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Heralding the Coming God: Schellings

Philosophy of the Persephone Myth


From its root there grew
a hundred blooms which had a scent so sweet that all
the wide heaven above and all the earth and all
the salt swelling of the sea laughed aloud.
And then the girl too wondered at it, she reached out
her hands to take this thing of such delight,
but the earth with wide paths gaped in the plain of Nysia,
and He Who Accepts So Many, the lord, sprang upon her
with his immortal horses, that son of Chronos with many names.
From Hymn to Demeter[1]
For Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling, the truth of God could be found in the mythologies
of antiquity. Schellings philosophy of mythology explores the presence of God in the world as
revealed through cultural myths and religious revelation. He primarily focused on Greek
mythology, with a particular concentration on the Cabiri gods of the island of Samothrace, which
he felt empirically confirmed an early image of the nature of God which he had worked out in his
own metaphysical ontology.[2] The Cabiri myth, and the mystery initiation rituals associated
with it have widespread connections throughout the ancient world, both within the
Mediterranean and beyond. The most prevalent correlation to the Cabiri, as Schelling discusses
in his essay The Deities of Samothrace, is the myth of Persephones abduction to the underworld
and subsequent return, which mirrors both the succession of the seasons throughout the year and
the cyclical development of a plant. Persephones story is both a metaphor and a symbol for
Schellings God, a God who is also in an eternal, dynamic process that leads to the creation of
the world in his own image.[3]
The ontology of Schellings God was based initially on the writings of Jakob Bhme in
combination with earlier works of his own.[4] God exists as two poles, one of absolute free will
and the other of necessity, and each pole can be understood through Schellings positive and
negative philosophies respectively.[5] Schelling paints a portrait of a God who constitutes
himself as a duality-in-unity and it is the continuous tension and harmonization of this polarity
that gives God a dynamic, living, and even evolving existence.[6] Of these two poles, the pole of
necessity has within it its own polarized structure, which also is in a process of tension and
harmonization. First, there is the initial force that is the dark ground of all being, a centripetal
potency of pure subjectivity that draws all things eternally into itself. The second force is one
of pure objectivity, a centrifugal potency eternally radiating forth. The opposing tensions of
these two forces are in continual struggle with each other, and can only be reconciled by a third
potency, one that would not be present without the other two. This third uniting potency is love,
which harmonizes and brings an unstable balance between the first two, before the third potency
is overcome and the cycle begins anew.[7]

While Schelling writes that this interaction of the three potencies is in Gods past he also calls
it an eternal process, indicating that it is atemporal and not subject to linear time.[8] However,
Gods pole of necessity is ultimately subordinate to the pole of freedom, or pure will, which
brings true balance to the tension between the centripetal and centrifugal forces within the
necessity pole. The third potency of the necessity pole, love, mediates between freedom and
necessity, allowing for harmony in Gods being.[9] It is through this highest principle of freedom
that God is able to freely create the world in the image of Gods own being. Thus the world has
the same polar structure as God, and the repeating process of tension, imbalance, and harmony
echoes throughout every layer of creations existence.[10] The forces of centration and expansion
exist in the world as the polarities of the real and the ideal, the corporeal and the spiritual. They
too are brought into balance through love, which acts as the mediator between the world and the
transcendent aspect of God. The pole of freedom exists in creation as human creativity and free
will, in a parallel image of Gods own freedom.[11] Upon coming into relationship with creation,
Gods freely created mirror, God is able to become conscious of Godself.[12] Since nothing is
outside of God, the very knowledge of God is simply the nonfinite knowledge which God has of
himself in the eternal self-affirmation, that is, it is itself the being of God and is in this
being.[13] Yet not only is the world a reflection of Gods image, but God also enters into
creation and is revealed historically in the mythologies and religious revelations of human
culture.[14]
By investigating the mythologies of antiquity Schelling was able to perceive an intimation of the
structure of God that he had worked out in his philosophy. The island of Samothrace in the
Aegean Sea was home to the initiation rites of the Cabiri, which reveal a sequence of gods nearly
identical to those in the myth of Persephone, central to the comparable mystery rites of Eleusis.
[15] While Schelling indicated there were seven, or even possibly eight, Cabiri gods, he names
the first four in The Deities of Samothrace: Axieros, Axiokersa, Axiokersos, and Kasmilos. These
four gods are understood to be the Hellenic gods Demeter, Persephone, Hades, and Hermes.[16]
In the most prevalent version of this myth, Persephone is the daughter of Demeter, the goddess
of the grain, and Zeus, king of the Olympian gods. While playing in the meadows, Persephone is
drawn to an exquisite flower grown as a temptation by Gaia, at the bidding of Zeus. As
Persephone plucks the flower, the earth gapes open and she is abducted against her will by
Hades, Lord of the Underworld. In grief, Demeter flies about the earth searching for her
daughter, and when she discovers that the abduction of her daughter was sanctioned by Zeus she
desolates the landscape in her fury. In fear of her wrath, and to save the fertile earth from
destruction, Zeus sends his messenger Hermes to the Underworld to retrieve Persephone. Yet,
while she was in the realm of shades, Persephone ate six seeds of the pomegranate fruit, thus
tying her forever to that domain; for whoever eats the food of the dead must remain in the
Underworld. As a compromise, Zeus decrees that Persephone must spend six months in the
Underworld, one for each seed, and six months with her mother in the light of the sun. So it is
that mother and daughter are reunited, but only for a time, and each year the cycle continues,
causing the wheel of the seasons to turn as Persephone the maiden of the upper world descends
to become Queen of the Underworld each winter.[17]

