Moira, Nomos, Physis

The Aegean University Department of Social Anthropology

Dr. S. Sfekas

Moira, Nomos, Physis : A Social Anthropological Analysis of the Origins of Rational Thought in Aegean Civilization

The origins of Western speculation are to be found in the prehistorical period of Aegean civilization . The words Religion and Philosophy (which to the Greeks included Science) perhaps suggest to some people two distinct provinces of thought. It is, however, also possible to think of them as two successive phases, as modes of the expression of man’s feelings and beliefs about the world. There is a real continuity between the earliest rational speculation and the religious beliefs that lay behind it. Philosophy and science inherited from religion certain great conceptions – for instance the ideas of Destiny (moira), Law (nomos), Nature (physis), God (theos) , Soul (psyche). The philosophic Muse is not a motherless Athena : Her august parent is Religion. I propose to investigate the central conceptions in the religious thought of Aegean civilization in the light of recent Social Anthropological scholarship. Most of the important work in this area has been done by ancient historians influenced by Durkheim and his school, scholars such as Cornford, Harrison, Gilbert Murray, Nilsson, Wilamovitz, A.D. Nock, Festugiere and Latte. But contemporary social anthropologists like Humphreys and Burkert think they have not bequeathed to us a definitive method for studying ancient religious history. Their response is viewed as intuitive and predominantly aesthetic, rather than historical. Their approach to ancient Greek religion is considered individualistic and psychological and thus ill-equipped to deal with the difference between societies and periods. The main criticism is that most of the scholarship done in Aegean studies is based on outmoded anthropological tenets. The ‘comparative method’ employed by the great scholars who studied the archaic period has been superseded in social anthropology by the successive movements of the functionalism of Malinowski and Firth, the structural-functionalism of Radcliffe-Brown and Fortes, and the structuralism of Levi-Strauss. Also, the school of British Social Anthropology developed at Oxford by Evans-Pritchard is useful, especially as regards its criticism of Levi-Bruhl’s anthropological theories as applied to Ancient Greek Society. In fact, the Evans-Pritchard school is critical of such works as Dodd’s The Greeks and the Irrational (1951) which is based on an anthropological theory drawn from a school – the American ‘Culture and Personality’ school of Ruth Benedict and Margaret Mead – which was based on shaky psychological foundations, and furthermore attributed a crucial role to the use of data on child-training which were simply not available for ancient Greece. They were weak in the analysis of social structure and could not provide the analytic tools needed for a re-assessment of the structure of archaic Greek society. Prior to the employment of anthropological tools of analysis, it was thought by classicists that when we have gone back to Homer and Hesiod we have reached the limits of our search, and that we had better not pry into the prehistoric darkness. Later Scholars took as their guide into this darkness the Durkheimian theorem that the key to religious belief lies in the social structure of the community which elaborates it. The term ‘collective representation’ has been made familiar to us by the French school sociologists (Durkheim, Mauss, Levi-Bruhl, Graner, Gernet, Vernant, et al.). Applied to the ancient Greeks this notion meant that embedded in the very substance of their thought about the world and themselves was an inalienable and ineradicable framework of conception, not of the individual’s making, but given to him ready-made by society – a whole apparatus of concepts and categories, within which and by means of which all individual thinking, however original and daring, is compelled to move. This common inherited scheme of conception, which surrounds the individual and comes to him as naturally and unobjectionably as his native air, is

