The Role of Mythology in Schellings Late Philosophy Louis Dupre /

Yale University

A study of Schellings late philosophy of mythology, despite the renewed interest it presently enjoys, still needs some justication. Why should we spend time and effort on a demanding philosophical text based on often outdated and inadequate historical information about myths? And why revisit a philosophy that claims to incorporate revelation, yet has been criticized for bending revelation to its own preestablished concepts, while in the process corrupting the methods of theology as well as of philosophy? The answer may be brief. Because Schelling (17751854) was among the rst to recognize the myth as an independent form of consciousness, irreducible to rational thought or to a prescientic interpretation of nature or history. For him, mythology constituted an essentially religious phenomenon, marked by polytheism but indispensable for the rise of an inclusive monotheism, that is, to an idea of God that incorporates creation within Gods Being. Despite the undeniable aws of his work and the enormous progress since made in this area, no one has yet surpassed the scope and intellectual depth of the two-volume treatise on myth written during the nal twenty years of Schellings career. Schelling understood that neither mythology nor revelation could be simply juxtaposed to philosophical truth. The two had to be integrated or one would inevitably exclude the other. A rst extensive discussion of mythology appears in the lectures on the Philosophy of Art delivered in Jena 18023 and repeated in Wurzburg (18045).1 Following August Wilhelm Schlegels Lectures on Mythology,
1 Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling, Philosophie der Kunst, in Sammtliche Werke, ed. K. F. A. Schelling (Stuttgart and Augsburg: Cotta Verlag, 185659), vol. 5; in English, The Philosophy of Art, trans. Douglas W. Stott (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989). The page numbers of this translation appear after the references to the German text. Other works referred to in this article are Einfuhrung in die Philosophie der Mythologie, in Sammtliche Werke, pt. 2, vol. 1, commonly indicated as vol. 11; Philosophie der Mythologie, pt. 2, vol. 2, indicated as vol. 12; Philosophie der Offenbarung, pt. 2, vols. 3 and 4, or vols. 13 and 14. 2007 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. 0022-4189/2007/8701-0001$10.00

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he limited the subject mainly to Greek myths because of their superior aesthetic quality (5:392). But the harmony between nite form and innite content of Greek mythology weakened its religious signicance. Philosophy eventually took over part of the religious function of the myth. On this and on several other issues Schelling was to change the views expressed in the Philosophy of Art. Since our subject is mythology rather than art, we move directly to the great works that Schelling composed during his nal years of teaching. His perspective here is exclusively religious and differs from the vaguely pantheistic philosophy of identity to which the Philosophy of Art belongs. In the so-called positive philosophy of his later years, Schelling abandoned the fundamental principle of his earlier idealism, that the mind itself contains the Absolute. The philosophical idea of absolute Being does indeed imply an intrinsic necessity. But such an ideal necessity contains neither real existence nor positive content. A philosophy built upon it could be no more than negative. Only the Absolute itself is able to convert the idea of what must be into the reality of what actually is. Negative philosophy, though indispensable for understanding the minds relation to the Absolute, merely forms an introduction to the positive philosophy, according to which the Absolute communicates itself in mythology and revelation. Schelling refers to the God of philosophy as Being itself (ens ipsum). Such a denition conveys no information about Gods nature or about Gods relation to other beings. (What complicates Schellings argument is that he uses the term Being indistinguishably for essence and existence. The reader is frequently forced to gure out from the context which one is intended.) But if God is Being itself, all beings must be included in the idea of God. To close the gap of its ignorance about God, philosophy cannot afford to ignore the content of a possible revelation. It ought to analyze the concept of revelation as it has historically presented itself in various religions. The task of positive philosophy consists in seeking to understand the logic of revelation and mythology. It ought to subject the reports of them to a critical investigation. At least they reveal the presence of a fundamental human need for an intimate acquaintance with the Godhead as well as of a belief that this need has actually been met. The purpose, then, of Schellings philosophy of myth and revelation is not to prove the existence of God or the supernatural nature of the alleged facts of revelation, but to show their ideal structures. Has Schelling not left the domain of philosophy altogether and entered that of theology? How could an alleged manifestation of a reality that lies beyond the reach of the autonomous mind ever become a

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subject of philosophy? He himself concedes: Most people understand by philosophy a science which reason purely and simply generates out of itself. From that standpoint, it is natural enough to consider the philosophy of revelation an attempt to present the ideas of revealed religion as necessary, pure truths of reason or to reduce them to those (14:4). To be sure, positive philosophy cannot be justied within the restrictions traditionally imposed on philosophical thought. But the question remains whether these restrictions are valid. Why should philosophy not investigate the logic of mythology and revelation, as it does with other empirical data? Without a positive philosophy, ultimate metaphysical questions concerning the relation between the Absolute and that of which it is the ground must remain unanswered. For Schelling, mythology constitutes part of revelation, even though it requires no supernatural intervention. Myths are natural processes that awaken the mind to full self-consciousness. They also prepare the minds ability to receive a supernatural revelation. Schellings position considerably differs from that of later students of mythology. To Paul Tillich, for instance, mythical thinking constitutes an early view of reality, which eventually will break down into a variety of elds: science, metaphysics, and religion. Rationalist philosophers of the early twentieth century considered mythical thought a defective, prescientic way of thinking, which contains no truth, but served as an early substitute for science. In Schellings view, the myth belongs neither to science nor to philosophy. It is an early but essential stage of the religious consciousness. He restricted the mythical eld to the genealogies of the gods, as recorded in civilizations of the Near East. At a rst stage of religion, the sacred is not yet clearly differentiated from the nonsacred. It is followed by a long period of polytheism, indispensable for preparing the idea of one God inclusive of all reality. Without mythical polytheism the mind would never surpass the inclination to oppose God to all other forms of being, as dogmatic theology still often continues to do. Schelling assumes that all myths follow a similar course, though not all complete the entire process. A complete cycle passes through three stages. Yet some barely move beyond the rst. He bases his analysis on the theory of the three potencies (Potenzen), which dominates his entire later metaphysics. The potencies are neither palpable realities nor abstract concepts, but real and effective (wirkliche) powers that hold the middle between concrete and abstract concepts. They are true universals, yet at the same time full realities (Philosophie der Mythologie, in Sammtliche Werke, 12:115). In the Einleitung in die Philosophie (1830, but published only in 1989) Schelling describes them as the conditions of