While the structure of the story remains relatively similar, innumerable versions of this myth
exist in which the cultural lineage of the gods is revealed through their many names and
relationships to each other. The grain goddess Demeter was initially a goddess of Crete where
her lover was the god Plautos, a name strikingly similar to Pluto, the Roman name of Hades.[18]
Although in this myth Persephone, who was born on Crete, is the daughter of Demeter and Zeus,
there is another myth in which Zeus seduces Persephone and she gives birth to Dionysos.[19]

Schelling writes that according to Heraclitus, Hades and Dionysos were really the same god, and
in other understandings of the Greek pantheon Zeus and Hades are interchangeable as well, as
both are called the son of Chronos with many names.[20]
In the myth of the Cabiri, Hades and Dionysos are both associated with the name Axiokersos, the
third god in the sequence of Samothrace.[21] Additionally, Persephones Cabiri name is
Axiokersa, which contains the root Kersa, derived from the Hebrew hrs, or Ceres, the Roman
name of Demeter.[22] Thus Schelling and other sources conclude that Demeter and Persephone
are really one and the same, two parts of a continuous cyclical being.[23] Demeters Cabiri
name, Axieros, Schelling has translated as hunger, poverty, yearning, seeking, and
longing.[24] She is the first god of the Cabiri sequence, in a continuous state of seeking and
drawing all things in toward her.[25] Culturally, Demeter is an older goddess figure than her
Olympian brothers, and can in many ways be considered first, the fertile ground of being out of
which the harvest grows.[26]
The fourth god of the Cabiri is Kasmilos, also called Kadmilos or Camillus, and is best known as
Hermes, the messenger god.[27] The name Kasmilos has roots in the word Kadmiel which
Schelling translates as he who goes before the god. Hermes is the messenger and servant of
Zeus, highest of the gods, and acts as a mediator between Zeus and the first three gods of the
Cabiri. It is from this ranking that Schelling infers that the Cabiri must be in a sequence, from
lowest to highest, all heralding the coming of a higher god, which may be equated with Zeus, or
ultimately Schellings Christian God.[28]
The Cabiri simultaneously herald the coming of the highest God, and also constitute a symbol of
the structure of Schellings God. On Samothrace the first three Cabiri were collectively called
Hephaestos, and Schelling writes that The creation of Hephaestos is the world of necessity.[29]
Thus the first Cabiri comprise the pole of necessity in Schellings God: Axieros and Axiokersa
symbolize the primary ground of being and the force of centration, and Axiokersos is the force of
expansion.[30]
Schelling writes Ceres is the moving power through whose ceaseless attraction everything, as if
by magic, is brought from the primal indeterminateness to actuality or formation.[31] With
Demeter and Persephone as two sides of the same goddess Ceres, Demeter represents the
formless primal indeterminateness and Persephone, who is born from Demeter, is that same
power but actualized into form.
Whereas the first of the Cabiri can be equated with the first power in its pure, unstructured
aspect in the necessity pole in God, the second Cabiri goddess symbolizes that power as
transformed into the first potency, which is the foundation of a dimension, or a region, of actual
being.[32]
Axiokersos, who is both Hades and Dionysos, is the Lord of the Underworld, ruler of spirits and
the realm of the dead, and thus symbolizes the second potency of Schellings God.[33] The
second potency is the realm of spirit in the creation, but as Schellings translator Robert Brown
writes, the spirit world is to be fully actualized only in an afterlife which souls enter upon
death.[34]

