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 mans 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archaic period has been superseded in social anthropology by the successive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-Bruhls anthropological theories as applied
to Ancient Greek Society. In fact, the Evans-Pritchard school is critical of such works
as Dodds 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 individuals 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 doall 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 olo 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 Frazers
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.