Pantheon, Part 0

by Embreis23

Note: Athens Area Pagans Inc. is open to all paths, ways, and practices. The following is the author’s opinion and is not intended as a statement of opinion, theology, ideology, or faith on the part of AAP.

Introduction: What follows is the second of a series of attempts to describe and communicate the experiences I have had with entities that I choose to call Goddesses or Gods, and also with other spirits. Sometimes I just call them “Those Ones.” I had promised weekly installments, but I’m a week behind, as the editorial process became extensive. There is a longer version of this introduction attached to the first installment, but please understand:

  • These essays reflect my experiences, and are not intended to be taken as dogma, some special revelation, or The Exclusive and Only Truth.For this purpose, I’m not really concerned about historical authenticity or claims of cultural property, or scholarly niceties. 
  • I am not, nor do I aspire to be, a prophet, pope, high priest, anointed one, cult leader, epopt, or lord high anything.
  • Although I necessarily use metaphors and poetic imagery in writing about Those Ones, I am not speaking of archetypes, or psychological states, or dwellers in some airless otherworld; I am writing about PHENOMENA, just like stars and stones and your own too solid flesh.
  • By whatever names you call them or stories you tell about them, the real gods are with us, in our blood, in the dirt beneath our feet, and in the stars and in the void. When we come to know them, we must love them because they are beautiful, and graceful, and even terrible. But we are neither their property nor their slaves, although we may sometimes be their prey. To know them and reach them is ecstasy, even if it’s sometimes a painful ecstasy.

0. Chaos and Eros

This is numbered 0, because Chaos is the beginning of all things, and the end. This should probably have been the first essay in this series. Chaos comes before and after, is above and below, is within and without. Everything comes from Chaos; everything disappears into Chaos.

“Chaos comes before all principles of order & entropy, it’s neither a god nor a maggot, its idiotic desires encompass & define every possible choreography, all meaningless aethers & phlogistons: its masks are crystallizations of its own facelessness, like clouds.” – Hakim Bey, “Chaos”1

Democritus2 is the first philosopher known to have proposed that everything is made up of tiny indivisible particles, those critters called “atoms.” By the 19th Century, scientists had come to agree that matter was made up of such indivisible particles, but by the beginning of the 20th Century, it had become clear that atoms were not indivisible at all, but seemed to be little systems made up of electrons, protons, neutrons and other, stranger particles

And outer space, the  space that stars and planets move through, that we also move through, is also filled with other particles, photons and gamma particles and such, except that sometimes those particles are waves, depending literally on how you look at them. 

But at the beginning, or the bottom, or the top, or the end, ultimately everything is made up of what we call particles. But what are these particles made of? If we say they are made up of more particles, we still have the same question: what are these even more fundamental particles? This is a game that could go on forever, but it doesn’t need to. We need to understand that these fundamental particles are nothing. Whirling vortices of nothingness that, despite their lack of existence, somehow exist, and spin, and vibrate, and dance, and somehow become something, become the world of things.

Plato detested Chaos. He was pleased by the neat, changeless shapes he could imagine. He found the observed world wanting, because nothing quite fit the precise dimensions of his imagination and everything kept changing. He concluded that his “reason” was observing a better world, a world where all the measurements come out even and nothing ever changes. That line of thought has run all through of Western civilization, leading  people to imagine omniscient creator gods, heavens and hells, purity and perfection, and other such absurdities.

But Plato was wrong, of course. Reality is perfect, and the contents of our minds are only imperfect reflections of reality

Only Chaos is perfect.

“Everything in nature is perfectly real including consciousness, there’s absolutely nothing to worry about. Not only have the chains of the Law been broken, they never existed; demons never guarded the stars, the Empire never got started, Eros never grew a beard.“3

We observe Chaos and we see change: constant, unpredictable change, but we are creatures made of Chaos, observing from the inside. We feel the passage of time and possibilities emerge from Chaos and vanish into Chaos. But the passage of time is an illusion. All the possibilities are there, and If one could step outside of time and reality, like a fish suddenly seeing the ocean from space, maybe one would see the perfect and shameless working out of every actual possibility, the final beginning of Chaos and the final end. Some folks deep in meditation have glimpsed this, but only in flashes.

