is thus our end, and we are confronted once more with the Seinsfrage and Apollo’s injunction to “know thyself”. What are we and who shall we be? Are we creatures of dust condemned by time to dust to return, or something greater? For those with eyes to see, who have caught a glimpse of that greater something, the divine excess that lies beyond the visible, I suspect that the decision has already been made. The challenge is only to persist and, like Parmenides, refusing to tarry with world’s illusions, to follow desire thus kindled back to its true source. The course of the daimon is, no doubt, perilous, but looking back yet more so (Luke 9:62).

“I went out to the hazel wood,
Because a fire was in my head,
And cut and peeled a hazel wand,
And hooked a berry to a thread;
And when white moths were on the wing,
And moth-like stars were flickering out,
I dropped the berry in a stream
And caught a little silver trout.

When I had laid it on the floor
I went to blow the fire a-flame,
But something rustled on the floor,
And someone called me by my name:
It had become a glimmering girl
With apple blossom in her hair
Who called me by my name and ran
And faded through the brightening air.

Though I am old with wandering
Through hollow lands and hilly lands,
I will find out where she has gone,
And kiss her lips and take her hands;
And walk among long dappled grass,
And pluck till time and times are done,
The silver apples of the moon,
The golden apples of the sun.”
(Yeats, The Song of Wandering Aengus).

(C) Peter Yong, Ph.D.

[The image used in the thumbnail of this essay is a bust of Apollo and is in the public domain. It can be found here: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Apollon_de_Mantoue_Louvre_MA689.jpg]

1“I celebrate myself, and sing myself,/ And what I assume you shall assume,/ For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.” Whitman, Song of Myself.

2 “I became a great enigma to myself and I was forever asking my soul why it was sad and why it disquieted me so sorely. And my soul knew not what to answer me.” Augustine, Confessions, 4.4.9, trans Sheed.

3 “We’re talking about men like Thales of Miletus, Pettacus of Mytilene, Bias of Priene, our own Solon, Cleobulus of Lindus, Myson of Chen, and, the seventh in the list, Chilon of Sparta. All of these emulated, loved, and studied Spartan culture. You can see that distinctive kind of Spartan wisdom in their pithy, memorable sayings, which they jointly dedicated as the first fruits of their wisdom to Apollo in his temple at Delphi, inscribing there the maxims now on everyone’s lips: ‘Know thyself’ and ‘Nothing in excess” (Plato, Protagoras 343a-b).

4 “Two of these sayings in particular express the spirit of Apollo, which is wisdom and morality at once: medon agan, nothing in excess, and gnothi sauton, know yourself; the latter, as has long been recognized, is not intended in a psychological sense or in the existential philosophical sense of Socrates, but in an anthropological sense: know that you are not a god. An ethics of the human emerges, but it is closer to pessimism than to a program for human progress” (Walter Burkert, Greek Religion).

5 Heidegger sees this history as beginning in the works of Plato and Aristotle who attempted to explain Being in terms of the essences of the beings which participate in it, continuing through the linguistic shift from Greek to Latin as the concerns of the Greeks were transposed into the imperial concerns of the Romans and alethia was transformed into veritas, and reaching its fruition in today’s technological world wherein philosophy is superseded by the empirical sciences it gave birth to. See Heidegger, What is Metaphysics?, The Question Concerning Technology, The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking, and his lecture series on Parmenides.

6 “Still, the clearing as such as it prevails through Being, through presence, remains unthought in philosophy, although it is spoken about in philosophy’s beginning. Where does this occur and with which names? Answer: In Parmenides’ thoughtful poem which, as far as we know, was the first to reflect explicitly upon the Being of beings, which still today, although unheard, speaks in the sciences into which philosophy dissolves” (Heidegger, The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking.)

7de profundis clamavi ad te Domine (Ps 129).

8 Sadly, this is not surprising, since it is now possible in many departments to earn a degree in philosophy without having read any of the tradition’s major historical texts. One might, for example, earn a Ph.D. in philosophy without having read anything by Plato or Kant. One can only conjecture as to the forces at play behind the scenes seeking to sever us from our cultural roots.

9Bertrand Russell is once more representative here. “This is the first example in philosophy of an argument from thought and language to the world at large. It cannot of course be accepted as valid, but it is worthwhile to see what element of truth it contains” (History of Western Philosophy).

10In fact, if he does reject the deliverances of the senses, he equally rejects the finite concepts of the understanding.

11 Kingsley, Reality, 239.

12 Ibid.

13 Ibid., 240.

14 Kingsley, In the Dark Places of Wisdom, 11.

15 Kingsley, Reality, 242.

16 Ibid., 241. What remains of his observations are recorded by Seneca the Younger in his Naturales Quaestiones iv.2.22. “Euthemenes of Marseilles bears corroborative testimony: I have, he says, gone a voyage in the Atlantic Sea. It causes an increase in the Nile [in fact, the Senegal] as long as the Etesian winds observe their season. For at that period the sea is cast up by pressure of the winds. When the winds have fallen, the sea is at rest, and supplies less energy to the Nile in its descent. Further, the taste of that sea is fresh, and its denizens resemble those of the Nile” (trans. Geikie).

17 Kingsley, Reality, 242.

18 Ibid.

19 Ibid., 243.

20 Ibid., 244. Kingsley contends that Pytheas made these measurements in order “to demonstrate in detail” that the earth “is a sphere”.

