Scientific Englightenment, Div. One Book 1: A Thermodynamic Genealogy of Primitive Religions 1.4. Chapter 10: Hesiod: Transition from Primitive Religion to Salvation ACADEMY | previous section | Table of Content | next section | GALLERY

Copyright © 2004, 2006 by Lawrence C. Chin. All rights reserved.

As Eric Voegelin has said, "The Works and Days is a Paraenesis, an exhortatory speech addressed by Hesiod to his brother Perses." (The World of the Polis, p. 137) Intimately connected with the Theogony in this respect, it is a warning to Perses as to his evil -- disorderly -- conduct, "since the fate of man is in the hands of the God; men will be famed or unfamed, sung or unsung as the God wills. Easily he raises a man, and easily he breaks him; easily he humbles those who walk in the light, and easily he advances the obscure; easily he straightens what is bent, and easily he brings down the overbearing. And then the poet turns to his brother: Attend with eye and ear, and make lordly judgments straight with righteousness (dike [justice, order]), for what I tell you, Perses, of a certainty is true (etetyma)." (p. 137 - 8) From such a warning an observation about order, or how order works, is spun out. Perses' evil deed toward his brother is a disruption of the order of the cosmos -- and because for the functional perspective the order of the cosmos is inclusive of moral order of the human society such disruption will bring consequences of disorder proving eventually unfortunate to the doer of evil himself. What interests us in Hesiod's paraenesis, however, is how his almost philosophical understanding of order and the "work-ethic" he advances as the counter-formula to his brother's order-dissoluting life-style are differentiating the experience behind primitive religiousness -- the primitive understanding of entropy and order-formation -- toward the salvational pursuits about to come in the Axial Time; how, that is, in serving as the prelude to the salvational movements (Hellenic second mode), Work and Days is the juncture between the pre-salvational Hellenic religions ("primitive religiousness" still) and the salvational pursuits starting with Orphism.

Hesiod's theory of order in the Wroks and Days is divided into two parts. "The first exhortation (11 - 41) is followed by the great fables and the apocalyptic sections dependent from them;" this part is the observation about the two sides of Strife (Eris) which constitute the human interaction sphere proper (competition as destructive and constructive: and which we have examined elsewhere) and is followed by the "theory of order" which interests us. "[T]he second exhortation (274 - 97) is followed by the detailed advice for the industrious farmer's life, seafaring, marriage, general wisdom and superstition, as well as by the calendar of good days." (p. 139) This part constitutes the prescriptional content of that work ethic which, insofar as it is the means to maintains the order of one's life, ensures prosperity.

With respect to the fables in the "theory of order" following the first exhortation controversies have arisen because of their similarity with mythologies from other cultures. Voegelin notes that there has been the opinion that "all parallels with Babylonian and Hebrew literary expressions can be sufficiently accounted for by the assumption of a floating stock of tales, fables, typical images and metaphors, which pervades the whole eastern Mediterranean areas (and perhaps India and China) and determines closely similar expressions when, in the eighth century B.C., the lower classes gain a literary voice." For example, Persson's The Religion of Greece in Prehistoric Times, I (p. 138). While such "Afrasian substratum" is possible -- and very likely in other cases of mythological parallels between the Near East and China -- in the following we will see that the Hesiodian myth can be entirely derived from the primordial human experience of the thermodynamics of order-formation whose invariant expression can then show up independently in different locales. In fact, some of the Eastern parallels with Hesiod -- such as the Chinese -- are only the result of superficial similarity, the underlying experience producing the two being entirely different.

Both of these fables (there are actually three; but the Nightingale does not concern us) tell of the "Fall" of men to (thermodynamically delimited) finitude. They both offer an explanation about the origin of the thermodynamic dilemma of order-formation -- why it is that order can only subsist with the constant infusion of energy into it -- and therefore about why a human organism, this particular form of order, can only subsist with constant labour to bring nutrient into him. In other words, this is the mythic equivalent of the modern (structural) explanation of the origin of the second law of thermodynamics in terms of statistics. The first fable is that of Pandora.

Before the Fall, men lived in (semi-)infinitude; they either did not have to work at all or, as here, worked very little. Consequently they needed no "work ethic". "Fallenness" means falling into a universe governed by the second law, where order can only be maintained if work is done and energy taken into the system. Order now has a price. This is the (thermodynamic) finitude. The Fall can be the result of a variety of reasons. Often myths seem to suggest the Fall to be a natural process of degeneration, as when the primordial ancestors live extremely long lives but descendants shorter and shorter lives in proportion to the temporal distance away from the primordial ancestor. Hesiod would resort to this mechanism for the Fall in his second fable of "The Ages of the World." In such case the degeneration is simply the effect of the second law, that entropy necessarily increases with time, that one gets weaker and weaker the further in time one moves away from the last meal, i.e. the last refueling which regenerated one's vigour; and the original infinitude is not precisely differentiated as such (i.e. a-temporal), but just the brand new (temporal) state right after regeneration. In this first fable however the Fall results from men's offense toward the gods, or rather some gods' offense toward other gods because of men. That is: Why did the gods keep hidden from men the means of life? Because, first of all, after the initial deceit of Prometheus (in stealing fire from Zeus to give to men):