We can say that Chaos is not random. A system is random only if every possibility is as likely as every other possibility; thus, randomness quickly becomes dull. Randomness is beige, but Chaos is brilliantly colored and filled with flashes of light. Tides ripple through chaos and interact with each other and each of those interactions makes a phenomenon: a god, a star, a stone, a mortal mind and body.

There is a line of thought in mathematics called Chaos Theory, sometimes also called (perhaps more correctly) the Science of Wholeness. The sensible world is filled with phenomena that seem to be messy or irregular or, in other words, chaotic:  the shape of a coastline, the pattern of spray when water runs over rocks, the path of a lightning bolt, the shapes of tree branches. These are the sorts of things that drew the disapproval of the Platonic philosophers. More recently, mathematicians began to wonder if there was some mathematical structure to such phenomena. And they found that there was indeed structure. repeating themes and patterns, and they could produce mathematical formulae that would produce images – strange attractors, Mandelbrot sets, other fractal patterns – that resembled natural phenomena. In theory, the math could predict the outcomes of chaotic systems (such as the weather), but in fact, they cannot because, to describe. In other words, they discovered that chaos is perfectly orderly, but its order is complex beyond any entity’s ability to map.4


Why isn’t Chaos random? The explanation lies in Eros and The Mother of All things. 

First Chaos came, then wide Earth, ever-sound

Foundations of the gods who on snow-bound

Olympus dwell, then, swathed in murkiness

Beneath the wide-pathed Earth, came Tartarus,

Then Eros, fairest of the deathless ones,

Who weakens all the gods and men and stuns

Their prudent judgment. _ Hesiod, Theogony ll. 130-136 (tr. Christopher Kelk)5

Robert Graves, in the Greek myths Volume I, assembled an even earlier account from fragments of pre-Hellenic creation. In this version, the Goddess Euronyme (wide-wandering) rises naked from Chaos and dances, her dance causes the North Wind to blow, and she catches the wind with her hands and rubs them to warm them. And from her hands springs the world-serpent Ophion, who dances with her, lusts for her, and couples with her producing the Universal Egg, from which all other things are born.6

Chaos is not really a God. chaos doesn’t think or plan; it just is, a swirling sea of bits of swirling nothingness, dancing and flowing and spinning, but somehow the Mother, the very idea of form and “something-ness,” emerges, also dancing and spinning. And the Mother is so beautiful, that Eros – translate this as “love” or “lust” or “desire,” as you prefer – manifested even within mindless Chaos, and made Her fecund with all things that can ever be.

Thus, through Chaos, the Mother, and Eros, all things are created, but there is no creator, only the process.

Of course, if you read works of the later Greek philosophers or of modern pundits (or internet edgelords), you may find the word “chaos” associated with violence, horror and destruction. Violence and horror do emerge from Chaos, because violence and horror are real, and everything that is real emerges from Chaos. But violence and horror are not the nature of Chaos; Chaos is perfect in its serenity. Eros, the desire for beauty and union, is the nature of Chaos. When humans, or even gods, resist the dance of Chaos, and thrash around, clinging to delusions of control, then violence, horror, and destruction arise.

“No, listen, what happened was this: they lied to you, sold you ideas of good & evil, gave you distrust of your body & shame for your prophethood of chaos, invented words of disgust for your molecular love, mesmerized you with inattention, bored you with civilization & all its usurious emotions.”7

There is no reason or purpose for you to exist; you emerge from Chaos; someday, after perhaps many incarnations, you will vanish into Chaos. In the meantime, there is nothing useful to do but be like Chaos, give yourself over to Eros, seek the Mother of All Things, strive for beauty and grace. And even if you think you have fallen short of that, the effort itself is beautiful and graceful.