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Being. They raise fundamental metaphysical questions. What preceded Being? What is needed for Being to be? Negative philosophy is unable to answer those questions. Hegel started his Logic with the concept of Being. Positive philosophy commences with the conditions of the possibility of Being. Schelling distinguishes three such conditions, or, as he calls them, three metaphysical potencies. (A) First is the sheer possibility of Being (das Seinkonnen). This expression becomes intelligible only if one as sumes, with Fichte and Schelling, that a transcendent will must precede actual Being. The rst potency consists of a preontological drive that renders Being not only possible but imperative: it is that which must be (das Sein-mussende). (B) An unconditioned obedience to this call would give rise to Being without limits. This blind Being would destroy any possibility of being this or that. It would simply overwhelm the receptive A moment in such a way that no differentiation, no particular reality, and no freedom could ever exist. B would suppress A altogether. For that reason Schelling calls the unrestricted second potency what ought not to be (das nicht-sein-sollende). Hence, for the existence of concrete reality, a third condition must be fullled to limit the impact of B and render it compatible with A. (C ) The third potency, then, consists in a capacity of reection, an ability of the receptive subject to withdraw into itself and thereby to preserve its freedom to be this and not that. This third potency restricts Bs undifferentiated power: B still remains the ground of differentiated reality, but it ceases to obliterate it. Schelling refers to the outcome of the third potency as das als-solchesSeinkonnende (what can exist as such) or also das als-solches Seiendes, which we might translate as Being within the limits of essence (Wesen). It is important to remember that the potencies are not moments of Being, but conditions. Hence the undifferentiated innite Being of the B potency must not be equated with Gods Being. Whereas Gods Being is endowed with an innite number of attributes, the second potency is merely indenite and blind. The preceding description of the potencies appears in the recently published rst version of the Philosophy of Revelation (written in 1831). Obscure as it may be, it is still clearer than any of the later versions.2 The general pattern of the potencies returns at every stage of the positive philosophy, each time assuming different features. In the entire philosophy of revelation (which includes mythology) the theory of the potencies plays a signicant part. Schelling denies
2 Friedrich Schelling, Urfassung der Philosophie der Offenbarung (1831), ed. Walter Erhardt (Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 1992), 2737.

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that a purely logical philosophy (exclusive of revelation) is able to think the transition from undifferentiated Being (B) to concrete, particular Being (C ). Negative philosophy conceives of Being as an empty innite. But how can the nite be, if Being can be thought only as innite?3 Instead, a positive philosophy, receptive of mythology and revelation, conceives of God as innite Being endowed with, yet not divided by, determinate attributes revealed in mythology. Without this revelation, Schelling implies, metaphysics is unable to answer its most fundamental question: Why is there Being (as we know it, i.e., differentiated) rather than nothing? Parmenides, our rst great metaphysician, consistently excluded the possibility of differentiated Being. To him, nitude and determination were mere illusions, forms of non-Being. Schelling argues that, after negative philosophy establishes the undifferentiated idea of Being, the justication of differentiated reality still requires an idea of the Absolute as including internal determinations, without which it would not be able to function as ground for the existence of particular realities. Negative philosophy is unable to provide such an idea. For that reason Schelling declares it inadequate for dealing with the relation between God and the nite. Only from the revelation of the Absolute in mythology does philosophy learn that the Absolute possesses internal determinations that it expresses in nite beings endowed with an independent existence. Because all beings remain immanent in the all-encompassing Absolute, archaic speculation conceives of the Absolute as being itself a plurality. Hence the rise of polytheism. In the mythological process the potencies present the stages of the minds process toward full God-consciousness, which coincides with full self-consciousness. As the mind gradually discovers the notion of a totality of Being, it rst imagines this all-embracing totality in the primitive picture of a primary god. Schelling calls this mythical representation a negative concept: it possesses no inner truth and functions as a substitute for the real (i.e., self-differentiated) Absolute. It is what is not (das Nicht-Seiende) and, in its relation to the rst potency of consciousness, what ought not to be (das nicht-Seinsollende). Mythology, in Schellings interpretation, represents the opposition between the multiple nite and the all-comprehensive but indenite one as a struggle between gods. The mythical mind seeks reconciliation, but seldom nds it. Whenever it succeeds, it usually presents the reconciliation between the innite and the nite in the form of a young
3 Friedrich Schelling, Einleitung in die Philosophie (1830), ed. Walter Ehrhardt (Stuttgart: Fromann-Holzboog, 1989), 98100. See Peter Koslowski, Philosophien der Offenbarung (Paderborn: F. Schoning, 2001), 6034.

