We saw in an earlier lecture that Hesiod
uses genealogy as a manipulable, flexible, very robust structuring device to try to
piece together lots of different traditions that are around him.
He knew in the Greek city states that, where his neighbors, lots of different
ways of treating the divinities. And now, he was faced with a question of,
well, how might they all fit together? So, he decides to turn to genealogy to try
to find a place for all of them and an ordering system that can make them all
fit. There's a wonderful example that I thought
we'd start off our talk today with, drawn from the American magazine The New Yorker
and a cartoonist named Roz Chast. Some years ago, she put together something
called The Cosmology of Timmy in the New Yorker where we see the mind of a very
young boy trying to figure out all the disparate, invisible, and powerful
creatures in this person's life. We'll see Timmy try to string them
together using genealogy as a system. His own immature brain, he knows that
there's some powerful figure called God. There's also something called Santa, and
the Boogeyman, and Heidi, and a Gremlin, and a Sandman.
He's not sure how they all fit together. So, in his own mind, he starts to draw a
family tree. If God is the highest one, well, the next
one is probably going to be Santa because he knows that Santa the, the man in the
red suit that bring, brings grifts, gifts at Christmas time is going to be someone
who probably is very closely related to this highest being.
So, he had Santa be the main, main offspring of God.
He also knows that bad stuff happens in the world so in addition to this layer of
Santa, there's this offspring of God called the Boogeyman.
Well, when Santa is looking for a mate in life, Santa look's for someone that would
have a good characteristics in his mate, so he looks for the tooth fairy.
On the other hand, a Boogeyman gets, when a Bogeyman gets married, a Boogeyman is
going to get married to some kind of witch.
So, he's got good ones and bad ones, and they kinda find each other in this
ordering way. There's a next generation as the tooth
fairy and Santa have offspring. They produce things like Frosty, Frosty
the Snowman. Now, from a famous American cartoon,
Rudolph also from an American cartoon. The Easter Bunny seems to be someone that
Santa would likely have as an offspring. The Easter Bunny would be married to
someone named Heidi, who shows up in an old fashioned Hollywood film.
Quite a lovely sprite who lives on the, on the hills in the rolling countryside.
The Easter Bunny and Heidi then have a next generation of offspring, they have a
sandman and some kind of a leprechaun. On the other side, the Boogeyman and some
kind of witch have a Gremlin and alien is their offspring.
And now, this whole family tree and Timmy's own, more immature mentality as a
young boy, they fit together in a set of relationships that genealogy helps them
structure. Now, in a way that's not entirely
different from this, but, but I hope is a lot more mature and a lot more trenchant,
Hesiod is going to try to piece together lots of disparate traditions around the
Greek countryside and try to find places and relationships among all of them.
You'll recall our story begins with a, a hymn to the Muses where Hesiod gives great
praise to them. Talks to them about all the great
characteristics and qualities that they have, and at the very end says goodbye to
them. We're going to find, when we turn to the
hymn that this is more than just hymn like that actually fits the many of the
structuring elements of what makes a proper Greek hymn.
After his opening, hymn to the muses, Hesiod now turns on page six to the
production of order in the cosmos and to his genealogical template.
We'll begin with his statement about how things all get started with the Chasm.
First came the Chasm, and then broad-breasted Earth, secure a seat for
ever of all the immortals who occupy the peak of snowy Olympus.
The misty Tartara in a remote recess of the broad-path Earth.
And Eros, the most handsome among the mortal, immortal gods, dissolver of flesh,
who overcomes the reason and purpose in the breasts of all gods and all men.
Out of the Chasm came Erebos and dark Night, and from Night in turn, came Bright
Air and Day, whom she bore in shared intimacy with Erebos.
In Hesiod's world, there's a kind of pre-beginning, there's a pre-genealogy
where we have four prior existing entities, the Chasm, Earth, Tartara, and
Eros. These have just been around for all time.
It's not as though they emerged. They're just there as Hesiod begins his
story. The Chasm is a very important figure for
us. In Greek, the term that's being translated
by our translator here as Chasm, the Greek is Xaos.
Some translators will choose the English term Chaos to translate this because the
letters match up quite well to the Greek word and there's an etymological
connection between Xaos and Chaos. The problem is that the Greek doesn't
really mean disorder, the ancient Greek term does not mean disorder at all.