This second deceit on Prometheus part (for the sake of men) causes Zeus to announce to him:

After this, though warned about the consequence, the slow-witted Epimetheus accepted on men's behalf this gift of Pandora from Zeus -- "and that is how evil (kakon) started." (Voegelin, p. 142) For Pandora the woman took off the lid of the jar, from which came plaques (muria) and disease (nosoi) to wander amongst men. Earth was now full of evils and the sea was full. (pleih men gar gaia kakwn, pleih de qalassa. 101.) The origin of evil is thus explicated, and evil, as it originally means dis-order (dissolution of order) as we have seen, is here extended to mean the thermodynamic dilemma of order in general, since in the thermodynamic framework of the cosmos order is continually threatened with dissolution unless the greatest amount of labour is spent preventing it.

It is of course amazing that Pandora -- meaning "all-giving" -- had by Hesiod's time fallen this far, for originally, before the era of the poets, of civilization, she certainly was the Earth-goddess worshipped by the agriculturalists, as Jane Harrison notes: "Pandora rises from the earth; she is the Earth, giver of all gifts.... her other name (A)nesidora, 'she who sends up gifts.' Pandora is a form or title of the Earth-goddess in the Kore form..." (Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion, p. 281). The Earth, this goddess, so fertile, she nourished by fruits and harvest all who lived upon her, "and men did sacrifice to her" (p. 283), because, remember the formula of endergonic sacrifice, the Earth (Pandora) could only offer up plenty of produce if she was well fed beforehand -- if the necessary energy for such production had beforehand been deposited. How, then, did a Earth-goddess who, giving up all her nourishment gift, was responsible for our order (for all good), get "demoted" to the status of the source of all disorders (of all evils) in the world? That familiar "overthrow" of the Matriarchy by the Patriarchs? Harrison does think so: "Pandora is in ritual and matriarchal theology the earth as Kore, but in the patriarchal mythology of Hesiod her great figure is strangely changed and minished..." (p. 284). "Zeus the father will have no great Earth-goddess, Mother and Maid in one, in his man-fashioned Olympus, but her figure is from the beginning, so he re-makes it; woman, who was the inspirer, becomes the temptress; she who made all things, gods and mortals alike, is become their plaything, their slave..." (p. 285). The jar was originally of a different meaning also, which got turned around by Hesiod: "Hesiod himself was probably not quite conscious that the jar or pithos was the great grave-jar of the Earth Mother Pandora" (p. 170).

