The Presocratics and the Supernatural

Magic, Philosophy and Science in Early Greece

Andrew Gregory

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781472504159
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Ancient & Classical Philosophy

This book examines the relationship between magic, philosophy and the investigation of nature in presocratic Greece. Did the presocratic thinkers, often praised for their rejection of the supernatural, still believe in gods and the divine and the efficacy of magical practices? Did they use animism, astrology, numerology and mysticism in their explanations of the world? This book analyses the evidence in detail and argues that we need to look at each of these beliefs in context.

1

Introduction

Behind its rather lurid title, what is this book about? It is possible to make a case that the presocratic philosophers attacked and entirely rejected the idea of the supernatural, believing what exists to be exclusively natural and that proper explanations of phenomena should cite natural entities only. This is called presocratic naturalism. One critique of this view is that the presocratic philosophers still believed in gods and the divine, that they believed in the efficacy of magical practices and that they indulged in animism, astrology, numerology, dream divination, magical healing and mysticism in their explanations of the world. The aim of this book is to investigate how far these criticisms are justified. It is common to find these criticisms made with the implication that the alleged belief entails a commitment to the supernatural and so a belief in an entirely natural world is compromised. It is rare to find this entailment spelled out in any detail or to find any discussion of how to distinguish between the natural and the supernatural, which we will look at later in this introduction.1

The critique

Some readers will be more familiar with the complete rejection of the supernatural view for the presocratics, so let me say a little more to introduce the critique, which will also introduce some of the main areas of contention for this book. The basic assertion is that the presocratics did indeed believe in gods and various forms of magic and that this undermines any attempt on our part to construct a narrative of a rejection of the supernatural for this period. Historiographically, this has been supported in several ways. Dodds, in his The Greeks and the Irrational,2 questioned why we should consider the Greeks different to other ancient societies and assembled impressive evidence of what he considered to be irrational beliefs among the Greeks.3 That we should not improperly privilege the Greeks has been an important theme in this critique, with Pingree and von Staden coining the terms ‘Hellenophilia’ and ‘Hellenocentrism’ respectively in this context. Both have argued that evidence of magical belief among the presocratics has been systematically underplayed,4 and the idea that some historiographies have either marginalised or ignored religious or magical belief among the presocratics is central to this critique.5 Jaeger commented that religious belief is:

An aspect which has been unduly neglected or minimised by scholars of the positivist school because in the early Greek philosophy of nature they saw their own likeness.6

This issue of ‘seeing their own likeness’ has been applied to other historiographies,7 and one question is whether we have constructed a Greek rejection of the supernatural because we would like to see the Greeks as forerunners of our own rejection of the supernatural.8 Van der Eijk has argued that the persistence of the view that the Hippocratics offered natural instead of supernatural explanations for disease is at least in part due to institutional factors in the study of the ancient world, a point generalisable to presocratic philosophers and their supposed rejection of the supernatural as well.9

Lloyd has argued that the Greek conception of nature is in itself problematic. We must be wary of differences between Greek conceptions of phusis (usually translated ‘nature’)10 and our own conception of nature.11 There was never the Greek conception anyway but many competing ones, all invented and not discovered, and as far as our evidence shows, generated in a context of polemic.12 The polemical context might cause us to wonder how much conceptions of nature and supposed rejections of the supernatural were employed ad hominem rather than given as statements of principle. An important point made by Lloyd concerns what has been preserved of the presocratics’ views on nature, upon which much of the rejection of the supernatural case is constructed.13 Were these views preserved because they were central concerns of the presocratics, or because they were central concerns of the doxographers? Given that much of the doxographical tradition on which we depend for information about the presocratics is itself dependent on the Aristotle/Theophrastus project of constructing a history of phusikôn doxai, ‘Opinions on Nature’, we have to be concerned about what was and what was not selected to go into this work, and why.14 If what has been preserved reflects the doxographers rather than the presocratics’ concerns then reliance and emphasis on these passages may be highly misleading, especially where the doxographers have stripped away the context for these passages.15

The counterpart of the critique of what phusis meant for the presocratics is a questioning of whether there was such a thing as the supernatural for them. Certainly it is the case that there is no Greek word for the supernatural.16 Martin has argued that the category of the supernatural was not available to the Greeks, explicitly or by assumption and that translating Greek terms like ‘divine’ as ‘supernatural’ is highly misleading.17 Martin has also questioned whether it is proper to think of Greek gods as intervening in nature as we might do if following modern notions of gods and the supernatural.18

Kingsley has argued that there is important evidence on the presocratics, especially Pythagoras and Empedocles, in the magical tradition, outside of the usual doxographical tradition of views on philosophy and nature.19 If we take this evidence into account then we obtain a much more magical view of the presocratics. Dodds, Kingsley and others have argued for the existence of shamen, holy men claiming to communicate with the dead when in ecstatic states among the presocratics.20

