There are two basic questions we will consider: what is an Orphic Revival? And is ours really happening? In the sciences, paradigm shifts happen; some of them are happening now. They are identified with these words: Chaos, Gaia, Eros. If you look these words up in the dictionary, they all go back to the global goddess religion of the Paleolithic past. Could it be a coincidence that people have named these new movements in science this way? Or is there, as I suspect, a grassroots mass movement against the sciences which is growing, and in growing gravitates towards these names, these Orphic proper nouns, as an unconscious means of expressing its opposition to the the traditional path of science?
The Orphic Trinity and the Sciences
The first of these words is Chaos. The Chaos revolution. Here is a chronology of the chaos revolution. There is mathematical pre-history with Poincare about a century ago. He saw a mathematical model of chaos, but he didn't call it by that name, and he didn't think very much about applications in the sciences either. But after the computer revolution, these objects envisioned by Poincare as mathematical models for chaos became visible, thanks to computer graphics, and they were probably seen for the first time around November of 1961. So now we're getting into the 1960s, which, besides all our personal transformative experiences, produced an unusual number of radical transformations in society, religion, and science as well. People studied these peculiar objects throughout the '60s, and it was in the early '70s that somebody connected them to the sciences. So these oddities suddenly became interesting to people working on the frontiers of every science. The connection was made by Ruelle and Takens, a physicist and a mathematician, in a paper written in 1972. They submitted it to the main journal of mathematical physics; it was rejected. A year later it was accepted and published, and now it represents the watershed in this particular social transformation in the sciences.
This paradigm shift is known as the chaos revolution. Chaos objects seen on the screen of computer graphics terminals became identified as models for the commonest phenomena in physics, particularly, fluid dynamical turbulence as represented by waterfalls and so on. This phenomenon, prior to 1972, completely mystified physicists. After that, the applications to other sciences grew. Originally known as strange attractors, they became identified with the word chaos in the following year, 1973. A lot of people felt funny about that. They didn't want a mathematical object with scientific applications to be identified with a word that has a pejorative meaning, or a negative connotation from the perspective of the hard sciences that are devoted to law and order. Something with the word chaos should not be admitted to the house of science! This was anathema. But finally the word won out, and the chaos revolution probably culminated in the publication a year or so ago of a popular book by a journalist called "Chaos". It's a major best seller in today's book market. The Chaos Revolution is an example of Thomas Kuhn's theory of paradigm shifts in the sciences. Many sciences are still untouched, but they soon will be, so we see a wave of social transformations, bending outward in concentric circles around a crucial event in 1972 with the publication of a paper about fluid dynamical turbulence.
Case two. Gaia. As everybody knows, the Gaia hypothesis is becoming more and more popular as the bad news about the destruction of the environment increases. The planet - the atmosphere, the hydrosphere, the lithosphere, every aspect of the environment - is being destroyed at an accelerating rate by the toxic side effects of human overpopulation. A combination of the population explosion and the stupidity of the species is terminally toxic to the planet. People have studied the bad news about the human species, trying to find a way to stem the destruction. Some people point to the paradigm shift in 1617, when Descartes had his dream, or to 1614, when Isaac Casaubon debunked the Hermetic corpus, or to 1600, when Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake. There are many theories trying to pinpoint some instant in time between 1300 and 1850 that could be the time when people turned back, when they lost the feeling of the sacredness of the planet and began to act against it wilfully and to destroy it.
One of the attempts to unlock the destruction is the Gaia hypothesis of Lovelock and Margulis. Jim Lovelock writes that this idea first occured to him in 1965 when he was working at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory to prove that Mars has life. Or has no life. It's hard to prove this, but very extensive data about the atmosphere of the planet had been collected with infrared interferometry. As an atmospheric chemist he was called in to see if this data could prove that there was life on the planet Mars. He said, well, I think I know a way, but I'm gonna try it out before I say anything to anybody, I'm gonna try it out on planet Earth, where we know what the answer is and see if it predicts if there is or isn't life. He tried it out and it worked. It said there is life on earth, and there is no life on Mars. His criterion for life is massive imbalance in the atmospheric chemistry, which is maintained by a lot of living souls working hard to keep up the chemical disequilibrium. If all trees stopped breathing, the oxygen would vanish and we'd be back to nitrogen.