It means emptiness, empty space. So, your translator M.L.
West has chosen the term Chasm to translate that Greek word Xaos and it's
actually I think a much better translation.
The Chasm is something that exists at the beginning, it's the empty space in which
the rest of these reproductions happen. We turn to these other figures of Earth,
Tartara, and Eros. Earth is someone that we'll see, we'll
spend a lot of time focusing on in the coming discussions.
She's a key character in Hesiod's genealogical structures.
Tartara is a pluralized name Tartarus, a more familiar name of a underworld.
And a, a region down below the regular upper world where the created a world that
you and I might know, exists and it's very far down.
It's a scary place. We're going to learn a little bit more
about it. Then, there's this force Eros.
Eros is an abstract sexual desire, but it's nothing like a kind of gentle,
helpful love between people. It's a more violent, sometimes quite
dangerous desire that can cause destruction and violence.
Now, these creatures start in a first phase of creation.
Out of Chasm, in any words, Chasm alone produces Erebos and Night.
And then, Night alone produces Bright Air and Day, but we learn in the closing part
of that line that Night after, when she produces Bright Air and Day, she does it
in shared intimacy with Erebos. So, Chasm seems to be able to reproduce
entirely on her own whereas Erebos and Night come together to produce the Bright
Air and the Day. The next generations are required to have
a shared intimacy in order for reproduction to happen.
When reproduction happens all spontaneously on it's own, we're going to
have to pay some attention to it. The normal way that things happen in
Hesiod is by sexual reproduction. There are creatures that get together,
those creatures have sexual relationships, and then there are offspring from those
creatures. So, now that we've got started on our
reproductive cycle, we can take a look at what happens during this first stage.
Let's call it the alpha stage of generation.
Drawing a term from those of the, those in our world that produce software.
You, you remember the very first stage of software is called an alpha stage, after
that comes the beta stage, and then you're ready for the real thing.
So, during the alpha stage, we have generations that come out of Earth.
Earth produces out of herself, in other words, in that same way that Chasm
produces in the very first thing. She produces many things including sky.
Sky then becomes her partner. She has sexual relations with Sky, and
from her come a whole order of Titans, a whole order of Titans.
These are scary creatures, Hesiod calls them fearsome children.
They're not someone to be trifled with. Also, during this alpha stage of creation
come monsters, famous ones. We know the cyclops and the hundred
handers who show up here. The cyclopses are those who have only one
eye in the middle of their forehead. The hundred handers are large, huge
strangely giant creatures that have 100 hands.
It's, Hesiod is telling us that these early generations of create, of the
creative process through reproduction that are happening with are figures like the
titans and the monsters, they're not quite together.
They're not quite right. Things in reproduction in the first cycle
don't work quite well. There's an analogy for those of who make
pancakes. Everyone knows that you've got to throw
the first couple of pancakes out. You try your best, get the griddle just
right. Add your baking soda, add your
ingredients. And if they're not quite mixed just right,
your pancake's not going to taste right. So, you've got to try one, test it out.
After you do, you have to toss it. Just like our software engineers know that
there's an alpha stage. Now, Sky and Earth have a intimate
relationship and there's a reproduction as the Earth is reproducing and reproducing
out of herself. At a certain point, though, in this
process of sexual reproduction, Sky gets annoyed with her mate.
I'm sorry, Earth gets annoyed with her mate, the Sky, and doesn't want Sky to be
coming on top of her every evening. You can imagine in Hesiod's imagination,
there's a, as the night is setting, Sky comes up over top of the earth.
And, the Earth is upset by this, she doesn't want it to happen.
So, she talks to her children and says, children, your father's awful.
He keeps getting up on top of me every night.
And when he does, he keeps pressing back inside of me all the creative things that
are about to come out of me. So, what she's talking about is literally
that Sky is pushing back into her what is trying to come out.
He's clogging up her pathways so that none of her reproductive power is able to
exhibit herself. This is an indication already that the
male principal here, figured as Sky, Sky is definitely gendered male, and the
female principal here, Earth, are having difficulties with this process of sexual
reproduction. The Sky is also threatened by the produce
that's coming out of his mate, the Earth. The male principle is, finds the female
power of reproduction to be a little bit scary and wants to try to control it.