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god who comes to share the lot of suffering humanity and thereby to redeem the race. In the end he becomes victorious over the oppressive old god and restores the autonomy of the nite. In the Philosophy of Mythology, then, Schelling describes the historical process through which the mind becomes aware of itself and of its transcendent dimension. Though the process is divinely guided, the mind must rely entirely on its natural powers. The key to the religious signicance of the myth lies in Schellings concept of monotheism. In the past some scholars considered archaic religions that possessed no polytheistic pantheon to be monotheistic. A few even assumed that a pristine revelation had preceded the spread of polytheism. The mythological process thereby came to be seen as a corruption of the primeval divine truth. Contrary to this opinion, Schelling maintained that polytheism, rather than implying a decline of the religious consciousness, constituted a necessary phase in the minds ascent to a spiritual idea of God and to full self-recognition. The alleged monotheism was either a primitive kind of pantheism, too vague to distinguish between the sacred and the nonsacred, or a theological dualism that conceived of God as a Being opposed to all other beings. That dualism has survived in dogmatic theories of the modern age, which envision the link between God and the nite to be no more than an act of effective causality. Such a conception conicts with the idea, admitted by the same theologians, that God is Being (esse ipsum) and, as such, must in some way include all that is. In Schellings view, the idea of God as Spirit, so strongly asserted in the fourth Gospel, requires a more intimate relation than that of causal dependence. As Spirit, God must be present in the inmost nature of His creatures. The intrinsic goal of polytheistic mythologies, then, served the purpose of reintegrating the multiplicity of creation within the divine unity. The mythological theogonies, far from being meaningless stories, prepare the mind for the acceptance of a true, that is, a differentiated monotheism. Still polytheism became necessary only because the mind had lost its primeval state of innocence. Without an exodus from the original state of innocence, there would be no history. Therefore that rst step of mankind is the primeval event (13:385). Originally the potencies maintained a relation of harmonious balance that the Fall disturbed. In the Fallof its nature we know no more than about the period that preceded itthe human mind arrogated to itself control over the potencies (13:36061). It thereby disrupted the minds harmony with itself and with nature. Humans attempting to become like God fell into a condition of Gottentfremdung, which was also a state of Selbstentfremdung (alienation from God and from oneself). But

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in accepting this state of alienation humanity would eventually rediscover the true God. Mythology describes the process of that return. How did polytheism start? Schelling argues that the original condition of culture was no more monotheistic than polytheistic. One might describe it as pantheistic, were it not that premythical humans lacked the kind of reectiveness that pantheism requires. Schelling pictures their condition as being dominated by the all-absorbing blind reality of the second potency. He refers to it as the reign of Uranos (the sky) who, according to Hesiod, was the oldest of the Greek gods. In giving this undetermined religious awareness the name of a Greek god the poet appears to make it part of a theogony, which it is not. The wandering nomads here presented, strangers to themselves and to the lands through which they passed, recognized no gods, not even the astral bodies that guided them on their ways. The stars merely served as beacons of light in an undifferentiated sacred space. Those Sabists, as Schelling calls them, were monotheistic only insofar as their religion recognized no distinctions. Everything was sacred and hence nothing in particular was. In the next stageto which Uranos formed the transitionthe (nite) principle of the rst potency (A) rebels against this crushing weight of undifferentiated Being and starts a struggle for survival. In the language of theogony, the struggle ends with a weakening of the oppressor. The myth achieves this either by placing a female principle next to the oppressive male, or by having the male one castrated. Urania is the Greek name Herodotus, the fth-century BC historian, gives to the goddess who at this point emerges everywhere in the Near East. Schelling describes the time of Urania as mostly one of peaceful coexistence between male and female divinities (13:392). Yet powerful goddesses such as Mylitta (in Assyria), Astarte, or Cybele (in Phrygia and Lydia) gradually deprived the male god of all his power. Eventually they achieved a total victory over the male god. Greek mythology used a more drastic image for the feminization of Uranos. The autocratic god killed all Uranias children as soon as they were born. Yet Kronos, secretly born, conspired with his mother to emasculate his father. One version of the myth presented an even more radical account of the feminization. Kronos threw the genitals of his father into the ocean and out of the foam arose Aphrodite, a second female power, which further marginalized the oppressive male. Driven from his central position to the periphery, the autocratic single god is no longer capable of preventing the rise of divine multiplicity. The introduction of female deities has opened the door to a new line of gods. When Kronos, a more reective representation of Uranoss blind