none the less imposed on him and limits his intellectual movements in countless ways – all the more surely and irresistibly because, being inherent in the very language he must use to express the simplest meaning, it is adopted and assimilated before he can so much as begin to think for himself at all. This mass of collective representation is, of course, constantly undergoing gradual change, largely due both to the critical efforts of individual thinkers, who from time to time succeed in introducing profound modifications, and to changes in the social and political structure. Thus just as behind philosophy there lies religion, so also behind religion there lies social custom – the structure and the institutions of the human group. Primitive beliefs about the nature of the world were sacred (religious or moral) beliefs, and the structure of the world was itself a moral or sacred order, because, in certain early phases of social development, the structure and behaviour of the world were held to be continuous with – a mere extension or projection of – the structure and behaviour of human society. The human group and the department of Nature surrounding it were unified in one solid fabric of moirai – one comprehensive system of custom and taboo. The divisions of Nature were limited by moral boundaries, because they were thought of as actually the same as the divisions of society. Society, in a word, is a system of moirai ; and the boundaries of its groups are also the boundaries of morality. Within them lies nomos – all that you ought to do and must do – the exercise of the group functions, the expressions of its peculiar magical powers. Behind them lies all you must not do—all that is taboo. The sentinel at the frontier is Death. It may be significant that moira is the counterpart of moros, death; and that the word moira itself easily passes from its sense of allotted portion to mean doom – ‘the grievous doom of death’ (moira oloé thanatoio) . Thus, the whole universe is brought within the bounds of human morality, and portioned out into its provinces; for each department of nature must be subject to the same taboos and bound to the observance of the same customs, as the human group with which it is identified. The concept of moira has a positive and a negative side: on the positive side there is the observance of custom; on the negative side, there is taboo – moira is thus supreme in the universe both human and non-human alike. The physical order has a moral character. There are primitive boundaries of Right regarding the individual as against society , and also those of society as against nature, and even from society to the cosmos. This is why the primitive universe is seen in terms of elemental provinces (e.g. the four elements) right into the age rational speculation, and this elemental disposition into provinces is seen as the most important feature of the universe, both by the primitive and later the rational speculator. The moral, or socially important, or sacred quality with which in the earliest ages it charged the universe, was still present in the later period of scientific speculation , but the common element in them both were the pervasive concepts of moira and nomos. The social group is the original type on which all other schemes of classification -- at first magical and later scientific – are modeled. At a very early stage the whole of the visible world was parceled out into an ordered structure or cosmos, reflecting, or continuous with, the tribal microcosm, and so informed with types of ‘collective representation’ which are of social origin. To this fact the order of nature owes its sacred or moral character. It is regarded not only as necessary but right or just, because it is a projection of the social constraint imposed by the group upon the individual. In this way moira came to rule supreme even over the Gods. Intimately bound with this view of moira is the notion of physis – that homogenous living fluid which is parceled out by Destiny or Justice into the

elemental provinces. This primary world-stuff is the material out of which daemons , Gods, and souls were made. This conception, too, has a social origin. The term ‘Nature’ (physis , natura) has had a long and varied history. To the earliest Greeks Nature meant not only the system of all phenomena in time and space, the total of all existing things, but also a primordial force, an active, up-springing energy. According to anthropo-logists influenced by the evolutionist ethnography of thinkers like Frazer and Tylor , custom and nature, nomos and physis were not merely harmonious, but identical. Cornford and Harisson, for example, clearly state that there is no evidence to support the claim that the Greeks were totemists. Nonetheless, according to Frazerian theory, it is possible that the social group in prehistoric Aegean society was a totemic clan, consisting of its human members and their totem species, and was defined by the collective function it exercised as a continuous whole. If the nature or essence of a class of things is something which all of them have, and which nothing else has, in an early stage, when practical interests are paramount and disinterested speculation is unknown, the essential ‘nature’ will be nothing but the social importance of the group – all that is expected of that division of society. It is, in fact, what it collectively feels and does: All that matters about it, all that is essential is its behaving as it ought, fulfilling its function, performing its customs. It is in the light of this idea, according to Levi-Bruhl, that we should interpret the alleged ‘identity’ of the human clansmen with their totem-species. They are, in the literal sense, practically identical. Thus the physis is the nomoi, and both words denote the active, socially organized force expressed by a group, or moira. The source of this view is Frazer’s notion of totemism which has since been rejected by anthropologists. Seen in this light, the alleged mystic identity of nature or consubstantiality with the totem resolves itself into a set of common duties and magical observances, centred on the totem; The unity of moira is the unity of its nomoi. The whole collective function of the human members, we are told, is to control and influence their nonhuman kindred of the same group, according to this view. When the totem is an edible species, their business is to multiply this food for the common use of the tribe; where it is a phenomenon like rain, wind, or sun, they have to make the rain fall or cease from falling, to raise or lay the wind, to regulate the sunshine. The means employed are mimetic dances, in which men are disguised as impersonations of the totem, and which are representations of the functions of a group. Thus the primitive religious fact is at the same time the primitive ‘social fact’. We find it to be a social group (moira), defined by its collective functions (nomoi). These functions constitute its nature (physis), considered as a vital force proper to that group. Religion begins, on this view, with the first collective representation of this fact. This collective representation is superindividual or superhuman. Being imposed on the individual by the group, its force is felt as obligatory and repressive. But, on the other hand, its content is dynamic – The energy of the group as expressed in collective emotion and activity (what anthropologists have controversially termed ‘mana’.). It is necessarily conceived in a material form, as fluid charged with life. And this fluid, since it takes the outline of a social group, whose ‘nature’ it is, will inevitably be identified with the blood, which is common to the kin. This kindred blood is, however, a mythical entity, in the sense that it may be conceived as uniting members of a group who are not really akin by blood, but may even (as in totemic clans) belong to natural species (e.g., men and snakes – consider early Minoan snakeworship). Out of the simple and fundamental conceptions which compose this primitive ‘social fact’ (as the Durkheimians would put it), arose two collective representations