21 Kingsley, Dark Places, 12.

22 Ibid., 15.

23 Ibid., 13.

24 Ibid.

25 Ibid., 14.

26 Ibid.

27 Ibid.

28 Ibid., 16.

29 Ibid.

30 Ibid., 17.

31 “For a long time we’ve been told the ancient Greeks were a self-enclosed people, unwilling to learn foreign languages, creating Western Civilization all on their own. We haven’t quite been told the truth. The links with the East were there to begin with, behind everything that was to occur and has occurred since then” (Kingsley, Dark Places, 18.) Seeing Parmenides as thus rooted in a primordial tradition has profound implications for our understanding the history of Western philosophy. Kingsley points out that, at the very roots of Western philosophy, we find an ancient spiritual tradition that transcends the distinction between East and West. For Kingsley observes:“The earliest Greek reports about Iatromantis figures… [describe] how they’d travel up and down from regions far to the north and east of Greece, how they’d pass through areas inhabited by Iranian tribes that were shamanic cultures in their own right and then on into Siberia and Central Asia….[and]…. Objects and inscriptions have been found that show a continuity of shamanic traditions stretching all the way from the boundaries of Greece across Asia to the Himalayas and Tibet, Nepal and India” (Dark Places, 113-114). As a result, when talking about such figures and their philosophy, the distinction between East and West becomes meaningless. “We think now of East and West. But then there were no real lines to be drawn. The oneness experienced by the Iatromantis on another level of awareness left its mark in the physical world. Even to talk about influence is to limit the reality of what was one vast network of nomads, of travelers, of individuals who lived in time and space but also were in touch with something else” (Dark Places, 114).

32 Kingsley, Dark Places, 98. Or again, “the Phocaeans were a very, very conservative people. After they moved out to the west they kept their ancient Anatolian customs unchanged and intact for centuries—close to a thousand years. Even in their nightmare situation, with the Persian army waiting at the gates and not a moment left to waste or spare, they make a priority of rescuing every single object they could that would help them keep the thread of their religious traditions unbroken wherever they managed to go” (Reality, 18).

33 Kingsley contends that this wise man may well have been Pythagorean. “The fact is that there used to be men just like him in southern Italy: men who really existed. They were called ‘the wise’ because their wisdom verged on the divine; because they were able to see beyond the surface and behind appearances; because they were able to interpret oracles and dreams and the riddles of existence. Some of them came to be known as Pythagoreans—people who lived in the spirit of Pythagoras” (Kingsley, Dark Places, 27).

34 Herodotus puts it tersely as follows. “Those who fled to Rhegium set out from thence and gained possession of that Oenotrian city which is now called Hyle; this they founded because they learned from a man of Posidonia that when the Pythian preistess spoke of founding a settlement and of Cyrnus, it was the hero that she signified and not the island” Histories I.167 trans. Godley).

35 “There’s no precise or reliable dating for Parmenides that survives. We just have rough indications; but they’re good enough. The indications are that he was born not that long after the Phocaeans arrived in southern Italy on their journey from the east—that he was among among the first generation of children brought up by Phocaean parents in Velia, with the memories of Phocaea and of their journey from Phocaea still running fresh in their blood.” Kingsley, Dark Places, 42.

36 Diogenes Laertius: “Parmenides of Elea, son of Pyres, studied with Xenophanes” (P6a).

37Given the parallels between Parmenides and Epimenides that will be shown shortly, it is also interesting to note that Xenophanes is portrayed as having “attacked Epimenides also”. It is also worth noting that it is this connection with Xenophanes that allows Aristotle to group together Xenophanes, Parmenides, and Melissus as a common Eleatic school of thought which “theorized about the universe as if it were a single entity” (Metaphysics 986b), a school of thought which he then claims, from the point of view of his own metaphysical project, can be safely ignored as “quite irrelevant” (ibid). One wonders how much of a shadow Aristotle has thus cast on the reception of Parmenides’ thought.

38Rhode, Psyche, 115, 117.

39Ibid., 116.

40Farnell, Greek Hero Cults, 58-62. See also Herodotus, Histories, 1.46, 1.52, and 8.134.

41Such a thought would actually be natural within Pythagoreanism, since Pythagoreans were already said to be able to see and hear daimones. “A special knowledge of daimones was claimed by the marginal sect of Pythagoreans: they could not only hear daimones, but even see them, and expressed great surprise that this was not accepted as quiet natural by other men” (Burkert, Greek Religion).

42 This characteristic stillness is also attributed to more famous characters such as Socrates in Plato’s Symposium. Yet we simply overlook these passages or pretend they refer to Socrates being absentmindedly lost in thought over some kind of intellectual puzzle.

43 Kingsley, Dark Places, 140.

44 Ibid.

45 Ibid., 108. This was the same Carian region whose inhabitants worshiped Apollo as lord of the lair as will be discussed later.

46 LSJ entry on oulios.

47 LSJ entry on physikos. It is also interesting to note how the term also came to mean “belonging to occult laws of nature, magical” and was used to describe “spells and amulets.”

48 Kingsley,Dark Places, 141.

49 “Parmenides himself represents year zero: all the numbers on the other inscriptions– year 280, year 379, year 446—were being counted from him. Century after century this line of healers had continued to exist, looking back to Parmenides as its source and dating its existence to him. To measure the age of a tradition or institution by dating it from its founder was nothing unusual in the ancient world. It was normal to acknowledge and then worship the person as a hero, beginning the moment when he died. And there was one formal way of referring to such a person. This was to call him heros ktistes, the founding hero” (Kingsley, Dark Places, 147).