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power, repeated the habits of his father and devoured his own children, Zeus, the son who had escaped his fathers infanticidal drive, at the next birth of a sibling swathed a heavy stone in bandages and, in lieu of the infant, fed him to the voracious Kronos. While the female gods merely weakened the power of the supreme male god in the mythologies of Egypt and Greece, Schelling claims (with insufcient evidence, I think) that in the Assyrian-Babylonian religions the goddesses simply replaced the male god. This dramatic revolution did not pass without causing a feeling of guilt in the people for having abandoned the old god. Schelling detects a symbol of halfhearted repentance in a selective form of temple prostitution described by Herodotus. On a day consecrated to Mylitta, the Assyrian goddess, married women had to surrender themselves, once in a lifetime, to the rst man who asked them, at any price he offered. Thus the nation attempted to expiate its guilt for allowing itself to be seduced by the new goddess and thus to break the ancient covenant. Schelling compares the motivation of this custom with the charge of adultery by which the Hebrew prophets denounced Israels turning to foreign gods. In the Book Hosea Yahweh even orders the prophet to marry a prostitute to denounce the peoples adultery with other gods. The female cults of the Near East were closely linked to the seasons of nature. Still Schelling rejects a naturalist reading of the myth, as if it merely symbolized fertility processes. Even the celebrations of the seasons had a spiritual signicance, he argues. They prepared an awareness of God as all-encompassing Absolute. His interpretation follows an earlier, mainly Neoplatonic tradition. In his treatise of the Egyptian myth of Isis and Osiris, Plutarch wrote: We oppose all those uncouth minds that so readily equate the activities of the gods either with seasonal changes in atmosphere, or with harvest, sowing, or labor in the elds. They speak of the burial of Osiris when the seeding grain lies buried in the earth and of the resurrection and reappearance of Osiris when the seeds begin to sprout (De Iside et Osiride, 377B). Nonetheless, the link with nature remained strong. As the religious consciousness advanced, representations of the divine moved up from lifeless structures (huge boulders or mountains) to animals whose sensitive awareness more directly reects divine life (ibid., 382A). Even the theologically progressive Egyptian mythology still abounds with animal symbols. Those primitive forms never disappear completely. The humanized Greek mythology continued to preserve sacred mountains, monsters, and hybrids, not to mention Zeuss animal disguises as a swan, a bull, or a serpent. In areas where the female victory had been less than absolute or

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where it was eventually overcome, a young male, either god or half-god, entered the scene as a liberator of the oppressed. He mediated between the gods and the people. In Greek mythology this mysterious gure, Dionysus, had been at work long before he received a name and a specic place in the theogony. A similar god appears in Egyptian, Persian, and Phoenician mythologies. Their behavior is identical. The young god rst places himself in the service of the old god who, though relegated to the sidelines, retains much power, at least where he has not been replaced by divine matriarchies. Soon the old god comes to suspect him of undermining his authority and tests his loyalty by imposing dangerous tasks upon him. Such were the works of Heracles (a similar half-god, possibly of Phoenician origin). The servant survives his trials and, through the good works he has accomplished, wins the favor of the humans whose harsh lot he shared. Yet eventually he is killed and thereby pacies the old god. When in some way he is brought back to life, the old god is nally forced to recognize the power of the newcomer, even though he may not acknowledge his divinity. Convinced that all myths followed a common pattern, Schelling tended to equate the various mediating gods of the Near East with the Greek Dionysus. He followed Herodotus, who had referred to the Egyptian Osiris and to the Phoenician Melkarth as Dionysus. As long as the rst god, whom we also call the real god, absolutely closes himself to [the newcomer], the young one cannot appear as god, but only as an unintelligible middle-being between god and men. So he appears as the hidden god, negated and humbled, who must rst merit his divinity (13:394). To Schelling, this mediating god prophetically announces the God-man of revelation (13:34745). In his famous poem Brot und Wein, Holderlin had in veiled terms compared Christ to Dionysus: he had come to proclaim the end of the ancient gods, but to comfort us of their absence, had left us his gifts. Schelling also regards the suffering and dying gods, Dionysus, Melkarth, and Osiris, as prophetic gures of Christ. Mythology, then, had been indispensable for discovering the truth of monotheism. Yet misinterpreting its instrumental role, humans converted the potencies active in the minds response to the Absolute into independent, divine substances. By thus turning the internal forces of the mind into gods, they actually arrested the process of religious development. Most mythologies remained frozen in the struggle between the two rst potencies, as if engaged in an unending ght between divinities. In that respect, Mazdaism, the noble religion of ancient Persia, constitutes an exception. Schelling judged it to approach monotheism, as

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he understood the term. Unfortunately, being almost entirely reduced to Greek sources written well after the founding time of the movement and long before the substantial changes it underwent in the Sassanian kingdom, he knew little of the origins of Mazdaism. We now know, or think we know, that Zarathustra, an Iranian sage who lived some nine hundred years before the present era, in his poems and sermons converted an old Indo-Iranian collection of beliefs and rituals into a simple, highly moral religion. His doctrine has often been interpreted as a dualism in which two ultimate principles, Ormuzd the good and Ahriman the evil one, were locked in a permanent struggle. In fact, evil was to be permanently overcome by the one principle of good. Despite his inadequate sources, Schelling perceived the monotheistic nature of Zarathustras thought. After the prophets death, Mazdaism began to slide toward a common polytheistic religion. At some point, the supreme god, AhuraMazda (the wise Lord), was believed to have had a female consort, Anahita. Considering the original purity of the Mazda faith, Schelling surmises that she may have entered the Persian religion under the inuence of nearby Assyrian-Babylonian female cults. In the Hellenistic age, when Mazdaism began to be called Zoroastrism (after the Greek name of its prophet), the young god Mithra, not named in the original sources but mentioned in the Indian Rg-Veda hymns, came to play a central role in Iranian mythology. His mediating function may be compared to that of Osiris and Dionysus. A god of light, usually represented with the sun, he was believed to have overcome the opposition between Ormuzds kingdom of light and Ahrimans reign of darkness. Eventually he appears to have merged with Ahura-Mazda himself and, as allinclusive Absolute, to have contained both light and darkness. As the cult spread during the Hellenistic and Roman periods, a luxuriant pantheon grew around the gure of Mithra. But the core of the myth, the young god who passes (the transitus) through great pain and dangers to capture and kill the wild bull, remained remarkably stable. Some scholars have interpreted this bull as the primeval animal, from whose body sprang plants, grains, and animals to serve human needs. Others identify the bull with the zodiac gure Taurus that is visible during the dark period of the year and in the spring must yield to the new light. In either case, Mithra appears as a humble god who labors in the service of humans and, after his full divinization, incorporates the qualities of all gods within himself. Even in this later mythical form Mazdaism differs from other mythologies in that it bypasses the struggle between the older and the younger gods. Mithra does not ght Ahura-