In any case, the fallenness to evil consists in two stages: first, the fallenness to the necessity of labour; second, the fallenness to the world with women and disease. The whole of the misery of existence in the temporo-spatial world is thus encompassed in this "evil": the necessity to labour in order to eat, the necessity of procreation with women, and the necessity of diseases. Hesiod follows the somewhat universal (male) trend in identifying women as part of "evil" because men's subjection to their prostitutive behaviour results in their having to labour not just for themselves, but also for the other sex and the dependants generated therefrom -- a perennial sorrowful state which is still in modern time made a principal theme in, e.g. Freud's Civilization and its Discontent and Chris Knight's theory about the origin of the sexual division of labour. (C.f., "Do not let a flaunting woman coax and cozen and deceive you: she is after your barn. The man who trusts womankind trusts deceiver." 373 - 5.) Now as Voegelin has noted, "The fable of Pandora is related with the story of the Fall and the expulsion from paradise in Genesis" (ibid., p. 142). In both men's fall into the thermodynamic finitude is caused by their rivalry with gods or rebellion against the order (dike) of gods. What seems to be an explanation for the thermodynamic dilemma of the existence of order is related to the human experience of the Original Sin which, as we've said, has been evident since tribal times. Voegelin's explanation of this sin and rivalry focuses on the experience that "[w]hen man creates the cosmion of political order, he analogically repeats the divine creation of the cosmos" (Israel and Revelation, p. 16), and hence that man's creation of society and culture shows him to be not just a creature but a rival of gods. In the beginning however the Original Sin arises from the guilty feeling that tribal people have when they must destroy part of the Ancestral Nature (and increase the entropy in the cosmos) in order to survive, that guilty feeling which manifests itself in hunters' taking the slaying of the animal to be a sacrilege (c.f. the Siberian peoples that seek a reconciliation with the slain animal and a repudiation of the killing) or in agriculturalists' taking the cultivation of the soil to be a sacrilegial violation of the earth. (This debt to the ancestors incurred for the sake of survival has the component of reciprocity to it.) Original Sin thus has always been the theme of offense toward the gods which is necessary simply because of existence or survival. Note that this "Original Sin" is in modern understanding actually part of the thermodynamic dilemma of order-maintenance, as an order can only maintain its low entropy with energy-influx and disposal of waste that necessarily increase the entropy of the environment. But in this mythic explanation this Original Sin is used to explain the thermodynamic dilemma itself. The myth of the theft of fire by Prometheus not only explains the origin of fire, but, in extending the offense towards gods by “eating them” to an offense by stealing from them inventions necessary for livelihood, also explicates the origin of this thermodynamic dilemma of the existence of order as gods’ punishment. By this stage, then, the primitive, simple experience of the Original Sin has shifted (or expanded) to what Voegelin has identified as man's rivalry with gods in all his cultural and technological achievements.¹ This is indeed loosely the theme of the Pandora fable and definitely the theme of both the Biblical stories of the expulsion from Eden and the Tower of Babel. (The story of the great flood and Noah's ark has also this rivalry as its theme, but it belongs, in its original Babylonian form, more to the type of the second of Hesiod's fable, "The Ages of the World".) In the story of the Eden, after Elohim (plural in the original polytheistic Babylonian form) created man in (incomplete) image of themselves, they "withheld the knowledge of good and evil, and enjoined man, by the threat of death on the same day, not to eat from the tree of knowledge (2: 17). But the tempter knows better: man will not die when he eats from the tree of knowledge, but will become more like the gods... [3:5: as the serpent told Eve: "For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil."] The motif of rivalry appears... Man, indeed, does not die as he has been threatened; instead, a threat has arisen for the Elohim." (Voegelin, ibid.) "The man is become as one of us, to know good and evil: and now, lest he put forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live for ever." (3: 22) Thus the Elohim "sent him forth from the garden of Eden, to till the ground from whence he was taken." (3: 23) In other words, man now has to labour (and bring energy into himself) in order to survive. (Woman shall also from now on suffer pain from childbirth.) With this price to pay for existence as order come also mortality and diseases: "In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken: for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return." (3:19) The story of Eden is thus the same as Hesiod's story of Pandora. Hesiod’s fable – the point of which is that “the rebellion against the order of Zeus is the cause of men’s misery [i.e. thermodynamic finitude]” (and moreover rebellion twice over, the theft of fire and then the re-theft of fire again; ibid.; same as the Biblical: rebellion against the order of Elohim is the cause of the thermodynamic dilemma of our order), "that the order of Zeus must be accepted and that anybody who violates Dike will come to grief": with this Hesiod attempts to "impress Perses with the consequences of his unrighteous conduct" (p. 141) – however, by developing this primitive theme, becomes already the germ of philosophical refection. It is to be noted that this use of an expanded and more differentiated understanding of the Original Sin to explain the thermodynamics of order-maintenance (that order comes with a heavy price) comes much closer to grasping the real thermodynamic situation. The conclusion of the myth of the Fall is that our existence as order is the compensation for the loss of the eternal order of the gods (c.f. Voegelin's explanation of the Babylonian Adape myth in terms of the political [imperial] version of this conclusion, later): that is, the Fall from infinitude is at the same time the precondition for order in the temporo-spatial world. It is, in modern understanding, only because entropy always increases that order may arise from the non-linear aspect of this equilibrium-process (order-formation requires the flow of energy from the more concentrated regions to the less concentrated ones: the material meaning of life. C.f. the comparison with the myth of Gilgamesh as another fable of the Fall.) But why is this thermodynamic finitude deserving explanation at all? Since we are descended from our ancestors (gods), we were originally co-extensive with the cosmos as are gods and were not so much subject to the thermodynamic constraint on the existence of order.

This original infinitude is “the Hesiodian dream of paradise,” “the counterimage to the burden of existence as experienced by the common man”, i.e. the dream of “having the workload reduced and… not suffering from hunger and sickness”. (p. 143) This germinal philosophical reflection on the human condition of finitude (or thermodynamic constraint on order) is not yet, but almost, a salvational dream, and therefore serves as the transition between primitive religion whose purpose is the maintenance of order (worldly prosperity) and the salvational pursuit of the First Axial whose purpose is to negate or escape from this thermodynamic finitude altogether: “[The common man’s dream] is less interested in immortality than in living indefinitely longer, in something like Hesiod’s ‘practical immortality’ of his mortals before the advent of Pandora.” (p. 143) Now because Hesiod is operating at the pre-salvational level, and because he is not spiritually depraved like modern ideologues (whether Left or Right) -- "The paradise is indeed lost... and it cannot be regained within the life of man in society; but through the attempt at regaining it [e.g. modern consumerism], the endeavor of man becomes the 'material interest' that violates the order of Zeus and Dike. Submission to the order of life as decreed by God for man means shouldering the burden of existence in competition and co-operation with fellow men: 'Fools, who know not how much more the half is than the whole!' (40 [nhpioi, oude isasin oswi pleon hmisu pantoV])." (p. 144) -- he leaves us a "work ethic" (sometimes called the first "farmers' almanac") that is not like the work ethic of Protestantism or feminism but is rather about the most efficient way to shoulder this burden of existence: i.e. to accept the Dike (punishment!) of Zeus.

Footnote:

1. It is only even later under Christianity that the Original Sin gets further expanded and differentiated to become the sin of pride, "le désir de ressembler à Dieu. C'était le plus grand péché que la créature pouvait commettre contre son Créateur." (Mircea Eliade, Hist. des croy. et des id. relig., I, p. 180.) At this point the original alimentary meaning is finally lost.