So this put him in touch with the pattern that connects all the elements, physical, living, and mental in this planetary system. That's how he came up with the idea of a planet as a sort of living or intelligent entity which has all of its component parts working in harmony to maintain the conditions that are ideal for them and for life. And then he realized that in order to put this across, which, we have to admit, he did splendidly, he needed a name. A year or so later he went for a walk with William Golding, the novelist, and he said, Bill, I've got a problem, I have this idea and this is what it's about. I need a good name, a name with some punch, you know, which can carry the idea forward around the globe, because, you know, we're trying to save the planet, so it's important. And Bill suggested the word Gaia. Now I'm pretty sure that Bill Golding at that time knew nothing about the chaos revolution in science. It hadn't even reached the pages of mathematical journals. And in 1973, when Jim Yorke renamed the strange attractors the chaotic attractors, he had no idea that Jim and Bill had named this other thing The Gaia Hypothesis.
These are two of the phenomena that I call collectively the Orphic Revival of the seventies. There is a third movement afoot in the social sciences that I'm involved in, for which I use the word Eros, but I admit that I was conscious of the Orphic trinity of Chaos, Gaia, and Eros when I was thinking up this name. It furthers what I think is an important, unconscious program in the sciences that is more than just a paradigm shift. It is an attempt to return to an animistic philosophy that embraces the love of all things, including the slime mold and the microbes and every aspect of the living planet - ugly things like large fish eating small fish and AIDS epidemics and so on - all that seems to be a central part of the evolution, and all is to be beloved for its cooperation in the joint enterprise of life. This love and reverence characterized so-called pagan religions up until recent times.
Why do I call this an Orphic Revival? When we look in the dictionary and try to figure out the etymology of the words Chaos, Gaia, and Eros, we go back to Hesiod and there it stops. All three words occurred for the first time in Hesiod's Theogony, starting at the 116th line, which is regarded as the oldest part of the text. They comprise The Orphic Trinity, the basis of the Orphic religion of ancient Greece. After that, there's the proliferation of all the gods and goddesses and olympiads. And the mythology associated with these words changes with each generation of ancient Greece.
The theory of Maria Gimbutas is very important to the understanding of Orphism. She is the archeologist who dug up old Europe and wrote the book "Gods and Goddesses of Old Europe", in which she describes a planetary society characterized by peace over thousands of years. It also had a commonality of religious symbols that extended over the entire occupied planet. One of these symbols is a goddess figurine found in different shapes and sizes everywhere. Mathematical or geometrical analyses of these figurines show that they are made in a common, geometric pattern, indicating that there was communication among the wide-spread people who made these things. There is speculation about the religion of a planetary society that may have existed for twenty or thirty or forty thousand years or more throughout the epipaleolithic. There is an interesting archeological site in a cave in the Zagras Mountains called Shanidar.
Shanidar is unique in that it's been inhabited continuously for a hundred thousand years. They dug down to the bottom. It runs into bedrock at 100,000 B.C. This can be used as a sort of timeline connecting up other archeological sites around the Zagras Mountains - Iran, Iraq, Turkey, the Anatolian Plains. The source of this planetary society then moved into old Europe, floating around the Danube on canoes and eventually reaching Britain where they built Stonehenge and other still surviving megalithicmonuments.
It is assumed that they had a monotheistic religion because of the emphasis on the goddess figure, although there are various abstract representations in cave paintings at Lascaux and elsewhere that are thought to represent mythological figures, particularly animal spirits. Maria Gimbutas has written extensively on this subject, particularly in a book about to be published that supplements her earlier work and takes into account the related hypothesis of Riane Eisler in her book, "The Chalice and The Blade". Maybe this is more important than my idea of the Orphic Revival, which also has to be regarded as a hypothesis. Riane Eisler speculates that there are basically two different structures, two general patterns of organization of human society that she calls the gylanic and the androcratic. Characteristic of the gylanic is that the two genders work in partnership. And characteristic of the andocratic is that one or the other gender dominates. Eisler more or less equates matriarchal and patriarchal societies in her scheme. She looked through the list of all known cultures and found abundant evidence of peace and tranquility over long periods of time, like cities with walls unbroken for 7,000 years such as Catal Huyuk.