50 Ibid., 78.

51 Ibid., 79.

52 Classicist E.R. Dodds describes the practice of incubation as follows: “Incubation had been practiced in Egypt since the fifteenth century b.c. at least, and I doubt if the Minoans were ignorant of it. When we first meet it in Greece, it is usually associated with cults of earth and of the dead which have all the air of being pre-Hellenic. Tradition said, probably with truth, that the original Earth oracle at Delphi had been a dream oracle; in historical times, incubation was practiced at the shrines of heroes—whether dead men or chthonic daemons—and at certain chasms reputed to be entrances to the world of the dead (necyomanteia)” (Dodds, The Greeks and the Irrational, Chapter 4). Dodd sees evidence for Delphi as an earth Oracle in the declaration recorded in Euripides’ Hecuba “O lady earth, mother of dreams that fly on sable wings!” (line 70, trans. Coleridge) and in Homer’s description of the underworld in the Odyssey 24 when Hermes leads the gibbering souls of the suitors to Hades. “They went along, and passed the Ocean stream, and the White Rock, and passed the Gates of Helios the Sun, and the country of dreams, and presently arrived in the meadow of asphodel. This is the dwelling place of souls, images of dead men” (Odyssey, 24.11-14 trans. Lattimore).

53This distinction goes back at least to Homer with his distinction between the gates of horn and ivory through which dreams pass (Odyssey, 19.560-567), and Virgil uses the same distinction in the Aenead (6.893-896).

54See LSJ entry on ῥοῖζος. The term ῥοῖζος will be significant when we start explaining Parmenides work, since the sound of piping also attends his journey to the goddess. It is also worth noting the connection between the hissing sound of snakes and Apollo. Clarke, Dillon, and Hershbell also point out further connotations of the word ῥοῖζος. According to them, “ῥοῖζος was a Chaldean and/or Pythagorean term for the sound caused by the planetary revolutions; see Orac. Chald. Frg. 37; 146 Des Places; Proclus, Comm. Resp. 2.76.20-21. See also Lewy (1978, 19 n.46). Iamblichus Vit. Pyth 15.65.3. states that Pythagoras “purified confused minds” of his disciples, sending them into a prophetic sleep with his musical imitations of the celestial spheres” (De Mysteriis 3.9 n. 188).

55Pausinias also speaks of the testimonies of those healed at the temple of Asclepius. “Over against the temple is the place where the suppliants of the god sleep. Near has been built a circular building of white marble, called Tholos (Round House) which is worth seeing…. Within the enclosure stood slabs; in my time six remain, but of old there were more. On them are inscribed the names of both the men and the women who have been healed by Asclepius, the disease also from which each suffered, and the means of cure” (Pausinias, Description of Greece, Corinth XXVII. Trans. Jones).

56We thus have further evidence linking a specific practice of incubation to the Anatolian region near Phocaea. Kingsley points out that it was in this region, that the name Pyres, the name of Parmenides’ father, was popular. The name was unusual in the wider Greek world. Dark Places, 140.

57Kingsley, Dark Places, 108.

58Ibid., 109.

59Eliade, Shamanism, 4-5.

60The names of the god Apollo, the god of the Greek shamans, illustrate how these terms were connected. He was identified by all three titles. We have already seen how he was referred to as Apollo Oulis. And Apollo was also called an Iatromantis. This is testified to in Aeschylus’s Eumenides, when the Pythia declares, “Let what is to come now be the concern of the master of this house, powerful Loxias (Apollo) himself. He is a prophet of healing (iatromantis), a reader of portents, and for others a purifier of homes” (Eumenides, 59-63). And Apollo was also associated with the practice of incubation. In Istria, a colony of the Carian town of Miletus, he was called “Apollo Pholeuterios”, “Apollo who hides away in a lair” (Kinsley, Dark Places, 84). And in Hierapolis, another Anatolian town, a plutonium, an entrance to the underworld, stood beneath Apollo’s temple (Dark Places, 83). The Neo-Platonist philosopher, Damascius describes it as follows in his Life of Isodorus: “At Hierapolis in Phrygia there was a sanctuary of Apollo and below the temple there was an underground passage which emitted deathly fumes. Even winged creatures could not pass over that pit without danger since everything which came within its ambit died. For the initiated however it was possible to descend to its lowest depths and stay there without suffering injury. The author says that, overcome by their enthusiasm, he and the philosopher Dorus went down and came up without suffering any harm. The author also says: going to sleep (enkatheudesas) at Hierapolis at that time I had a dream in which I was Attis and, at the instigation of the mother of the gods, I celebrated the feast of the so-called Hilaria, which signified my salvation from death” (Damascius, Life of Isodorus, in The Philosophical History, § 87, p. 219-221, trans. Athanassiadi.) [Kingsley, following Deubner, takes the term “going to sleep” (enkatheudesas) to be a technical term for incubation (Dark Places, 83. Deubner De Incubatione, 6-7).] And Kingsley observes that this Apollonian association was not confined to Hierapolis. “At the greatest incubation centers in Italy or Greece or Anatolia, Apollo was always there. If he wasn’t the chief god, he was somewhere in the background” (Dark Places, 83). So, all three terms linked to Parmenides, Ouliades, Pholarchos, and Iatromantis, are interconnected. They all concern entering into a shamanic state of consciousness and interacting with non-ordinary reality.