He's trying to clog it up so that the power of reproduction is throttled and
stopped, and he has a way to keep it in place.
Now, this upsets of course, the Earth and she says, children, please gather around.
I've got to announce to you something. Your father's awful.
He's on top of me every night. I don't want him to be there.
I've gotta make him stop. So please, children, let's find a way to
make him stop and won't one of you take this very sharp knife, made out of
Adamantine, the hardest substance that we, creatures know about, and hide behind a
rock. And when he comes on top of me tonight,
grab onto his genitals, cut them off, and throw them into the ocean.
Can you imagine a mother saying that to a child?
So, lo and behold, there is a child that says, yes, mother, I'll help.
This little one Cronus. Cronus dives in and says, I'll do it.
Cronus, in fact, does it. Hides behind a rock, the father comes up
on top of the mother at night. He jumps out, grabs onto the genitals,
hacks them off an hurls them into the sea. After Sky is castrated by his own son, we
don't hear so much from him later on as the events unfold.
This castration of Sky, ordered by Earth and executed by the son is deeply
effective in dis-empowering the Sky. Now, from that moment lots of things
happen. The Sky disappears, Earth then becomes
extremely productive and lots of generations come out of her.
We hear the reproduction of lots of evil beasts that come out of her.
There's discussion of things like doom, and death, and cabal, and misery, and
deceit, and strife. We have discussion of all these principles
that come, come bursting out of her now the Sky's not on top of her every single
night. We also hear that from the genitals
themselves, important principles are born. As the genitals are hurled to the ocean,
they drop blood into the Earth along the way.
From that blood, grow up a series of creatures called the Erinyes, here in our
first word in our list there, Erinyes. These are nasty creatures that exhibit
revenge against anyone that has committed a blood murder.
If someone has blood on their hands because of a murder, the Erinyes will
chase them down, hunt them down, and punish them.
They are blood avengers and they work via blood.
You can see Hesiod's poetic connection between the savage crime that is committed
of a son against the father perp, instigated by a mother, is now made to be
the birth point, the birthplace of these blood avengers.
Also, Aphrodite is said to grow up out of this, out of this moment.
The, when the genitals are hurled into the ocean, there's a foam that comes up around
them. And because of a connection between a
Greek term, Aphros, and the idea of foam, Hesiod suggests that Aphrodite herself
grows up out of the foam of the severed genitals of this guy.
So, Aphrodite's birth is anything but a kind of gentle, loving one.
Here, the goddess of love is born out of a very sharp violent act committed in a,
with a sexual dimension, but a very sharp violent act built into the very earliest
layers of the creative process. I've also brought up a term here called
Parthenogenesis, which is necessary for us to lock into.
This is the term that we're going to use to refer to creation by a single power, by
single principle. When Earth creates all by herself, when
the Chasm creates all by itself. And later, we'll see Zeus actually has the
power to create all by himself, this term parthenogenesis is going to be important
to us. Now, after the genealogies of the nasty
beasts, we get a long list of monsters that come up.
We hear famous ones like Medusa, and Echidna, and Typhae, Typhoeus, and
Cerberus, and Hydra, and Chimera, and the Nemean lion.
These are all things that come out of this very early stage of creation where one
could expect that certain kinds of nasty monstrous creatures are going to come.
You see, it connects them all back to that, prior alpha stage creation.
We also get during this stage a long list of myths.
You recall we talked about our lists and the importance in Hesiod's story of long
catalogs of things. Here, the Nereid nymphs are listed and we
get that really elegant many, many lines of proper names, we talked earlier about
how that was, would have been amazing to see performed.
Here, those don't seem to be connected with any kind of negativity or violence.
The Nereid nymphs are generally happy creatures, and you're happy you have one
around you. They're not thought of to be connected
with evil, or inflected with any kind of that.
Any, any of that kind of thing. So, the alpha generation is possible of
reproducing nasty things and these are especially flagged after this Cronus
crass, castration of Sky. But, there are also, in alpha stage
generation where it's possible for us to produce some things that are pretty good.
Next, we're going to tune in to the reproduction that happens around the next
stage of things as Cronus and Rhea give their try at having a reproductive family
themselves.