Peace and tranquility in the partnership societies, and warfare, aggression, destruction, annihilation, killing, rape and so on in the dominator societies, whether matriarchal or patriarchal. So her hypothesis, her theory of the key that can unlock the door to the garden of Eden once more on this planet, is that we must find a way to readjust our mythology so that our society switches from a dominator society to a gylanic society. On the basis of extensive anthropological evidence, the possibility, not the guarantee, but at least the possiblity of peace, exists. We can have as many peace movements as we want, but unless we change society so that the subjugation of women in our patriarcal society becomes a thing of the past, there is no chance for success, according to Eisler's theory.
Gimbutas also subscribes to this theory, but Eisler has extensive documentation of the main example of a partnership society that lasted throughout the epipaleolithic for many thousands of years. The part that Gimbutas has dug up spans only from 6500 to 3500 B.C. That's old Europe. Before that, there was Catal Huyuk, Hacilan, the Anatolian Plain and so on. The most recent intact culture of this stripe is Minoan Crete, which lasted till around 1500 B.C. Minoan Crete was settled from the Anatolian Plains, and its religious rituals have been extensively studied, They involved two kinds of ritual, the cave ritual and the open-air ritual - kind of a Bacchanalian, Dionysian, Orphic celebration. All these elements had crept into early Greek religion from Crete, and before that from Anatolia. They give us a little window through which we can faintly glimpse the religious rituals of this planetary society in the past. Many people have written about them. They entered Greece through Mycenae. Homer and Hesiod introduced some of these religious ideas.
The worst event in the history of consciousness from the perspective of Gimbutas and Eisler is the final patriarchal takeover. When Minoan Crete failed, it was the end of partnership society. What happened to it? Well, there are less extensively studied details given in Eisler's book about the so-called Kurgan invasions. After the Kurgan wave came the patriarchal takeover of Babylonia and Egypt, and goddesses were replaced with gods. This is a historical fact, thanks to cuneiform tablets found at Nippur, for example, Eridu and Araduga, the sacred city in Babylonia.
In this interesting time of cultural evolution, when each city had their own gods or goddesses, cities started with a temple. People who were in sympathy with the abstract concept for which that temple stood would gather around it. Thus there were homogeneous settlements that shared a certain common mythology, but were completely different in different cities. Eridu had a goddess, Tiamat, who was later replaced by Marduk, Bel Marodach - Beltane fires of the Druids in Ireland. A god of law and order took over from the goddess of chaos in Eridu around 2000 B.C. Machismo is associated with that one male war god.
In the earliest phase of our tradition, the religious ideas of this previous culture of 25,000 years appear in different forms. Homer's Orphic pantheon is clearly represented in the unitarian way, while the trinity appears in Hesiod as three abstract principles called Chaos, Gaia, and Eros. So right at the beginning there was a dispute between Homer and Hesiod as to the unitarian and trinitarian version. I imagine that in the early days of the city-states, the sacred city-states of Babylon, some people would have been unitarian, some duotarian - or whatever you would call it - and some trinitarian, and others quatrinarian and so on. Since a process of cultural evolution was taking place, there was some kind of natural selection happening, so that a system with greater stability would have greater longevity. That's how we end up with a lot of unitarian and trinitarian societies, and not many two-four-fives-sevens-nines, which might be the ultimate base of Pythagorean number mysticism. There was actually a kind of experimental science of number in the cultural evolution. It was said that Thales and Pythagoras traveled widely to the south and east. They had a laboratory on the Mesopotamian Plains, a cultural laboratory where people tried every conceivable kind of structure on the mythological level.
There are three, four, or five levels of consciousness, depending on your model. Let's take a two level model for the sake of simplicity. On one level we have mythology etc.,- so-called cognitive maps - and on the other level the stuff of history - the data of history, the phenomenological universe. There may be a causal relation where cognitive maps are sort of the DNA code of the actual evolution of history. Well, where do these cognitive maps come from? They're extrapolations, abstractions. They're sort of a two-way process and that's the hermeneutic circle of life and the history of consciousness.
Before the cognitive maps of cities were joined into a planetary cognitive map, there was a kind of natural laboratory for experiments in cognitive maps. That's why I say we have a whole bunch of ones, twos, and threes on the cognitive map level. Here is a town with Chaos, Gaia and Eros, and there a town with the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, while over there they have the Father, the Mother, and the Child. All these experiments were started at different times; but suppose a number of them started simultaneously, and shortly they all became extinct except for a certain number of ones and a larger number of threes, thanks to some kind of natural law. And then Pythagoras would come along, traveling from town to town, and he'd say, okay, you guys got a two, you have your work cut out for you because it just can't be done, take my word for it. A natural selection took place which left us with a Christological controversy about the unitarian and trinitarian way. Isaac Newton was caught up in this controversy. In his day you were burned at the stake if you uttered a unitarian word. So he didn't. But he had serious personal problems with official trinitarianism, which didn't come out until 250 years after his death because he buried his secret so deep. He said that this is a lawful universe and without the father how could there be the son? How could there be the son and the holy ghost without the father? So there was this whole unitarian heresy - the Arian heresy.
