Footnote GV25

GV25.  In From Religion to Philosophy (Edward Arnold 1912), F.M. Cornford espouses the view that animism and the associated Olympian gods came after a primitive period of unity with nature. Even the concept of Moira (destiny or fate) came, he speculates, from clan territorial boundaries. In that period all was mana, a magical spectrum embracing the clan member and his whole environment. Cornford writes,

'Soul' and physis are not merely analogous, but identical. The two conceptions — Soul, and ultimate matter — are as yet fused in one, just as we found that at a certain stage mana and the blood-soul were fused in the magical continuum. The later differentiation of the two conceptions will bring out one of the latent contradictions which divide the philosophic schools. As the properties of life come to be distinguished from those of inanimate matter, philosophers will have to make their choice between conceiving the ultimate reality as mind or as matter, as living or as dead. Whichever choice they make, the nature of Soul will still be the same as that of physis.

GV25a. In a footnote, Cornford says,

The case of the Indian  âtman appears to be exactly parallel to that of physis and the individual soul in Greece. The oldest Upanishads recognise only one soul: *It is thy soul, which is within all.’ 'He who, while dwelling in the earth, the water, the fire, in space, wind, heaven, sun, etc., is distinct from them, whose body they are, who rules them all from within, “he is thy soul, the inner guide, the immortal.” . . . This âtman who alone exists is the knowing subject in us . . . and with the knowledge of the âtman , therefore, all is known. . . . The âtman created the universe and then entered into it as soul,’ and this gives rise to the later conception of individual souls, imprisoned in the eternal round of samsâra and needing deliverance. See Deussen, Relig. and Philos. of India, Upanishads, Eng. trans. 1906, p. 257.

GV25b. Cornford theorizes that dualism is traceable in archaic Greece to a period when Orphism supplemented Dionysiasm.

Whether or not this revival [return of Greeks to worship of the sky and celestial bodies] was occasioned by Oriental influence, it is easy to see how well it agrees with the doctrines characteristic of Orphism. The wheel of birth or becoming is now governed by the circling of the starry heaven. From the stars the soul of man is believed to have fallen into the prison of this earthy body, sinking from the upper region of fire and light into the misty darkness of this ‘ roofed-in cave.' The fall is ascribed to some original sin, which entailed expulsion from the purity and perfection of divine existence, and has to be expiated by life on earth and by purgation in the underworld. Caught in the wheel of birth, the soul passes through the forms ol man and beast and plant. But the cycle, instead of going on for ever, is terminated by the limit of the Great Year of ten thousand solar years; at the end of this period, the soul may escape and fly aloft to the fiery heaven whence it came, regaining perfection and divinity. Then a new Great Year begins (for the cycle of Time is endless), and a new world is bom, to pass away in its season, and give place to another.

When we analyse this conception, it becomes clear that the cycle of the Great Year, which must have an astral origin, has been superimposed upon the old cycle of reincarnation. That primitive belief belonged to earth, not to heaven: it taught the revolution of all life or soul in man and nature, passing in an endless round from the underworld into the light of day, and back again. There was no hope or possibility of any release; indeed, such an idea would have no meaning, since the individual soul did not persist after death, but was reabsorbed in the one life of all things. No part or fragment of this life had any separate persistence. It had not come from the  æther, and could not fly off thither; it came from earth, and returned to earth again. In the later doctrine, a series of such periods is fitted into a larger period or Great Year, based upon astronomical theories, probably of Babylonian origin, of the length of time required for all the heavenly bodies, in their various revolutions, to come back to the same relative positions. The focus is thus shifted from the annual recurrence of earthly life to the periodicity of the stars; and with this change goes the doctrine that, while the body is of earth, the soul comes from the starry sky and claims to be of heavenly descent.

This contrast brings out what seems to be the essential difler- ence between the ' Dionysiac' view of immortality (as we may call it) and the Orphic. Orphism is focused on the individual soul, its heavenly origin and immutable nature, and its persis- tence, as an individual, throughout the round of incarnations. It is 'an exile from God and a wanderer ' ; and it is reunited with God, and with other souls, only after its final escape at the end of the Great Year. Hence, the Orphic is preoccupied with the salvation, by purifying rites, of his individual soul.

The insistence on the individual soul, perhaps, gives us the psychological key to the phenomena of Orphism. The cosmic dualism, with its contrast of the principles of light and darkness, identified with good and evil, reflects outwards upon the universe that inner sense of the double nature of man and the war in our members, which is called the ‘sense of sin.' It is also the sense of separation from ‘God,' which goes with the intense desire for reunion. We may, perhaps, see the psychological cause of all this in the development of self-conscious individuality, which necessarily entails a feeling of isolation from the common life, and at the same time an increasing conflict between self-assertive instincts and that part of the common consciousness which resides in each of us, and is called  'conscience.’  If this is so, it is significant that the conflict is represented as between 'body ' and ‘soul.' To ‘body' are assigned those senses and lusts whose insurrection destroys the inward harmony. ‘Soul ’ still covers the field of the common consciousness, or ‘ conscience ' ; but it has shrunk from being the pervasive soul of the whole group to being one among an aggregate of individual selves, weakened by their novel isolation, and always longing for the old undivided conununion.

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