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Mazda; he incorporates him. Not without reason does Schelling regard Mazdaism as having prepared the religions of the future. The coming of Dionysus and his Phoenician, Egyptian, and Persian counterparts introduces the third potency, which reconciles the rst and the second. The struggle between the two former principles has ended in a defeat of the dominant principle (in Greek mythology represented by Kronos). The dominant godwhether Kronos or Cybele being exclusive of all others, lacked the complexity of a spiritual religion. With the advent of the mediating gods, the celestial kingdom acquired a spiritual, that is, a complex, inclusive quality. The new gods still remain material substances, but they differ from the old ones in that they directly prepare a different interpretation of the mythological process. In them the three potencies remain active at each of the three moments. The struggle against the dominant principle here ends in a nal reconciliation (13:396401). Three religions completed, each in a different way, the cycle of the potencies: the Egyptian, the Indian, and the Greek. They directly prepared a spiritual monotheism. The Egyptian strongly emphasized the struggle between the old and the new gods. Here also Herodotus served as Schellings principal source of information, though Plutarchs treatise on Isis and Osiris assisted him in perceiving some of the meaning of the historians confused narrative. Typhon, comparable to the Kronos of the Greeks, was originally the god of the desert, who with burning winds dried up the fertile land. The benevolent Osiris restores fertility by inundating it with the Nile. Typhon kills the young god and disperses the members of his body. Isis, Osiriss sister (or bride), collects and reassembles them. Brought back to life, Osiris defeats Typhon and, according to one version of the myth, kills him, while Isis, who here appears as Typhons spouse, laments his death. In another version, Osiris, now Isiss spouse and brother of Typhon, commits adultery with Typhons wife Nephtys. Isiss changing role in these different versions illustrates the ambivalence created by the young gods coming: people prefer him but still fear the old god. In the end the myth takes a signicant turn: Typhon merges with his young antagonist Osiris and in this reconciliation the myth reaches what Schelling considers to be the third potency. In the Egyptian myth the gods begin to lose their xed, substantial identity and to present the impersonal powers of the religious consciousness. When Typhon merges with Osiris, he reveals that he was not the aboriginal oppressive, undifferentiated substance, but merely a potency of Being confronting another potency and bound to unite with it in a third one. Osiris also gives up his substantial identity in order

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to become a symbol of spiritual unity. At this nal stage, the god, as well as the one with whom he merges, becomes truly the one who must be (der sein sollende). The most signicant episode in the story is the dispersion of Osiriss limbs. It symbolizes the plurality that must enter into the true (i.e., all-inclusive) idea of God. It also suggests that to fulll their ideal function the gods must lay down their earthly lives. Typhon and Osiris, it now appears, were no more than opposite facets of the same reality. The tension among the mythical characters was merely a means to restore the divine unity. The goal is the reparation of the original unity, of the monotheism that was given with the essence of man and that had to be raised to a higher level [aufgehoben] in order to be recognized not as a potential or material [monotheism], but as an actual unity of God and consciousness (12:374). The Osiris myth seemed headed for a spiritual idea of God. Yet at the end Egyptian mythology returns to its earlier, material representations, even though the thinking that had motivated the story had already moved well beyond them. Precisely where the myth seems to attain its spiritual conclusion, it exposes its permanent inadequacy. Instead of opening up into a vision of the one God who contains all things within Himself, the myth once again descends into a coarsely material representation of the multiplicity of beings immanent in God. After the concept was ready to assert the spiritual nature of God, the material principle intervenes and breaks up the spiritual unity. The unity dissolves in an abundance of animals and half-animals. With these animal gods the myth regresses to an earlier stage when the gods, afraid of Typhon, hid themselves in animal bodies. But the appearance of dogs, ibises, and hawks seems singularly inappropriate after the completion of the Osiris myth. The fact that Egyptian religion retained its mythical form allowed it to celebrate the yearly recessions and expansions of the Nile. Myths develop in time, but they never attain a historical ending. The events never cease to repeat themselves. Even the old gods, suppressed from the present, never fully disappear. They still enjoy a modest veneration and remain objects of a vague fear. Next to the large temples dedicated to Horus, the son of Osiris and Isis, who incarnates the third potency and the end of the mythical struggle, small ones were erected for Typhon. Egypt never abandoned its mythology, but constantly corrected it. Schelling saw one such correction in the existence of agennetoi (un` born), premythical or metaphysical gods who, though presented in human forms, are products of thought rather than of the mythical imagination. Among them was Amun, the Zeus of Thebe (as Herod-