At a more specific level, with Thales, Anaximander and Anaximenes the standard critique is that they all believed in gods or the divine and that this compromises any claim that they believed everything to be natural.21 There has also been considerable debate on just how different the views of the Milesians were from those of Homer and Hesiod.22 Important for the Milesians are a few passages giving what we interpret as natural explanations of meteorological phenomena. Lloyd’s point about what has been preserved is particularly important here and two things remain to be shown. First, that there is an intentional rejection of the supernatural here, rather than a simple statement of or polemic about meteorology. Second, it needs to be shown that the rejection of the supernatural is universal to all phenomena rather than just specific to meteorology or some other subset of phenomena.23

The Hippocratic texts have been a matter of ongoing debate, especially On the Sacred Disease and On Regimen. Edelstein makes the classic case that the Hippocratics retained a belief in the gods and the supernatural, more recently supported by Fowler and van der Eijk,24 while Martin has argued that the Hippocratics believed in the activities of the gods and the efficacy of dreams but that supernatural is an inappropriate term.25 That On the Sacred Disease is part of this debate may be surprising, as a common view is that it rejects a divine aetiology for disease. However, its view that all diseases are both divine and natural, the nature of its critique of magical healers and its attitude to purification rituals and piety have all been hotly contended. On Regimen IV, which appears to advocate prayer and divination as part of a healing strategy, has long been thought of as a difficult text for a purely natural reading and there are other difficult passages in the Hippocratic corpus as well.

The old view of Pythagoras as an innovative expert in mathematics and geometry, who emphasised the importance of a mathematical approach to cosmology and music has given way to a view of someone whose expertise was in the fate of the soul after death and in the nature of religious ritual with the work of Burkert, Huffman, Zhmud and others. It has been argued that metempsychosis, the transmigration of the soul on the death of the body could hardly be a natural process.26 Dodds and Kingsley have argued that Pythagoras should be considered to be a shaman, someone who believes they can access the world of the dead by entering into ecstatic states.27 Kingsley has argued that we should take some of the strange attributions to Pythagoras seriously (such as having a golden thigh) as these are indicative of an interesting relationship to Greek magic, ritual and ways to access the realm of the dead.28 To what extent the Pythagoreans shared Pythagoras’ own views has always been a contentious topic. It has also been argued that the Pythagoreans approach to number is that of ‘number magic’, ‘number superstition’ or ‘number mysticism’ rather than that of mathematics or geometry.29

With Empedocles, there is evidence of views on the transmigration of the soul, on the efficacy of magic, on the purification of the soul, on magical healing, on bringing back from Hades the strength of a man who has died and of Empedocles regarding himself as some form of god among men and some form of divine prophet. All this is well known, but has been marginalised by the assumption that Empedocles wrote two poems, one on religion/magic (supposedly called On Purifications), the other an account of the natural world (supposedly called On Nature). There have been strategies for privileging On Nature and marginalising Purifications.30 However, recent developments in scholarship and historiography, and the discovery of the Strasbourg papyrus have all thrown doubt on whether Empedocles’ thought was compartmentalised in this way and indeed even on whether he wrote two separate poems at all.31 This means that we need to deal with Empedocles’ views on religion and magic as an important part of his overall thought and this will impinge on whether we consider Empedocles to have rejected all elements of the supernatural. Kingsley has argued for a strong relationship between Empedocles and the Greek magical tradition, and again that we should take some of the strange attributions to Empedocles seriously as these are indicative of an interesting relationship to Greek magic and ritual.32

Even Leucippus and Democritus, sometimes taken as paragons of an entirely atomistic, mechanical and natural view have been argued to have a belief in gods and the divine and to have used biological analogues for the formation of the cosmos, allegedly compromising their supposed naturalism. The critique of the rejection of the supernatural view then is substantial both at a historiographical and at a specific level. It cannot be disarmed simply by citing passages of the Milesians on meteorology and the Hippocratics on disease as this evidence is hotly contested and there is much more evidence which needs to be taken into account.

Natural magic, natural theology?

In this introductory chapter I want to explore the ideas of natural and supernatural and the nature of the distinction between them. In relation to this it is important to look at how the pres...

Table of contents

• Dedication
• Title
• Contents
• Abbreviations
• Preface
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Plato and Aristotle
• 3 The Milesian Philosophers
• 4 The Hippocratic On the Sacred Disease
• 5 The Hippocratic On Regimen
• 6 Xenophanes and Others: More Natural Explanation
• 7 Pythagoras and the Early Pythagoreans
• 8 The Early Pythagoreans and Numerology
• 9 Empedocles
• 10 Leucippus and Democritus
• 11 Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index Locorum
• Index of Names
• General Index
• Copyright