chapter 10 the monism of darkness and the dualism of limit and ...

84 CHAPTER 10
and purpose (end) to the product. In Apion’s Orphic doctrines iligx’
(oIÏÈÁÍ) raison d’ être is the necessity of the second stage in the triadic
law of proceeding from Indeterminacy (\AappleÂÈÚ›·) to a stable result:
we saw that the first order is periodic motion the archetype of which is
rotation, ones coming-back to oneself.
13. Between Indeterminacy (\AappleÂÈÚ›·) and Being there must be
Limit as the intrinsic self-regulation of Indeterminacy (the opposite of
the Neoplatonic Triadology where the Limit stands on the top of the
hierarchy, has its empowerment as Indeterminacy in the second place,
and finally produces the synthesis of being). Between Night and Egg
(World, Eros) early Orphism needed a focusing of mobility, a
confluence and a flowing-back. With primordial Chaos being
conceived of as Abyss of Water, such a function is taken by the Ocean.
In this way, the emphatic position of aquatic nature at the beginning
of coming-into-being according to the Orphic systems of the
Hellanicus and Hieronymus type as described by Athenagoras (OF
57-8) and Apion (OF 55-6) is accounted for. Moreover, the divine
and cosmic genealogies presupposed by Homer are in this perspective
better explained.
Plato (Cratylus, 402b) relates the continual alteration of the
World, the Heraclitean flux of natural being as becoming to the names
of streams that the divine progenitors Cronos (=Time) and Rhea bear,
to the Homeric belief that Ocean and Tethys are the parents of the
gods (with which he makes Hesiod agree) 42 , and last but not least to
Orpheus as the poet of two verses that support the same claim, namely
that the origin of gods is to be found in stream-like principles (OF
15):
\øηÓe˜ appleÚáÙÔ˜ ηϛÚÚÔÔ˜ qÚÍ Á¿ÌÔÈÔ,
¬˜ ®· ηÛÈÁÓ‹ÙËÓ ïÌÔÌ‹ÙÔÚ· ÙËıfÓ ùapple˘ÈÂÓ.
Here too, all subsequent gods (or at least the common main
branches of succession) must derive from the couple that was the first
to be married. Hence the interpretation according to which the Ocean
was the first only among his brothers or only within a limited section
of gods however large, to get married, is inadequate. The first marriage