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otus calls him), adored in the huge temple of Karnak. Schelling ranks them with the Sabist cults of the beginning. But their cult continuing until the Christian era rather seems to indicate that Egyptian religion resists being compressed within his rigorous mythical interpretation. Schelling regards Vedic mythology also as complete. Its gods represent all three potencies. Yet, according to the Philosophy of Mythology, they remain independent of each other and thereby fail to resolve the tensions that divide them. Brahma, the passionate, rash, and blind god (12:448), whom Schelling compares to Typhon, has been completely relegated to the past. Virtually no temples are dedicated to him, and he receives little cultic attention. Shiva, the destroyer who replaces him, never became more than a destructive principle. The religious mind, dissatised with these negative deities, simply moved on to a third, spiritual godhead, Vishnu, the god of Being (Sattwa) and of light, who incarnates the third potency but has little to do with the other two gods of the supreme triad. In Schellings presentation, Indian mythology developed in a direction opposite to the Egyptian and the Greek. Both continued to maintain a cult for the god of the beginning, while Indian religion, abandoning the original principle altogether, shifted without transition to a spiritual principle. It thereby lost the foundational principle, the ground of the entire process (13:403). The abrupt move to a spiritual unity may have satised a spiritual elite, but not the ordinary believer. Indian mythology could not have survived in such a thin spiritual atmosphere, and people reverted to more material gods. Schellings purely mythological and overly simplistic treatment of Hinduism fails to account for much in Indian religion that was barely connected with the three gods. Nor does the alleged independence of the three principal gods explain the unique status of Hinduism. In fact, by Schellings own account, a very real relation does exist between Brahma, Shiva, and Vishnu. The balanced, differentiated power of Vishnu could not exist without Shivas destruction of Brahmas autocratic monism. A text quoted from the Puranas (mostly written between the rst and the tenth century AD) describes their intimate relatedness: As light shows a difference, greater or less, according to its nearness or distance from re, so is there a variation in the energy of Brahman [the Absolute, distinct from Brahma, the supreme god]. Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva are his chief energies. . . . Vishnu is the highest and most immediate of all the energies of Brahman. On him this entire universe is woven and interwoven: from him is the world and the world is in him; and he is the whole universe (Vishnu, 1:22). Let us assume, however, that the link between Vishnu and the other

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two gods is too weak to support Vishnus spiritual piety. Does that explain why he becomes fragmented into an innite number of avatars, as Schelling maintains? In the Puranas Vishnu appears in the guise of the young shepherd Rama, center of numerous epic compositions, or of Krishna, the god of the Mahabharatas war and of the epiphany of the Bhagavad Gita. The theory of the potencies provides little assistance for understanding this fragmentation. As for the Vedanta, the mystical completion of the Veda, it is not so much an interpretation of Indian mythology as an attempt to free the religious mind of myth altogether. An even more forceful rejection of mythology appears in Buddhism. The early, practical Theravada as well as the later, more metaphysical Mahayana abstained from any kind of theogony, as Schelling duly notes. Was Buddhism a twig of the mythically sober Iranian religion to which it, particularly in South India, appears close, or did it originate in the ascetic and/or mystical trends of the Vedanta? In either case it remains far from the structural principles of the Philosophy of Mythology, although not more so than Chinese religion, which, by Schellings own admission, possesses neither autochthonous myths nor gods! Rather than attempting an articial explanation to save his elusive schema, the author proposes an ingenious hypothesis to account for this absence. Myth, he had often asserted, requires the conscious identity of a people. But the inhabitants of the gigantic Chinese Empire never regarded themselves as a people, but rather as humanity itself. Their enormous territory and superior institutions presented no occasion for comparing themselves with others. Schelling maintains that only with the beginning of a national consciousness do people abandon the primitive state that precedes mythology. This requires that they reject the exclusive dominance of the all-encompassing sacred. China followed a different direction: its people never developed a theogonic rebellion. Instead they transferred their traditional religious expressions of respect and submission to the Empire. Not even the idea of heaven, so prominent in Chinese culture, refers to a transcendent power: it constituted an integral part of the social universe. Their religio astralis in rem publicam (12:531) allowed the emperor to rule by the heavenly motions. This civil religion, in which the secular became sacred, prevented Chinese culture from passing through a theogonic process to reach selfconsciousness. Finally, Schelling turns to Greek mythology, the one that had provided the model for his theory since the early Philosophy of Art. He regards it as the most spiritual because it immediately prepares the transition to the true idea of God. He notes that Greek mythology, more than any other, displays a certain rationality. Hesiods history of