61Diogenes, Lives 9.3.22. “Our philosopher too commits his doctrines to verse just as did Hesiod, Xenophanes and Empedocles.” (trans. Hicks). And, according to Walter Burkert, “the utterances of the Pythia are… fixed by the priests in the normal Greek literary form, the Homeric hexameter” (Greek Religion).

62There is here a parallel to Hesiod in Theogony 90f. In this passage the muses are said to give their gifts to kings, and through these gifts they deliver straight judgments and persuade the people with mild words. “Whomever among Zeus-nourished kings the daughters of great Zeus [i.e. the muses] honor and behold when he is born, they pour sweet dew upon his tongue, and his words flow soothingly from his mouth. All the populace look to him as he decides disputes with straight judgments; and speaking publicly without erring, he quickly ends even a great quarrel by his skill. For this is why kings are wise, because when the populace is being harmed in the assembly they easily manage to turn the deeds around, effecting persuasion with mild words (μαλακοῖσι παραιφάμενοι ἐπέεσσιν); and as he goes up to the gathering they seek his favor like a god with soothing reverence, and he is conspicuous among the assembled people” (Trans. Most).

63For oracular use of epos see LSJ def 1.4, “word of a deity, oracle”. See Od.12.266 and Hdt. 1.13.

64See Burkert, Das Proomium des Parmenides and die Katabasis des Pythagoras, 10. Justice watches over the process of the disappearance and appearance of the light, making sure that these occur in the right order (“dass dies in der rechten Ordnung geshieht”). Burkert argues that this identification of Justice as a guardian of the alternation between day and night also stood at the basis of other presocratic conceptions.

65See Palmer, Parmenides and Presocratic Philosophy, 57. He points to Hesiod Theogony (901-3) and Homer’s Iliad (5.749-51).

66See Burkert on the technical meaning of εἰδώς, Proomium 5 n.11. See also Diels, 49. For the technical meaning of κοῦρος see Burkert, Proomium 14 n.32. It is also interesting to note that this initiatory setting, connects Parmenides with the figure of Pythagoras. Pythagoras, for example, was said to be initiated into the mysteries at Crete. Porphyry records in his Life of Pythagoras that “Going to Crete, Pythagoras besought initiation from the priests of Morgos, one of the Idaean Dactyls, by whom he was purified with the meteoric thunderstone, during which he lay, at dawn, stretched upon his face by the seaside, and at night, beside a river, crowned with a black lamb’s woolen wreath. Descending into the Idaean cave, wrapped in black wool, he stayed there twenty-seven days, according to the custom; he sacrificed to Zeus, and saw the couch which there is yearly made for him. On Zeus’ tomb Pythagoras inscribed an epigram, ‘Pythagoras to Zeus,’ which begins: ‘Zan deceased here lies, whom men call Zeus” (Porphyry, Life of Pythagoras, § 17, in The Pythagorean Sourcebook). See also Burkert, Proomium, 23-26.

67Burkert, Proomium, 5. He cites Plutarch Def.or 417b-c noting how Plutarch implies that one can have the clearest experience of the actuality of the daimon in the mysteries.

68“Only Christian writers strove to violate the rules. Clement of Alexandria gives the password, synthema, of the Eleusinian mystai.” We see this also in the gold leaf writing found in Hippponian-Vibo Valentenia. “In the house of Hades there is a spring to the right, by it stands a white cypress; here the souls, descending, are cooled. Do not approach this spring! Further you will find cool water flowing from the lake of recollection. Guardians stand over it who will ask you in their sensible mind why you are wandering through the darkness of corruptible Hades. Answer: I am a son of the earth and of starry sky; but I am desiccated with thirst and am perishing: therefore give me quickly cool water flowing from the lake of recollection. And then the subjects of the Chthonian King (?) will have pity and will give you to drink from the lake of recollection… And indeed you are going a long, sacred way which also other mystai and bacchoi gloriously walk” (Burkert, Greek Religion).

69Kingsley equates this goddess with Persephone. “All across the Greek world there was one particular divinity who was constancy left unnamed—but especially through southern Italy and the regions surrounding Velia. In ordinary language, in poetry, in the statements given by oracles, it was normal simply to refer to the queen of the dead as ‘goddess.’ Even when there were other important goddesses worshiped in the same city and there were plenty of opportunities for confusion, Persephone would still just be called ‘the goddess’. That was enough” (Kingsley, Dark Places, 96). Palmer, in contrast, identifies her with Night. Parmenides and Presocratic Philosophy, 58-61.

70“Those words ‘hard fate’ have a very specific meaning in ancient Greek. They’re a standard expression for death. Her reassurance would be pointless unless there was good reason to suppose death is what had brought him to her. She’s saying, without having to say it any more clearly, that you’d only expect to arrive where he has arrived if you were dead” (Kingsley, Dark Places, 61).

71Odysseus’ nostos in the Odyssey constitutes another possible mythological parallel. Like Odysseus, Parmenides makes a journey to the underworld and receives a prophetic word. And the concept of wandering is prominent in both tales. Yet, Parmenides, unlike Odysseus, the man of many turns, does not wander. He is taken directly to his destination, and protected from the wandering course or ordinary mortals through the grace extended to him from the goddess and the Heliades. And unlike Odysseus who, in order to return to his human life and family in Ithaca, refuses to unite with the nymph Calypso and spurns her offer of immortality, Parmenides has presumably already joined himself with the Heliades and his patron goddess and accepted their offer of immortality. Moreover, the Heliades themselves would have brought to mind Circe, another daughter of the Sun (Od. 10.138), and the Heliades who guard the Sun’s cattle Thrinakia (12.130). For further discussion see Tor, Mortal and Divine, 265. See also Mourelatos, The Route of Parmenides, 17-25, and Havelock, “Parmenides and Odysseus”.