which are still discussed by philosophers and theologians. These are the ideas which we name ‘God’ and the ‘Soul’. Throughout the development of Greek polytheism , and on into rational speculation, the notion constantly persists of moirai, each filled by a specific living force, beneficently operative within its sphere, maleficent in its recoil upon the intruder. We have now to watch the process by which this force shapes itself into spirits, Gods, and human souls, and to realize thatr this process, with all its advance in clearness of conception and imagery , is as it were an overgrowth, which leaves untouched beneath it the fundamental conceptual framework within which it springs up. When we look at it in this light, it appears that ‘God’ is, as it were, an offshoot of soul. The notion of the group-soul is closer to the original fact of groupconsciousness, of which, indeed, it is the first mythical representation. The notion of god, as distinct from Soul, arises by differentiation. Gods are projections into nonhuman nature of the representation of the group-soul. At the same time, Soul is only by one stage the older of the two conceptions. After that they develop side by side in parallel courses. The primitive complex of notions we have just defined – moira, physis, and nomos, -- was ineradicably fixed in collective representation. The reinterpretation of it into terms of personal Gods or human souls all took place without breaking them down and sweeping them away. Hence when the first philosophers in Ionia quietly left the Gods out of there scheme of things, and supposed themselves to be dealing straight with natural facts, what really happened was that they cleared away the overgrowth of theology, and disinterred what had all the time persisted underneath. Hylozoism, in a word, simply raises to the level of clear scientific assertion the primitive, prehistoric conception of a continuum of living fluid, portioned out into the distinct forms of whatever classification is taken to be important. What the Milesians called physis has the same origin as what the primitive calls ‘mana’ (in the view of Hubert and Mauss of the Annee Sociologique), although it must be remembered that ‘mana’ is one of the key concepts which became controversial for later social anthropology. But when reason seemed to herself to have dispensed with the supernatural, and to be left with nothing but Nature, what was the Nature, physis, she was left with? Not simply the visible world as it would present itself to unbiased sense-perception, if such a thing as sense-perception unbiased by preconceived notions could ever exist.. The ‘Nature’ of which the first philosophers tell us with confident dogmatism is from the first a metaphysical entity; not merely a natural element, but an element endowed with supernatural life and powers, a substance which is also Soul and God. It is that very living stuff out of which daemons, Gods, and souls had gathered shape. It is that same continuum of homogenous matter, charged with vital force, which had been the vehicle of sympathetic magic, that is later put forward explicitly, with the confident tone of an obvious statement, as the substrate of all things and the source of their growth. In conclusion, I wish to emphasize that my research proposal consists in a reexamination of the anthropological studies of the relation between early Greek thought and the development of rational speculation, but in the light of the work of Humphreys, Burkert, Gernert, and Vernant; and I propose a thorough study of the methods of these recent Authors. A recent British social anthropologist, John Beattie, for example, while praising the work of Cornford and Harisson earlier in the century, acknowledges that with appropriate caution in view of more recent anthropological theory the work of these early scholars of Ancient Greek Society is very promising

provided we approach it with caution in light of the developments in Social Anthropology in the twentieth century. For example, theories like ‘totemism’ and ‘mana’ require re-analysis in view of contemporary social anthropological theory. Furthermore, Levi-Strauss has exploded the category of totemism in his classic study on totemism by arguing that there are too many diverse religious phenomena grouped under this rubric, which deserves separate analysis. The criticism rendered against the early classicist or Hellenistic-cum-anthropologists like Cornford and Harisson is simply that when they do not draw inspiration from the Durkheimian school, they rely too much on Frazerian anthropology. Likewise, Humphreys (who agrees with LeviStrauss) in his discussion of Levi-Strauss, Gernert, Vernant, and De-Saussure (the structural linguist), emphasizes the importance of studying key words, e.g. moira, physis, nomos, etc, not simply in terms of their derivation, but in terms of their institutional context (a point on which Gernert insisted as well). This is the sort of updating or improvement I propose to do on the basis of the traditional Englishlanguage scholarship in this area, taking into account not only the fact that social anthropology has developed since these monumental studies, but also the fact that contemporary social anthropologists view these studies as a significant framework on the basis of which promising research ( as Beattie has suggested very recently ) can be done, provided that it proceed with the utmost caution, taking into account the fact that Frazerian and Durkheimian theoretical frameworks have since been supersede, but that nonetheless, given this proviso, the study of the religious thought of Aegean civilization awaits renewed investigation and enquiry. This view is, as I have shown, in keeping with the most recent social anthropological analyses of the religious thought of Aegean civilization.