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the gods raised theogony into an intelligible system. A concern for rationality appears also in Herodotus, who claimed that the Greeks rst gave names to the gods. Yet the religious reason never became abstract. At every stage, the Greeks recurred to images and often earthy representations for expressing an ideal content. This balance between material form and spiritual signicance gave Greek myths a natural aptitude for being turned into poetry. Indeed, they formed the original content of Greek poetry. The story of the gods starts with Chaos, an ideal concept as well as a physical one. From Chaos Hesiod moves directly to Gaia (the Earth), the rst female principle and the source of the mythical process. She bears Uranos, but also the mountains, the sea, and the Titans, among them Kronos and Rhea, his future wife. In a second generation, Gaia bears the Cyclops, whom Zeus later used in his battle against the Titans. These primitive creatures populated the earth before it became civilized. The Greeks despised them yet never forgot them. They moved them to the past, but that past remained vitally linked to the present and even to the future. Thus Kronos, the horrible ancestor, was still needed to understand Dionysus, the latest of the gods. In Schellings view, the many gods owed their origin to the disintegration of the one homogeneous reality principle. As Kronos, who presented that principle, started losing his power, it broke down into a number of increasingly more spiritual principles, which together formed a harmonious universe. Greek mythology consists in the soft death, the true euthanasia of the real principle which, after its departure and demise, still leaves a beautiful, fascinating world of appearances in its place (13:405). The ambiguous gure of Demeter therein occupies a central position. She stands between the real world of the past, dominated by the oppressive power of Kronos, and the ideal world of the future (12:631). Still, the memory of the simple life of the age of Kronos (in Latin, Saturnus) continued to evoke nostalgia in the Greek mind. It was remembered as the golden age, a time when no border stones divided the elds and when the earth was recognized to be a common possession. Surprisingly, it was Demeter, the remembrance of the past, who introduced people to agriculture, the beginning of higher civilization. Indeed, this is how she was commonly remembered. Yet she was much more than a seasonal goddess. The Greek mysteries revolved around her. Obviously, agriculture requires no foundation in mysteries. Nor was her daughter Persephone, abducted to the underworld, a mere image of the seed buried in the ground to reemerge after six months

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as a living plant. While distressedly seeking her daughter, Demeter is, in Schellings view, looking for the lost god of the beginnings. The Eleusinian mysteries enact the goddesss erring search, her resignation, and, at last, the advent of her son Dionysus. This god of the future concluded the mythical cycle, even though at an earlier stage Dionysus had very much been part of the polytheistic struggle. He even had been killed. Yet he had risen to new life and in the end was to survive all gods. His mother, Demeter, symbolized the transition from the dominion of the old god, the one who should not be (der nicht sein sollte), to the higher potency of the new god who ought to be (der sein sollte) (12:634). Persephone plays hereby a signicant role. The myths relating to Persephone contain the key to the entire mythologya key provided by mythology itself. . . . The origins of mythology present in the Persephone doctrine move into the innermost depths of human existence (12:181). She represents the dangerous odyssey of freedom as it begins to assert itselfwith tragic consequences and eventual compromises. Her life begins in a state of innocence, yet she is vaguely aware of her ability to move out of this primeval state. As she tests her freedom by wandering off on her own, the god of the underworld abducts her to his kingdom of darkness. In response to the pleas of her mother, Hades allows her to spend half a year above ground and half a year with him in the underworld. Beyond the obvious seasonal reference of the myth lies a profound awareness of the destiny of freedom, which moves from innocence to fall to rebirth. Consciousness has to die to its natural life in order to attain spiritual awareness. Yet a third god plays a major part in the Eleusinian mysteries: Dionysus. In Greek mythology he appears in three different impersonations. First as the chthonian Zagreus, the wild son of Zeus and Persephone, still very much a gure of the rustic, primitive age. The second Dionysus, the so-called Theban Bacchus, son of Zeus and the nymph Semele, incarnates the joy and revelry that accompanies the liberation from the old god. In his murder (similar to Osiriss) by raging maenads who tore the limbs off his body, Schelling sees a symbol of the fragmentation into many gods. It is, however, the third Dionysus, Iakchos, the son of Zeus and Demeter, who stands central in the mysteries (see 13:46583). Iakchos assumes some features of the rst and the second Dionysus. The hierophant still referred to him as Zagreus, and the suffering and death of Bacchus played a considerable part in the holy ritual. Yet, as we shall see, his signicance lies elsewhere. He is the god of the future. The mysteries form the transition from mythology to revealed reli-

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gion: in them the esoteric meaning of the myth becomes revealed. Demeter, reconciled to her fate, the loss of Persephone and of the old god, resolves the existential tensions represented by the struggling gods. The dramatic presentation of the mysteries forced the participants to confront the initial terror that lay hidden in the mythical narratives. Yet in the end the initiation promised lasting beatitude after death. The reliving of Persephones descent to Hades concluded in an encounter with the god of life. Hades and Dionysus are one, Plutarch had cryptically written. While reenacting the mythical events, the mysteries liberated the initiates from the endless continuance and oppressive materiality of the mythical process. The initiation into the mysteries has often been compared with an introduction to philosophy. In the Phaedrus, Plato likens the goal of philosophy to that of the mysteries, namely, to move from the material to a spiritual realm where death has no more power over life. Still the mysteries contain no philosophy. They have more in common with the Greek tragedy, which was believed to have originated in songs that commemorated the suffering and death of Dionysus. The classical drama still began with a sacrice to the god of the mysteries. All that evoked pity and fear in the tragedy, human fate with its unpredictiveness and inevitable end, the initiates intensely experienced while participating in the trials of the suffering god. Why were the mysteries secret? The stories of Demeter and Dionysus were universally known. Their images appeared everywhere, poets had sung their adventures, and playwrights had presented them on the stage. So, how could what was publicly known be kept secret? Schelling linked the secret to Dionysuss third impersonation. Iakchos, the third Dionysus, popularly depicted as a child at Demeters breast, was called the god who comes, the god of the future. That future had to remain secret, for the promise it held of the god who was to bring the theogonic process to an end threatened not only the national gods but also the state itself, which rested on them. The mystery was revealed only to the initiates. Even the gods should not hear about it. It was to be shown, not told. Whoever betrayed it risked capital punishment. Even Aeschylus, the great dramatist, narrowly escaped death because he allegedly had revealed the secret of the mystery when, through the mouth of Prometheus, in the play that bore his name, he had predicted that Zeus would lose his throne. Such was Schellings interpretation of the still unsolved problem of the secrecy of the mysteries. Today it impresses us as highly speculative and probably incorrect. The mysteries almost certainly contained no prophecy of future monotheism. At most they may have suggested that