72Burkert, Proomium, 7.

73It is interesting to note in this regard, that in the third section of his poem, the part concerning mortal opinions, Parmenides claims that humanity was born from the sun. “The genesis of human beings came about in the beginning from the sun; but he himself is the hot and the cold, out of which all things are constituted” (D40 Laks and Most). It is also worth observing Plato’s allegorical interpretation of the story put in the mouth of an Egyptian priest. “There have been, and there will continue to be, numerous disasters that have destroyed human life in many kinds of ways. The most serious of these involve fire and water, while the lesser ones have numerous other causes. And so also among your people, the tale is told that Phaethon, child of the Sun, once harnessed his father’s chariot, but was unable to drive it along his father’s course. He ended up burning everything on the earth’s surface and was destroyed himself when a lightning bolt struck him. This tale is told as a myth, but the truth behind it is that there is a deviation in the heavenly bodies that travel around the earth, which causes huge fires that destroy what is on the earth across vast stretches of time” (Timaeus, 22c-d trans. Zeyl).

74 Aristotle claims that according to the Pythagoreans, Phaethon’s ride had been responsible for the creation of the milky way. “Of the so called Pythagoreans some say that this is the path of one of the stars that fell from heaven at the time of Phaethon’s downfall” (Aristotle, Meteorology 345a).

75 According to Ovid, the nymphs provide him with an epitaph: “Young Phaethon lies here, poor lad, who dreamt of mastering his father’s sky-borne carriage; although he sadly died in the attempt, great was his daring, which none may disparage.” [HIC SITUS EST PHAETHON, CURRUS AURIGA PATERNI: QUEM SI NON TEUIT, MAGNIS TAMEN EXCIDIT AUSIS.] (Metamorphoses, II.327-328).

76It is dervied from a verb meaning “to yoke”. This brings to mind a similar concept in the etymologies for “yoga” and “religion”.

77For example, Pausanias in his Description of Greece records that “The placed called the Ceramicus has its name from a hero Ceramus, said to be a son of Dionysus and Ariadne. First on the right is a colonnade called the Royal Colonnade, where the king sits during his year of office, which is called the kingship. On the tiled roof of this colonnade are terracotta images—Theseus hurling Sciron into the sea, and Day carrying Cephalus, who, they say, was exceeding fair and was ravished by Day; for she loved him and bore him a son, Phaethon… and made him guardian of the temple.” (1.3.1 Trans. Jones). See also Pseudo-Apollodorus Bibliotheca 3.14.3 and Ovid Metamorphoses 7.703.

78See Keightley, The Fairy Mythology. Kirk, The Secret Commonwealth of Elves, Fauns, and Fairies. And Evans-Wentz, The Fairy Faith in Celtic Countries.

79Diels, “dass es nicht ist und dass dies Nichtsein notwendig sei.” Parmenides Lehrgedicht, 33.

80Coxon, “this I tell you is a path wholly without report”.

81See also Isa 6:1-13, Jer 1:3-5.

82See Gödel “On Formally Undecidable Propositions in Principia Mathematica and Related Systems”.

83 “I call all cognition transcendental that is occupied not so much with objects but rather with our a priori concepts of objects in general. A system of such concepts would be called transcendental philosophy.” (Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A12/B26). “Not every a priori cognition must be called transcendental, but only that by means of which we cognize that and how certain representations (intuitions or concepts) are applied entirely a priori, or are possible (i.e., the possibility of cognition or its use a priori). Hence neither space nor any geometrical determination of it apriori is a transcendental representation, but only the cognition that these representations are not of empirical origin at all and the possibliity that they can nevertheless be related a priori to objects of experience can be called transcendental. Likewise the use of space about all objects in general would also be transcendental; but if it is restricted solely to the objects of the senses, then it is called empirical. The difference between the transcendental and the empirical therefore belongs only to the critique of cognitions and does not concern their relation to their object” (A 57/ B81).

84 “Pure or transcendental phenomenology will become established, not as a science of matters of fact, but as a science of essences (as an ‘eidetic’ science); it will become established as a science which exclusively seeks to ascertain ‘cognitions of essences’ and no ‘mattes of fact’ whatever. The relevant reduction which leads over from psychological phenomena to pure ‘essence’ or, in the case of judgmental thinking, from matter-of-fact ( ‘empirical’) universality to ‘eidetic’ universality, is the eidetic reduction.” (Husserl, Ideas, xx). Or again, “The ‘phenomenological’ epoche will deserve its name only by means of this insight; the fully conscious effecting of the epoche will prove itself to be the operation necessary to make ‘pure’ consciousness, and subsequently the whole phenomenological region, accessible to us…. Concerning terminology we may add the following. Important motives, grounded in the epistemological problematic, justify our designating ‘pure’ consciousness, about which we shall have so much to say, as transcendental consciousness and the operation by which it is reached as the transcendental epoche” (Husserl, Ideas, 66).

85See, for example, Frege, The Thought.

86LSJ.

87LSJ.

