Chapter I - PYTHAGORICA
This chapter presents the person of the early Greek sage and scholar Pythagoras, of whom an outline of his life is given. Next comes a description of the fraternity he founded in Croton (Crotone) in South Italy and of the way of life of its members. Important in his ideology were his special signs (the pentagram), his philosophical cosmology, his theory of numbers, the notion of the harmony of the spheres, and the role of music. The question: was he dualist? is answered in § 12 on his basic dualistic principles, and in § 15, Was Pythagoreanism dualistic? (Length of this chapter, with notes = 42 pp.)
(A useful work for the interested reader, which appeared after this volume was published is: Luis E. Navia, Pythagoras: An annotated bibliography. New York, 1990. Garland Reference Library of the Humanities, no. 1128).
Chapter II - IONICA AND ELEATICA
The ideas of the Ionian philosophers Pherecydes - Thales - Anaximander - Anaximes - Heráclitus - and Xenophanes are discussed, with due attention to the question of whether or not these early Greek scholars were dualists; according to Plato they all were.
The Eleatic philosophers are Parmenides and Empedocles. Especially Parmenides (born in Elea in South Italy) was an outspoken dualist, what with his division of reality in Being and Seeming. Empedocles is the spiritual father of the theory of the four basic elements. (Length of this chapter + notes = 49 pp.)
Chapter III - EPICA AND LYRICA
The two great epic poets are Homer and Hesiod.
Homer, the author of the Iliad and the Odyssee, was a great creator of myths, which became the common possession of the Greek nation. His view of humanity and of human life may be dubbed pessimistic. Plato even called him a tragic poet. Pessimism and the tragic are notions, which open the road to dualism.
Hesiod, the author of the Theogony and of the Works and Days, finds heaven and earth full of evils. His pessimistic view of history is apparent in his myth of the five ages of the world, which begin with a golden age and ends with our world with its iron race of men. His idea of the man-woman relationship is clearly dualistic: men and women have a different origin, with women being the inferior group.
The early Greek lyric poets are Aristeas - Archilochus - Mimnermus - Semonides - Theognis - Bacchylides - and Pindar. None of the epic and lyric poets is overtly dualistic, but with their pessimism, their stressing of the role of fate and destiny, their denigration of women, the high idea they had of their own significance over and against the common run, they come near to dualism. (Length of this chapter,with notes = 64 pp.)
Chapter IV - MYSTICA
The official religion of Greece was the Olympian religion, that of the twelve Olympian gods. It was above all Homer, who implanted it in the Greek mind. This system had its defects; the gods were no paragons of virtue, and the attitude of the Greeks towards them was ambivalent. The Homeric presentation of the Greek pantheon was severely critiziced by some scholars, especially by Plato.
Since the Homeric system of the Olympian religion was defective, many people were dissatisfied with it and thought of other ways of being religious, that is, of coming nearer to the divine and of finding answers to the questions of the meaning of life and of there being a life after death, more in particular of the possibility of redemption. The oracle of Delphi supplied the Greeks with counsels with an ethical nature, of how to live, which the official religions did not give them. The mysteries of Eleusis brought the mystics into direct contact with the divine and effected immortality. Then there was the cult of Dionysus, which was a festival of frenzy, maniacal and ecstatic. Orphism was in fact a perfect religious counter-ideology, dualistically opposed to the official cult. Finally, there is a paragraph on Greek shamanism. (Length of this chapter, with notes: 289 pp.)
This volume contains a Bibliography and a General Index.
Published in 1986 by J.C. Gieben, Publisher.
ISBN 90 70265 40 0