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Dionysus, the god of the future, would bring the ruling divine hierarchy to an end. Schelling was undoubtedly right, however, about the consolation the mysteries brought to the deep-seated melancholy that, despite an exuberant vitality, possessed the Hellenic mind. Even in its most condent creativityindeed, there particularlyone senses a sad awareness of the irredeemable nitude of existence. The mysteries promised a better life after death. Schellings exclusively religious interpretation of the myth has found scarce approval among contemporary scholars. Indeed, for some, such as Claude Levi-Strauss, religion has hardly anything to do with myth: it consists in symbolic models of social structures employed by the savage mind to justify the existing ones or to promote alternative ones. LeviStrausss theory has introduced new elements, but it has left out the religious signicance of myths, which most scholars (particularly Mircea Eliade) continue to recognize in one way or another. Whether or not the primary signicance of the myth is religious does not affect Schellings thesis, that it constitutes a necessary stage in the minds development toward transcendence. It prepares the idea of a God who, rather than excluding nite beings, includes them within Himself. Schellings decision to build a general theory of myth on the limited basis of Near Eastern and Greek mythologies, while omitting Oceanian, Germanic, and Slavic ones, is indefensible. Yet what has been most seriously attacked from the beginning is the philosophical scheme, insufciently supported by empirical evidence, within which he has compelled all myths. He thereby weakened the success of his intended project, namely, to explore the internal logic of the myth. In his Philosophy of Revelation Schelling attempted to show that Christianity, the only revelation he considered, was the ultimate goal of mythology and the fulllment of promises implicit in the mysteries. In that profound but controversial work, he applied the theory of the potencies to Christian monotheism and, once again, gave that theory a different, trinitarian interpretation. The history of polytheistic religion is no more than an episode in Gods intratrinitarian drama. It constitutes the rst act of the Sons attempt to return humanity to its divine destination. Before appearing in visible form the Son directs humanity in its mythical search for a spiritual monotheism. The potencies, which in various mythologies stood in opposition to one another, thereby gradually move toward integration and unity. God does not interfere with this essentially natural process, but acts as its natural moving power. To the ancient Christian claim that the Old Testament prepared Israel for the appearance of the Messiah, Schelling adds the one that pagan mythology induced the nations to wait for the god who comes.

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In most mythologies he detects a longing for liberation from a blind, oppressive power. What paganism interpreted as the crushing power of an ancient god he compares to Luthers wrath of God and to Boehmes Unwill. To some Romantics, Christianity itself appeared to be no more than a continuation of the myth of the liberating god and Christ a new impersonation of Dionysus. But according to Schelling, one fundamental difference separates the Christian revelation from the myth: whereas myth is entirely a product of the creative imagination, revelation rests on a historical basis (14:22933). Sagas and legends may have embellished its historical core. But they could do so only because the history possessed an extraordinary signicance. Schelling does not dene the extent to which legend and mythology could inltrate the sources of revelation without jeopardizing the message itself. He admits the presence of mythical elements in the Old Testament. The prophets fought an unceasing battle against the inuence of the myths of the Near East. But he draws a sharp line between the Christian Gospel and the continuing presence of myth in the Hellenistic culture. His unqualied defense of the historical truth of Christianity made his theory vulnerable to the attacks of David Friedrich Strauss, Bruno Bauer, and Rudolf Bultmann. Contemporary philosophers have objected to Schellings method. Thus Walter Schulz, in a classic study,4 claims that Schellings positive philosophy remained essentially idealist and as negative as Fichtes and Hegels. What Schelling ascribes to divine revelation has in fact been predetermined by the philosophical structure of his own theory. The allegedly real God of revelation still remains the God of philosophy. Schelling would probably reply that positive philosophy is indeed philosophy, but philosophy mediated by faith. Viewed from that perspective, his positive philosophy might not be essentially different from Anselms des quaerens intellectum. Still, it would be hard to deny that the theory of potencies, which Schelling imposes upon revelation, basically determines the nature of its content. What at the beginning still appears to be a method for understanding the content of mythology and revelation soon turns into the content itself. Symptomatic of this domination by philosophy is that Schelling unreservedly equates the Christian idea of reconciliation with the philosophical category of mediation. Our nal judgment on the Philosophy of Mythology, then, must remain
4 Walter Schulz, Die Vollendung des deutschen Idealismus in der Spatphilosophie Schellings (Pful lingen: Neske, 1975).

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a conditional one. To the extent that Schellings theory assumed a genuinely receptive attitude with respect to myth and revelation, rather than predetermining it by philosophical categories, we may regard it as legitimate. But the traditional name of such an enterprise has been theology, not philosophy. To the extent that philosophy a priori denes the limits of mythology and revelationas it denitely did in the theory of the potenciesit was indeed philosophy, but not positive philosophy.

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