The Derveni Papyrus

The Derveni Papyrus is the biggest thing in Presocratic philosophy since the tortoise beat Achilles. Discovered a few decades ago in the tomb of a wealthy Macedonian, it dates from around 320BC which makes it the oldest surviving book in Europe. It is horribly burnt and consists of carbonized ink on charred papyrus such that the text has only been revealed by digital enhancement techniques. Even then, it is in fragments and the task of restoring the fragments to their original order is Herculean. What is intact or can be restored, however, is remarkable: the remains of a philosophical text concerning the Orphic Mysteries. The author is unknown and his intentions are unclear. He seems to be in the school of Anaxagoras, and he presents - in part - a previously unknown Orphic hexameter poem as an allegory of Anaxagorean cosmology. A focus of the book is the nature of god Zeus. The book quotes Heracleitus and other Presocratic sources including, it seems, Parmenides. Interpreting and understanding what remains of the book is an enormously challenging undertaking, but also enormously important. The pictures on this page show the state of the papyrus and some of the reconstructions.

Conceptual limitations arise almost immediately. Modern scholarship is remarkably adept at technical processes, but far less adept at understanding the mind-set that frames and informs early Greek philosophy. Nearly all scholarship is conducted within an Enlightenment narrative where modern science has its beginnings in early Greek cosmological speculation and where the heroes are 'free thinkers' bravely standing up to religious ignorance. This is to project modern science vs religion fault-lines back into Presocratic Greece and they are very likely to distort our picture of the real tensions of that period. In the present case, scholars in this Enlightenment paradigm have embraced the Derveni Papyrus as one of their own. "This is the roots of modern science," declared Professor Richard Janko after devoting more than a decade to studying the text. He situates the text within a struggle between atheism and religious conservatism ala Galileo vs The Church as science tried to free itself from ignorance and superstition. In this sort of scholarship, however objective it might be in other respects, the Ionian materialists are necessarily the good guys because they laid the foundations of the very world-view of the scholar himself.

Personally, I doubt this whole scientific (or scientistic) narrative and am wary of its assumptions. It is because of those assumptions we are not well-placed to understand a text such as the Derveni Papyrus. For a start, it concerns the Mysteries, and if the Mysteries were mysterious to the ancients, we are far more remote and far less able to bring the necessary empathy to our understanding. In particular, we are far from the well-springs of muthos. Much scholarship labours under a simplistic dichotomy of muthos and logos - which is itself the mythos of Enlightenment science. The Derveni text shows the author explaining a poem of the Orphic Mysteries in terms of Presocratic cosmology, as 'allegories', but it is a modern distortion to think of this as "rationalizing", or as merely rationalizing. (Harmonizing is a more accurate word.)


Explaining the cosmos in terms of basic forces is already Hesiodic. Rather than arising out of a new scientific spirit the Presocratic enterprise has very deep roots and is better seen as an extended reaction to the Olympian revolution in the ancient Greek religious universe. That is, it is proper to see these texts as different tendencies within a religious tradition rather than as a contest between science and religion, reason and superstition. Indeed, even atheism is a religious viewpoint in the ancient Greek milieu (much as it is in Hinduism.) It is fundamentally different to and has only a superficial resemblance to the modern atheism born in the Enlightenment. We should not be too eager to colour the Derveni Author with tenets or tendencies of modern scepticism. Presocratic philosophy is all religio-philosophical (noting how we don't actually have a word for that category and have to make one up with a hyphen.)


In general, I am doubtful of modern characterisations of a 'sophistic enlightenment' and the suggested parallels to the modern Enlightenment. Janko first assumes this structure and then tries to place the document within it; it is in his working assumptions. For example, he proposes of the papyrus:

The phrase "in order to reconcile them with the latest science of his day" is likely to misrepresent the motives of the author and the real reason for his allegorical interpretations of the Orphic poem. The real significance of the Derveni Papyrus is that it violates the assumptions and expectations of the 'sophistic enlightenment' narrative: it doesn't fit. There is something unexpected going on. The science in the work seems not to be skeptical but rather deployed to mystical ends.