88“Why is alethia not translated with the usual name, with the word ‘truth’? The answer must be: insofar as truth is understood in the traditional ‘natural’ sense as the correspondence of knowledge with beings, demonstrated in beings; but also insofar as truth is interpreted as certainty of the knowledge of Being; aletheia, unconcealment in the sense of the clearing, may not be equated with truth. Rather, alethia, unconcealment thought as clearing, first grants the possibility of truth.” (Heidegger, The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking.)

89This sort of phenomenological interpretation of the goddess’s argument may go all the way back to Plato. For example, it is possible to read the culmination of Diotima’s ladder in the Symposium as Plato’s interpretation of Parmenides’ Way of Truth. Diotima, like Parmenides, describes the vision as one belonging only to the initiate. “‘Even you, Socrates, could probably come to be initiated into these rites of love. But for the purpose of these rights when they are done correctly—that is the final and highest mystery, and I don’t know if you are capable of it. I myself will tell you,’ she said, ‘and I won’t stint any effort. And you must try to follow if you can’” (Plato Symposium 210a). “‘Try to pay attention to me’, she said, ‘as best you can. You see, the man who has been thus far guided in matters of Love, who has beheld beautiful things in the right order and correctly, is coming now to the goal of Loving: all of a sudden he will catch sight of something wonderfully beautiful in its nature; that, Socrates, is the reason for all his earlier labors’” (211a). “First, it always is and neither comes to be nor passes away, neither waxes nor wanes. Second, it is not beautiful in this way and ugly that way, nor beautiful at one time and ugly at another; nor is it beautiful here but ugly there, as it would be if it were beautiful for some people and ugly for others. Nor will the beautiful appear to him in the guise of a face or hands or anything else that belongs to the body. It will not appear to him as one idea or one kind of knowledge. It is not anywhere in another thing, as in an animal, or in earth, or in heaven, or in anything else, but itself by itself with itself, it is always one in form; and all the other beautiful things share in that, in such a way that when those others come to be or pass away, this does not become the least bit smaller or greater nor suffer any change” (211a-b). Here Diotima presents the vision of Absolute Beauty, as a vision, that is, as an experience, and she describes this vision as having the same qualities that Parmenides attributes to Being (such as eternality, aseity, unity, and immutability).

90 “The material element which is given here as standing in such a [logical] conflict is itself something and can be thought. A quadrangular triangle is absolutely impossible. Nonetheless, a triangle is something, and so is a quadrangle. The impossibility is based simply on the logical relations which exist between one thinkable thing and another, where the one cannot be a characteristic mark of the other. Likewise, in every possibility we must first distinguish the something which is thought, and then we must distinguish the agreement of what is thought in it with the law of contradiction. A triangle which has has a right angle is in itself possible. The triangle and the right angle are the data or the material element in this possible thing. The agreement, however, of the one with the other, in accordance with the law of contradiction, is the formal element in possibility” (Kant, The Only Possible Argument in Support of a Demonstration of the Existence of God, in Kant: Theoretical Philosophy, 1755-1770, 123).

91One might object that this argument would likely fail to satisfy those committed to the path of necessary non-being, since they likely will not have had the relevant sort of mystical experience. But such an objection would likely fail to disturb the goddess. As noted earlier, the language of initiation predominates in the proem, and she has comissioned Parmenides to be her prophet. It is not likely that she intends to persuade to the uninitiated. Likewise, there is a long tradition of prophets being heard only by those with the ears to hear.

92Burkert, Proomium, 29, n. 64. Kingsley, Reality, 65.

93Kant, for example, speaks of an intuitive understanding wherein cognitions are co-extensive with the actual. For such an understanding, “all objects that I cognize would be (exist)” (Critique of Pure Judgment, § 76).

94See, for example, Plotinus Enneads 2.9.1, though he himself distinguished between the One as a primary principle and Noos as a derivative principle. “So, since the simple nature of the Good appeared to us also to be first—for nothing that is not first can be simple—and to contain nothing within itself, being rather some one thing; and since the nature of what is called the One is identical with the Good—for the One is not first something else and next one, and neither is this Good something else and next good– [it follows that] when we talk about the One and when we talk about the Good, we should consider their nature to be identical and to say that this nature is ‘one’, though in doing so we are not predicating anything of it but only making its nature clear to ourselves to the extent that that is possible. And it is in this sense that we all it is ‘first’ on account of its utter simplicity and ‘self-sufficient’ on account of its not resulting from a plurality of parts—for if it did result from a plurality of parts it would depend on them—and we say it is not in another because everything that is in another derives from another.” See also Augustine, City of God, 11.10. “There is, accordingly, a good which is alone simple, and therefore alone unchangeable, and this is God.” …. “It is for this reason, then, that the nature of the Trinity is called simple, because it has not anything which it can lose, and because it is not one thing and its content another, as a cup and the liquor, or a body and its color, or the air and the light or heat of it, or a mind and its wisdom. For none of these is what it has: the cup is not liquor, nor the body color, nor the air light and heat, nor the mind wisdom. And hence they can be deprived of what they have, and can be turned or changed into other qualities and states, so that the cup may be emptied of the liquid of which it is full, the body be discolored, the air darken, the mind grow silly.”…. “According to this, then, those things which are essentially and truly divine are called simple, because in them quality and substance are identical, and because they are divine, or wise, or blessed in themselves, and without extraneous supplement.” See also Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, I. Q.3. The Simplicity of God.

