SOLARIS
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As goodness stands in the intelligible realm to intelligence and the things we know,
so the sun stands in the visible realm to sight and the things we see.
— The Republic VI (508c)
Frances Yates, ‘Heliocentricity’ in Giordano Bruno:
The cult of the prisca theolgia laid greatly increased emphasis on the sun, and two of the prisci theologi in Ficino’s lists had taught that the earth moves. These were Pythagoras and Philolaus; the latter had published the astronomical views of the Pythagorean school, which were that the earth , sun, and other bodies revolve around a central fire. The cult of Hermes Trismegistus also tended to suggest a different position for the sun to that which it held on the Chaldean-Ptolemaic system, universally accepted in the Middle Ages. The Egyptian order of the planets was different from the Chaldean order, for the Egyptians put the sun just above the moon, and below the other five planets, not in the middle of the seven. The difference between the two systems was emphasised by Macrobius – a Platonist much studied in the Middle Ages and Renaissance – who pointed out that the Egyptian order, in which the sun is much nearer to the earth, was the one which Plato accepted. Ficino in his De Sole mentions the Egyptian order, soon afterwards remarking that the sun has been put nearer to the earth than the firmament by Providence in order to warm it with spiritus and ignis. The Egyptian position of the sun, only just above the moon which is the channel of all astral influences, would better suit Ficino’s sun-centred spiritus magic than the Chaldean order. However, there is no evidence that he rejected the latter […]
Unquestioning belief in the Ptolemaic position of the sun was nevertheless somewhat shaken by the prisci theologi, but more important than this in fixing attention on the sun was the immense religious importance attached to it by the earliest (so Ficino believed) of the prisci theologi, Hermes Trismegistus, the Egyptian Moses. The sun, of course, is always a religious symbol and has always been so used in Christianity; but in some passages in the Hermetic writings the sun is called the demiurge, the ‘second god’. In the Asclepius, Hermes says:
The sun illuminates the other stars not so much by the power of its light, as by its divinity and holiness, and you should hold him, O Asclepius, to be the second God, governing all things and spreading his light on all the living beings of the world, both those which have a soul and those which have not.
There are also passages on the divinity of the sun in Corpus Hermeticum V and X, and above all, in XVI (thought the last-named did not influence Ficino since it was not in his manuscript […]). The admired Egyptian religion included sun-worship, and the sun is among the list of gods of the Egyptians given in Asclepius.
These Egypto-Hermetic sun-teachings undoubtedly influenced Ficino’s sun-magic, and they connected philosophically with Plato on the sun as the intelligible splendour, or chief image of the ideas, and religiously with the Pseudo-Dionysian light symbolism. All these influences can be perceived, working together, in Ficino’s De sole and De lumine. As we have tried to outline in previous chapters, the concentration on the sun in the astral magic, led upwards through the Christian Neoplatonism of Pseudo-Dionysus to the supreme Lux Dei, and in this way the sun very nearly is for Ficino what it is for Hermes or for the Emperor Julian, the ‘second god’, or the visible god in the Neoplatonic series.
The De revolutionibus orbium caelestium of Nicholas Copernicus was written between 1507 and 1530, and published in 1543. It was not by magic that Copernicus reached his epoch-making hypothesis of the revolution of the earth round the sun, but by a great achievement in pure mathematical calculation. He introduces his discovery to the reader as a kind of act of contemplation of the world as a revelation of God, or as what many philosophers have called the visible god. It is, in short, in the atmosphere of the religion of the world that the Copernican revolution is introduced. Nor does Copernicus fail to adduce the authority of prisci theologi (though he does not actually use this expression), amongst them Pythagoras and Philolaus to support the hypothesis of earth-movement. And at the crucial moment, just after the diagram showing the new sun-centred system, comes a reference to Hermes Trismegistus on the sun.
The teleological framework in which Copernicus presents his discovery has long been recognised, but it is still not generally realised that this framework was the contemporary one. Copernicus was not living within the world-view of Thomas Acquinas but within that of the new Neoplatonism, of the prisci theologi with Hermes Trismegistus at their head, of Ficino. One can say, either that the intense emphasis on the sun in this new world-view was the emotional driving force which induced Copernicus to undertake his mathematical calculations on the hypothesis that the sun is indeed the centre of the planetary system; or that he wished to make his discovery acceptable by presenting it within the framework of this new attitude. Perhaps both explanations would be true, or some of each.
At any rate, Copernicus’ discovery came out with the blessing of Hermes Trismegistus upon its head, with a quotation from that famous work in which Hermes describes the sun-worship of the Egyptians in their magical religion.
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Jacques Derrida, ‘Plato’s Pharmacy’ in Dissemination:
Now, about this father, this capital, this good, this origin of value and of appearing beings, it is not possible to speak simply or directly. First of all because it is no more possible to look them in the face than to stare at the sun. On the subject of this bedazzlement before the face of the sun, a rereading of the famous passage of the Republic (VII, 515c ff) is strongly recommended here.