It is best to view the Derveni Papyrus as a fascinating religious document, by an author whose world-view is inherently religious, albeit in ways difficult to situate in our existing understandings. I want to point out what I take to be its most important feature, or its 'doctrine', if you like. Assuredly, any reading is highly speculative, but if we step back from the profusion of conundrums and are guided by what is striking, peculiar and unusual, this emerges:

The document has a central preoccupation with the One and its limits.

The Many is a necessary illusion misunderstood by the ignorant.

The One is known as many things, but primarily as Zeus. (It is the same as Mind and in elemental terms, Air, i.e. the most subtle of the elements.)

All gods are Zeus. The strangest feature of the entire document is the recounting of a myth in which, contrary to the usual accounts, Zeus swallows the phallus of Ouranos. In this way he consumes the previous theogony and becomes "First Born." The author wants to show that all gods are Zeus.

This might be taken as a 'monotheist' or more accurately a 'henotheist' position but it is rooted, I think, in Parmenidean monism. Janko has detected allusions and references to Parmenides in some of the barest surviving fragments.

This explains the document's concern with the Furies who police the limits set by Justice (Dike). Unity is inviolable. The One is tightly bound with firm limits. Parmenides says the same.


Janko, in his tireless labours, submitted some tiny fragments to infrared analysis and discovered that one contained a series of letters that could only have come from the end of the first line of Parmenides’ poem. The fragment is believed by most scholars to proceed what is now counted as Column I. He concludes, however, that “the context is so badly damaged that it is unlikely ever to reveal why this verse was quoted.” He thinks “the author compared the interpretations of diviners with those of natural scientists in some way.” But he points out “the presence of Parmenides neatly confirms that the Derveni author was writing in the post-Parmenidean tradition that posits an ultimate unity of existence.”

The theme of the work is the One and its limits, primarily cast as Zeus and the Furies, explained as a teaching of the Orphic Mysteries. The polemic in the work is directed against certain charlatans who misrepresent the Mysteries and fail to understand this teaching under the veils of myth, symbol and allegory. In this respect, the author seems to be on the same page as Plato who records the same polemic in the Republic (or is he one of those Plato condemns?)

Regarding matters of textual form, I am inclined to the view that the first columns are best understood as commentary upon an invocation of the Eumenides, and this form is comparable to the proem of Parmenides. In that case, the first lemma has been lost, but from the commentary that follows we can surmise that it was an invocation of the Eumenides. The text, though, is still in flux, and the placement of fragments is open to debate and, often, interpretation.


It is commonly supposed by those working on reconstructions of the document that the first section is of a different literary genre to the later sections. In part, this is because of its tone but also its length. It is supposed that there was some form of introduction before the author turned to commentary upon the hexameters of Orpheus. But I see no firm basis for this supposition. More likely, the commentary on Orpheus is already in progress in the early columns (apparently an invocation to the Eumenides)and the commentary on this first lemma is naturally longer and more developed than those later in the work. Alternatively, the early columns concern matters of ritual which is then followed by an exposition of the Orphic poem. Need they be separate?


The context in which the papyrus was discovered is important. It appears to have been a valued text that was included in the funeral of a wealthy man. Since the text concerns the Mysteries and the afterlife, can we suppose that the book was to bring comfort to the dead in some way? In any case, this context must count against reconstructions and interpretations of the text as a work of scientific skepticism. It is unlikely a man would want to be buried with a book on atheism. The context favors more gnostic and mantic interpretations where the religious and mystical elements of the work are sincere and integral and not merely expediencies employed by a non-believer to avoid persecution by the  conservative religious establishment. The dead man took the book seriously and perhaps believed it would ease his passage through the Underworld.

There are three works in play here:

1. The Derveni Papyrus itself, which is a copy of a work written some time, perhaps a century earlier.

2. The work of which of the Derveni is a copy.

3. The hexameter poem ascribed to Orpheus upon which the work provides hermeneutical exposition.


A list of possible authors proposed in studies of the papyrus so far:

Epigenes

Euthyphro

Diagoras the Quibbler

Prodicus of Ceos

Metrodorus

Stesimbrotus of Thasos

Diogenes of Apollonia

Others propose an unknown author whose purpose in writing is open to debate. It is unclear what the author may have been and what relation he had to the Mysteries. Was he a heirophant himself? A priest? A sophist? Was he a tout? Is the work advertising his professional services while condemning his rivals?

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