95See also Taran’s translation, “Behold things which, though absent, are nevertheless firmly present to the mind. For it cannot cut off Being from holding fast to being, either by dispersing it all everywhere in order or by bringing it together.” IV, p.45.

96 One might, following Kingsley, object that ordinary experience is an even more promising candidate, since even in everyday experience one can think of something that is distant in space and time. “If you think about something out of sight, hundreds or even thousands of miles away, then your mind knows no distance: whatever you are thinking is directly present to your awareness. And if you look at mountains or buildings on the distant horizon, the sight of them is absolutely present to your mind” (Kingsley, Reality, 79). For example, one can think of the great Pyramid, even though it lies on a different continent, and one can consider Alexander the Great, despite being far removed from him in time. But again, the problem with these examples is that they don’t seem to have the epistemic strength required by the Way of Truth. I can just as easily think falsehoods such as “the Great Pyramid is made of Lego bricks” or “Alexander the Great was a 20^th century acrobat” as I can think truths about them, and I can consider things that do not exist in this world. I can, for instance, think of Sirfetch’d, but this does not suffice to populate the world with Pokemon. Furthermore, the fact that the goddess is speaking of things existing far off makes it unlikely that she is merely referring to contents of thought existing in some kind of Platonic realm of ideas. For, to think of such abstracta as spatio-temporally near or far would constitute a category mistake. You’ll never trek through the empirical world and stumble on abstract propositional content. [It should also be noted that Kingsley’s contention appears false even from a phenomenological point of view. When I look at mountains, they are not “absolutely present” to my mind. For I see only the side of them which faces me; their backs are hidden from view. And I see them only as they exist now, not as they did a moment ago or as they will be in the future.]

97And research on remote viewing has shown that such states of consciousness are not confined to ancient shamans but are also experienced by people today. “Remote viewing is a human perceptual ability to access, by mental means alone, information blocked from normal perception by distance, shielding, or time.” (Targ and Puthoff, Mind Reach, Preface). “During a lengthy series of experiments…, we have been investigating those facets of human perception that appear to fall outside the range of well-understood perceptual or processing capabilities. The primary achievement of this research has been the demonstration of high-quality ‘remote viewing’: the ability of experienced and inexperienced volunteers to view, by means of mental processes, remote geographical or technical targets such as roads, buildings, and laboratory apparatus. Our accumulated data… indicate the following: the phenomenon is not limited to short distances; electrical shielding does not appear to degrade the quality or accuracy of perception; most of the correct information given by subjects is of a non-analytical nature pertaining to shape, form, color, and material rather than to function or name, suggesting that information transmission under conditions of sensory shielding may depend primarily on functioning of the brain’s right hemisphere; and finally, the principal difference between experienced and inexperienced volunteers is not that the inexperienced never exhibit the faculty, but rather that their results are simpy less reliable. This indicates to us that remote viewing is probably a latent and widely distributed perceptual ability” (Mind Reach, Preface).

98 “Almost unanimous is the report that on one and the same day he was present at Metapontum in Italy, and at Tauromenium in Sicily, in each place conversing with his friends, though the places are separated by many miles, both at sea and at land, demanding a journey of many days” (Porphyry, Life of Pythagoras, § 27).

99The word μηδείς is used only once in Homer, instead of the more familiar μή τις. It is found in Iliad 19:500 in a depiction of a scene in emblazoned on Achilles’ shield. It describes the context of two men arguing in the city marketplace about the bloodprice for a murdered man. One man offers restitution an the other refuses and accepts “nothing”, and so it is necessary to call in arbiters. In so doing, Parmenides may already be foreshadowing the human path to follow.

100This is likely an allusion to Homer. “The sound of the two words akrita phula would immediately have reminded any intelligent Greek of a rather striking expression already used by Homer: akrtitophullon, which means ‘with countless leaves.” (Kingsley, Reality, 96). This would bring to mind the brevity of human life.

101 “Unfamiliar tongues, horrendous accents, words of suffering, cries of rage, voices loud and faint, the sound of slapping hands, all these made a tumult, always whirling in the black and timeless air, as sand is swirled in a whirlwind” (Inferno III, trans Hollander). “This miserable state is born by the wretched souls of those who lived without disgrace yet without praise. They intermingle with that wicked band of angels, not rebellious and not faithful to God, who held themselves apart. Loath to impair its beauty, Heaven casts them out, and depth of Hell does not receive them lest on their account the evil angels gloat” (Ibid). They are miserable because “they have no hope of death, and their blind life is so abject that they are envious of every other lot. The world does not permit report of them. Mercy and justice hold them in contempt” (Ibid). “And I, all eyes, saw a whirling banner that ran so fast it seemed as though it never could find rest. Behind it came so long a file of people that I could not believe death had undone so many” (Ibid). “These wretches, who never were alive, were naked and beset by stinging flies and wasps that made their faces stream with blood, which, mingle with their tears, was gathered at their feet by loathsome worms” (Ibid).

102 Such double minded men also remind one of the apostle James’ description of the faithless: “But let him ask in faith, with no doubting, for the one who doubts is like a wave of the sea that is driven and tossed by the wind. For that person must not suppose that he will receive anything from the Lord; he is a double-minded man, unstable in all his ways” (James 1:6-8, ESV).

103See LSJ VII.1 “divine utterance, oracle, Pi. P. 4.59; λ. μαντικοί Pl. Phdr. 275b; οὐ γὰρ ἐμὸν ἐρῶ τὸν λ. Pl. Ap. 20e; ὁ λ. τοῦ θεοῦ Apoc. 1.2, 9.”