“ You have nothing. You possess nothing. You own nothing. You are free. All you have is what you are and what you give.” Ursula K. LeGuin, The Dispossessed8

Eros is the force that prevents Chaos from collapsing into the flat, beige field of randomness. It’s not just about fucking (although that’s part of it). Eros is also love, and the desire for beauty, grace, wonder, and knowledge. We see Eros in every painting, in every song, in every grand experiment, in every family, whether biologically bred or brought together by mutual love and need.

“There is no becoming, no revolution, no struggle, no path; already you’re the monarch of your own skin – your inviolable freedom waits to be completed only by the love of other monarchs: a politics of dream, urgent as the blueness of sky.”9

There’s no plan or decreed fate, only your desire, and the will and imagination to pursue it to the End of Desire, She Who Must Be Adored.

“There is no governor anywhere; you are all absolutely free.” Robert Anton Wilson, Schrodinger’s Cat II: the Trick Top Hat10

And that’s all folks.

This is the second in a series of at least 8 and possibly more aspirationally weekly essays. Next time,  Nimble Jack.

  1.  “Chaos” is the first prose poem in “The Broadsheets of Ontological Anarchism.” Hakim Bey is the pseudonym of Peter Lamborn Wison (1945-2022). The Broadsheets are collected in his book T.A.Z: the Temporary Autonomous Zone (1991: Autonomedia Press). ↩︎
  2. The Laughing Philosopher (ca. 480-370 BCE). All of his work is actually lost, and what is known is from quotations by later philosophers, particularly Aristotle. ↩︎
  3. Bey, Op. Cit. ↩︎
  4. Most of this comes from Chaos: Making a New Science, by James Gleick (1987: Viking Books). ↩︎
  5. Translation copyright 2021. It can found on the web here https://www.poetryintranslation.com/PITBR/Greek/HesiodTheogony.php
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  6. The Greek Myths Vol. I, (1955, rev’d. 1960: Penguin Books) ↩︎
  7. Bey, Op. Cit. ↩︎
  8. Copyright 1974: Harper and Rowe. This is part of Shevek’s speech which I recommend that everyone read: “It is our suffering that brings us together. It is not love. Love does not obey the mind, and turns to hate when forced. The bond that binds us is beyond choice. We are brothers. We are brothers in what we share. In pain, which each of us must suffer alone. In hunger, in poverty, in hope, we know our brotherhood. We know it, because we have had to learn it. We know that there is no help for us but from one another, that no hand will save us if we do not reach out our hand. And the hand that you reach out is empty, as mine is. You have nothing. You possess nothing. You own nothing. You are free. All you have is what you are and what you give.
    “I am here because you see in me the promise, the promise we made 200 years ago in this city – the promise kept. We have kept it, on Annares. We have nothing but our freedom. We have nothing to give you but your own freedom. We have no law but the single principle of mutual aid between individuals. We have no government but the single principle of free association. We have no states, no nations, no presidents, no premiers, no chiefs, no generals, no bosses, no bankers, no landlords, no wages, no charity, no police, no soldiers, no wars.
    “Nor do we have much else. We are sharers, not not owners. We are not prosperous. None of us is rich. None of us is powerful. If it is Anarres you want, if it is the future you seek, then, I tell you, you must come to it with empty hands. You must come to it alone, and naked, as the child comes into the world, into the future, without any past, without any property, wholly dependent on other people for his life. You cannot take what you have not given, and you must give yourself. You cannot buy the revolution. You cannot make the revolution. You can only be the revolution. It is in your spirit, or it is nowhere.”
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  9. Bey, Op. Cit. ↩︎
  10.  Copyright 1980. Originally published as the second volume of the Schrodinger’s Cat trilogy and then republished as an omnibus volume by Dell in 1988.
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embreis23

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