Thus will Socrates evoke only the visible sun, the son that resembles the father, the analogon of the intelligible sun: ‘It was the sun, then, that I meant when I spoke of that offspring of the Good (ton agathou ekgonon), which the Good has created in its own image (hon tagathon egennesen analogon heautoi), and which stands in the visible world in the same relation to vision and visible things as that which the good itself bears in the intelligible world to intelligence and to intelligible objects’ (508c).
How does Logos intercede in this analogy between the father and the son, the nooumena and the horomena?
The Good, in the visible-invisible figure of the father, the sun, or capital, is the origin of all onta, responsible for their appearing and their coming into logos, which both assembles and distinguishes them: ‘We predicate ‘to be’ of many beautiful things and many good things, saying of them severally that they are, and so define them in our speech (einai phamen te kai diorizomen toi logoi)’ (507b).
The good (father, sun, capital) is thus the hidden illuminating, blinding source of logos. And since one cannot speak of that which enables one to speak (being forbidden to speak to it face to face), one will speak only of that which speaks and of things that, with a single exception, one is constantly speaking of. And since an account or reason cannot be given of what logos (account or reason: ratio) is accountable or owing to, since the capital cannot be counted nor the chief looked in the eye, it will be necessary, by means of a discriminative, diacritical operation, to count up the plurality of interests, returns, products, and offspring: ‘Well, speak on (lege), he said, for you will duly pay me the tale of the parent another time – I wish, I said, that I were able to make and you to recieve the payment, and not merely as now the interest. But at any rate receive this interest and the offspring of the good. Have a care, however, lest I deceive you unintentionally with a false reckoning (ton logon) of the interest (tou tokou)’ (507a).
From the foregoing passage we should also retain the fact that, along with the account (logos) of the supplements (to the father-good-capital-origin, etc.), along with what comes above and beyond the One in the very movement through which it absents itself and becomes invisible, thus requiring that its place be supplied, along with differance and diacriticity, Socrates introduces or discovers the ever open possibility of the kibdelon, that which is falsified, adulterated, mendacious, deceptive, equivocal. Have a care, he says, lest I deceive you with a false reckoning of the interest (kibdelon apodidous ton logon tou tokou). Kibdeleuma is fraudulent merchandise. The correpsonding verb (kibdeleuo) signifies ‘to tamper with money or merchandise, and, by extension, to be of bad faith.’
This recourse to logos, from fear of being blinded by any direct intuition of the face of the father, of good, of capital, of the origin of being itself, of the form of forms, etc., this recourse to logos as that which protects us from the sun, protects us under it and from it, is proposed by Socrates elsewhere, in the analogous order of the sensible or the visible. We shall quote at length from that text. In addition to its intrinsic interest, the text, in its official Robin translation [fr], manifests a series of slidings, as it were, that are highly significant. The passage in question is the critique, in the Phaedo, of ‘physicalists’:
Socrates proceded: – I thought that as I failed in the contemplation of true existence (ta onta), I ought to be careful that I did not lose the eye of my soul; as people may injure their bodily eye by observing and gazing on the sun during an eclipse, unless they take the precaution of only looking at the image (eikona) reflected in the water, or in some analogous medium. So in my own case, I was afraid that my soul might be blinded altogether if I looked at things with my eyes or tried to apprehend them with the help of the senses. And I thought that I had better have recourse to the world of idea (en logois) and seek there the truth of things…. So, basing myself in each case on the idea (logon) that I judged to be the strongest…’ (99d-100a).
Logos is thus a resourse. One must turn to it, and not merely when the solar source is present and risks burning the eyes if stared at: one has also to turn away toward logos when the sun seems to withdraw during its eclipse. Dead, extinguished, or hidden, that star is more dangerous than ever.
We will let these yarns of suns and sons spin on for a while. Up to now we have only followed this line so as to move from logos to the father, so as to tie speech to the kurios, the master, the lord, another name given in the Republic to the good-sun-capital-father (508a). Later, within the same tissue, within the same texts, we will draw on other filial filaments, pull the same strings once more, and witness the weaving or unraveling of other designs.
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A little further:
In the Phaedrus, the god of writing is thus a subordinate character, a second, a technocrat without power of decision, an engineer, a clever, ingenious servant who has been granted an audience with the king of the gods. The king has been kind enough to admit him to councel. Theuth presents a tekhne and a pharmakon to the king, father, and god who speaks or commands with his sun-filled voice. When the latter has made his sentence known, when he has let it drop from on high, when he has in the same blow prescribed that the pharmakon be dropped, Theuth will not respond. The forces present wish him to remain in his place.
Doesn’t he have the same place in Egyptian mythology? There too, Thoth is an engendered god. He often calls himself the son of the god-king, the sun-god, Ammon-Ra: ‘I am Thoth, the eldest son of Ra.’ Ra (the sun) is god the creator, and he engenders through the mediation of the word. His other name, the one by which he is in fact designated in the Phaedrus, is Ammon. The accepted sense of this proper name: the hidden. Once again we encounter here a hidden sun, the father of all things, letting himself be represented by speech.
The configurative unity of these significations – the power of speech, the creation of being and life, the sun (which is also, as we shall see, the eye), the self-concealment – is conjugated in what could be called the history of the egg or the egg of history.