posted December 03, 2007 08:45 PM            

[~ Plato, 'The Spindle of Necessity" THE REPUBLIC]

Plato's intricate geometric vision of the cosmos, with Necessity and the Fates enthroned at the centre governing all, is echoed by Aeschylos in Prometheus Bound:

Chorus: Who guides the helm, then, of Necessity?
Prometheus: Fates triple-formed, Erinyes unforgetting.
Chorus: Is Zues, then, weaker in his might than these?
Prometheus: Not even He can escape the thing decreed.

And the philosopher Heraclitus, in the Cosmic Fragments,
declares with less than his usual ambiguity:

Sun will not overstep his measures;
if he does, the Erinyes,
the minions of Justice,
will find him out.

Greek thought, as Russell states, is full of fate. It can, of course, be argued that these sentiments are the expressions of an archaic culture or world view which died two thousand years ago, prolonged through the medieval epoch because of ignorance of the natural universe, and that we know better now. In one sense this is true, but one of the more important and disturbing insights of depth psychology is the revelation that the mythic and undifferentiated consciousness of our ancestors, which animated the natural world with images of gods and daimones, does not belong to chronological history alone. It also belongs to the psyche of modern man, and represents a stratum which, although layered over by increasing consciousness and the hyper-rationality of the last two centuries, is as potent as it was two millenia ago or even ten millenia ago. Perhaps it is even more potent because its only voice now is the neglected dream-world of childhood, and the incubae and succubae of the night which are better forgotten in the clear ligth of morning. We understand, from our much more sophisticated knowledge of the physical universe, that the sun is not a 'he', and that it is not the snake-tressed screaming Erinyes who prevent it from overstepping its measures. At least, the ego understands: which is to say, that is only one way of looking at it.

The language of myth is still, as ever, the secret speech of the inarticulate human soul; and if one has learned to listen to this speech with the heart, then it is not surprising that Aeschylos and Plato and Heraclitus are eternal voices and not merely relics of a bygone and primitive era. Perhaps it is now more than ever important to hear these poetic visions of the orderly nature of the universe, because we have grown so dangerously far from them. The mythic perception of a universe governed by immutable moral as well as physical law is alive and well in the unconscious, ans so too are the Erinyes, the 'minions of Justice'. Fate, in the writings of the Greeks, is portrayed in images which are psychologically relevant to us. Fate in the archaic imagination is, of course, that which writes the irrevocable law of the future: beginnings and endings which are the inevitable products of those beginnings. This implies an orderly pattern of growth, rather than a random caprice ro chance. It is only the limits of human consciousness which prevent us from perceiving the full implications of a beginning, so that we are unable to foresee the inescapable end. The second cnetury gnostic text, the Corpus Hermeticum, phrases this with beautiful succinctness:

And so these two, Fate and Necessity,
are bound to one another mutually,
to inseperable cohesion.
The former of them, Heimarmene,
gives birth to the beginning of things.
Necessity compels the end of all depending from these principles.
On these does Order follow,
that is their warp and woof,
and times perfection of all things.
For there is naught without the interblend of Order.