104See the Sense Certainty chapter of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit.

105See the Perception and Force and the Understanding chapters in the Phenomenology of Spirit.

106Plato seems to adopt this view in his affinity argument for the immortality of the soul. See Phaedo (78b-84b).

107In some accounts, Achilles’ mother was said to have rendered the rest of his body invincible by the application of ambrosia and fire, but to have neglected so treating his heel (Apollonius, Argonautica 4.869-872). So, when Paris shoots him in the heal with a poisoned arrow, he is able to bring down the great warrior.

108See Augustine, Confessions XI, and Husserl, On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time. “What then is time? Provided that no one asks me, I know. If I want to explain it to an inquirer, I do not know. But I confidently affirm myself to know that if nothing passes away, there is no past time, and if nothing arrives, there is no future time, and if nothing existed there would be no present time. Take the two tenses, past and future. How can they ‘be’ when the past is not now present and the future is not yet present? Yet if the present were always present, it would not pass into the past: it would then not be time but eternity. If then, in order to be time at all, the present is so made that it passes into the past, how can we say that this present also ‘is’? The cause of its being is that it will cease to be. So indeed we cannot truly say that time exists except in the sense that it tends towards non-existence” (Confessions XI.xiv(17).)

109“There followed a major cosmology that may reasonably be estimated to have accounted for roughly 80 per cent of the original poem….The direct evidence provided by the end of fr. 8 and by the other fragments plausibly assigned to this portion of the poem (frs. 9–19) originally accounted for perhaps 10 per cent of the cosmology’s original length.” Palmer, 160.

110Graham, Science Before Socrates, 95.

111 “In poetic terms and apparently without fanfare, Parmenides offers a stunning insight: the moon is a body lacking its own source of light. It gets its light from the sun, as we can see by tracking its phases, noting that the luminous part is always facing towards the sun. This insight describes the actual state of affairs between these two heavenly bodies. To our knowledge, it had never been understood previosly by anyone in any other culture. Parmenides, the alleged anti-cosmologist gets it just right for the first time ever” (Graham, Science Before Socrates, 91.)

112Graham, Science Before Socrates, 94.

113Mansfeld, Parmenides From Right to Left, 5-6.

114“One will be left puzzling over the resulting problem of why Parmenides should have bothered to develop so lengthy and detailed an account of a world his own reasoning has shown does not really exist. This is the problem the cosmological portion of the poem presents for strict monist interpretations” Palmer, 161.

115Comp. Diels trans. “Diese Welteinrichtung will ich Dir ganz wie sie erscheint mitteilen”

116Kingsley, Reality, 225-226. See also n. “so that nobody”, 578-579.

117Kingsley sees this passage as an elaborate homage to μῆτις. He claims that “the passge reads like a classic exposition of metis in its various subtleties and shapes and forms. It even contains a little hymn in praise to metis—to the mysterious, indefinable factor that relies on presence of mind to achieve what could seem impossible. For metis is what allows a charioteer in the toughest race, regardless of any apparent limitation or disadvantage and in spite of all the odds, to get ahead and win” (Kingsley, Reality, 222-223). But I don’t think this passage points to the advantages of metis as unambiguously as Kingsley suggests. For, the hymn is spoken by Nestor, who does not himself particpate in the race, and the events of the race seem to belie his claims, since the slower horses cannot, in fact, make up for their disadvantage. Indeed, the winner is decided by divine intervention, as Apollo tries to harm, and then Athena intervenes to help, Diomedes. And, at the end of the section, Nestor is unexpectedly given a prize by Achilles, not for his sage advice, but as if in pity for his old age. If Parmenides’ goddess were alluding to this passage, which I don’t believe she is, it is more likely that it would indicate that success depends on divine grace, as it has in Parmenides’ own case in the proem. One wonders whether Kingsley had his own dark esoteric reasons for failing the mention the obvious parallel to the Sirens episode in the Odyssey (or the immediate context of human sacrifice that precedes the chariot race in the Iliad (see Il. 23.170ff)). “You will come first of all to the Sirens, who are enchanters of all mankind and whoever comes their way; and that man who unsuspecting approaches them, and listens to the Sirens singing, has no prospect of coming home and delighting his wife and little children as they stand about him in greeting, but the Sirens by the melody of their singing enchant him. They sit in their meadow, but the beach before it is piled up with boneheaps of men now rotted away, and the skins shrivel upon them. You must drive straight on past (παρεξελάαν)…” (Od. 12:35f trans. Lattimore).

118Mourelatos draws such a comparison in The Route of Parmenides, xlii-xliv.

119The supposition that Orphic mythological speculation was of a late date was overturned by the discovery of the Derveni papyrus, and the supposition that Empedocles separated his religious speculations from his investigations into nature was undermined by the discovery of the Strasbourg papyrus.

120Similar paradoxes emerge from the following passage: “For just as it possesses each time the mixture of much-wandering limbs, so too thinking (νόος) presents itself to humans: for it is the same that the nature of the limbs apprehends (φρονεῖν) in humans, both in all and in each; for the full is thought (νόημα)” (D51). This passage appears to present a quasi mechanistic account of cognition, where the mind’s knowledge is wholly dependent on “the mixture of the much wandering limbs”. If knowledge is, in this manner, wholly dependent on one’s bodily states, it renders paradoxical the goddess’s attempt to bestow knowledge through her words.