I guess they continue to exist today. I mean you go downtown and see quite a few different churches. To be frank, I don't see what exactly is the difference between them, but I think that there are differences on the cognitive map level. Maybe every year there is another church, but basically, I think there is an evolution in the sociology of religious practice, which is based upon sacred geometry on the level of cognitive maps which does have to be respected.
Anyway, let's take the trinitarian view of the sacred heritage of the Anatolian Plain as represented by Hesiod in the Theogony. "Chaos was born first, and after her came Gaia the broad-breasted, the firm seat of all the immortals who hold the peaks of snowy Olympos and the misty Tartaros in the depths of broad-pathed earth, and Eros, the fairest of the deathless gods..."
If you look up all the references in the Theogony, these three words appear nowhere else until much later. And then you find there are many more occurrences of the word Gaia, and just a few of Chaos and Eros. But if you look them all up there is no doubt that these are the three fundamental principles for Hesiod from which all else is drawn. But what did they actually mean?
Chaos did not mean to Hesiod anything like what it means today. It meant only the gap between heaven and earth - the formless nothing out of which form came, the same as in the Bible, second line, first verse in Genesis where it speaks about Tohu Wabohu, Gaia is apparently something like the Earth, but not exactly the Earth, because the actual earth was made later. The next line of Hesiod refers to the actual Earth and doesn't call the Earth Gaia. So Gaia is a little more than Earth - the broad-breasted foundation. In this rendition, Eros is not the son of Aphrodite, later known as Cupid - god or goddess depending on your perspective of physical love. First of all, Eros is an androgyne. There are some notes of this in one of the many translations of the Theogony: the position of Eros among such primeval elements as Chaos and Gaia indirectly or tacitly indicates a very important role - perhaps that of a demiurgic catalyst within creation. Creativity is the main business of Eros - the essence of form out of which forms are made, the substance of matter out of which matter is made, and the vibrating, interpenetrating creative principle that catalytically brings forth the form and matter. Those are the three principles, the Orphic Trinity, as I call it. Perhaps it would be more accurate to call it the Hesiod Trinity or something.
There is presently some talk about a pagan revival. A lot of people hope for it because they seriously believe that monotheism is the key to the destruction of the planet. The main representative of this pagan view is Arnold Toynbee. In one of his last papers he firmly recommends that we abandon monotheism to resume worshipping the Earth - the rocks, trees, lakes, and mountains.
Now let us return to the transformation of science. Can it be an accident that separate people in separate times and places used the words Chaos and Gaia for two fundamental transformations of science which point to a pagan science in the sense of the Pythagorean mysteries? Or are these transformations in the field of science part of a larger phenomenon of consciousness throughout the planet in which a new vision of love gods and goddesses has come forward? In this vision, not only science, but everything - religion, family structure, agriculture, law and so forth will be transformed into a completely different model.
This new model should be totally independent of religion. Take Riane Eisler's model, for instance. As far as I know, nobody has called her anti-Christian as yet, but her book (THE CHALICE AND THE BLADE) is very critical of the Bible. She relies greatly on the work of Elaine Pagels which is rooted in the patriarchial society with its religion, so it doesn't mean that we would have to necessarily throw out that religion in order to regain a partnership society. Eisler never suggested that. Nevertheless some people are led to wonder if this is not a package deal. The patriarchal society is not only monotheistic, but Yahweh is kind of fierce. The records state that the Jewish people were told to go into a village and kill everyone. I imagine kind of a two-dimensional system, the mythology and the social structure. The social structure can affect the myths in making the gods or goddesses more fierce, carrying weapons like some of the Hindu divinities. I don't think we have to invent a new religion in order to change the structure of society, but the fact is, we don't know how to change it. In the 1960s, many of us here in Santa Cruz thought we were making a new society. We started new schools and we had new religions or resurrections of old ones for which we brought in teachers. We thought it would be safest to basically throw out the whole old order and think up something new.