The third uniting potency, which Schelling emphasized does not have its own constitution, is
symbolized by Kasmilos, or Hermes, who mediates not only between the first two potencies but
between the pole of necessity and the pole of freedom, or between the triangle of Demeter,
Persephone, and Hades, and Zeus.[35] The pole of freedom in Schellings God is pure will and
balances the pole of necessity, just as finally Zeus intervenes and creates a cyclical harmony
between Demeter, Persephone, and Hades.[36]
This myth, in its many forms, served as the basis of the various Greek mystery rites, from the
initiations of Samothrace, the rituals of Thesmophoria or the Festival of Sorrow, to the
Eleusinian mystery rites.[37] While some scholars believed the secret of all the ancient mystery
rites was the doctrine of the unity of god, Schelling disagreed with this notion in part, deeming
that it would be impossible for a secret monotheism to exist in deceit of a public polytheism.[38]
Rather, it seems that the unity experienced in the mysteries was both an understanding of the
necessary unity of the gods within the sequence of the Cabiri myth, and also the union of the
initiates with the divine.[39]
Because it was forbidden to reveal what occurred during the rites, we do not have a full picture
of the initiatory rite of passage. We do know that participants consumed a grain drink called
kykeon, a mixture of barley, water, and mint, which was said the be the drink Demeter requested
after her fast during which she desolated the earth in her rage against Zeus and Hades.[40] Also
included in this drink was the psychedelic rye fungus ergot, also called Mutterkorn, or mother
grain, in German.[41] It is likely that the mind-expanding quality of this drink, as well as the
ceremonies enacted during the rites, allowed the initiates to understand the ultimate unity and
contingency of the gods within the sequence of the Cabiri myth, as they herald the higher God
into manifestation.[42] Even the name Cabiri seems to be descended from the Hebrew term
Chabir, which expresses simultaneously inseparable connection and magical union.[43]
The holy, revered teaching of the Cabiri, in its profoundest significance, was the representation
of the insoluble life itself as it progresses in a sequence of levels from the lowest to the highest, a
representation of the universal magic and of the theurgy ever abiding in the whole universe,
through which the invisible, indeed the super-actual, incessantly is brought to revelation and
actuality.[44]
Like Elohim, the plural name of the Godhead in the Old Testament, the Cabiri are one, not
differentiated but still distinct; so too are the potencies of Schellings God, each distinct with
their own qualities, yet ultimately constituting a whole.[45]
The sequence of the mystery rites paralleled the sequence of the Cabiri myth, and it seems that
initiates each underwent the journey of Persephone to the Underworld. Plutarch wrote that to
die is to be initiated and even the word to die in Greek, teleutan, is related to the word for
initiation, teleisthai.[46] Yet, like Persephone, the initiates returned to the light of day and were
reunited with Demeter, an ultimate rebalancing and reconciliation.[47]
Just as the story of Persephone mirrors the cycle of the seasons, it also mirrors the growth of a
plant from a seed embedded in the earth to a shoot flowering and finally fruiting. Another name
for Persephone was Kore, from koros meaning sprout; Persephone also translates as she who

shines in the dark, symbolizing the dormant life of the seed underground, as well as her shining
presence as Queen of the Underworld.[48] Persephones descent is a necessary process, a cycle
of death and regeneration vital for life to continue. It is as though the flower Gaia grew to tempt
Persephone to the brink of Hades realm was grown in service of the greater need of earths
fertility.[49] Even the symbol of this single beautiful flower carries the dynamic of the entire
myth within it.
Demeter and Persephone both symbolize the first potency of Schellings God, but Demeter is the
first potency before creation and Persephone the first potency after, just as the seed and the shoot
are one plant, before and after the germination process. The world is created in the image of God,
and as such has the same ontological structure as God.[50] Thus the poles of necessity and
freedom, and within the pole of necessity the force of centration and physicality, and the force of
expansion and spirituality, all unified by love, ripple out and can be found within every structure
of the created universe. As Brown writes, Because the potencies of being are not exhausted in
whatever severally exemplifies or symbolizes them, they can recur at various levels within an
extended hierarchy.[51] The polarities can be found in the growth of plants, the cycles of the
seasons, and the polytheistic pantheons of antiquity. They overlap and combine, the mythological
gods intertwined with earths natural processes.[52]
Schelling believed that because God had entered creation, God was being revealed in a historical
evolution from the ancient stories of mythology to the revelations of the religions, disclosing
each potency in sequence, leading ultimately to knowledge of God as a whole.[53] The Cabiri
are at the evolutionary stage of the full revelation of Gods pole of necessity, but intimations of
the next stages are also present in that mythology. Kasmilos, or Hermes, is the herald of the
coming God, who is both the Olympian Zeus and a God higher than Zeus. Schelling mentioned
that there were either seven or eight Cabiri, and it seems that Zeus was both the seventh, as a link
in the sequence, and also the eighth, as the final God who is manifested by the relationships of
the first seven.[54] Each participant of the sequence is divine, as Schelling writes in one of his
aphorisms: Yet not only the whole as whole is divine. For so is also the part and the particular
by itself.[55]
As a Christian, Schelling believed that God was revealed fully in the revelation of Christ. The
fallen state of the world is a manifestation of the first potency, but God acted through the
spirituality of the second potency to bring new harmony and balance to creation. This
manifestation of the second potency is the incarnation of Christ. The teaching of Christ is that of
love, which is the third unifying principle, which leads ultimately to a full union with the divine.
[56]
The polarized structure of God and the world has been in an eternal cyclical process that has also
been evolving linearly through time. The Godhead is both revealed in the course of time and
outside of it altogether. In the mythology of Samothrace, time is located above all of the gods,
which can also be seen in the family tree of the Cabiri: Chronos, who represents time, is either
the father or the grandfather of all the gods in that story.[57] Schelling also wrote, Because the
gods come forth in succession, they themselves are only the offspring of almighty time; time is
the true creator and permeates all things.[58] Yet Schellings God existed before time and is
caught in an eternal process, therefore his God is also outside of time.[59] It seems that

ultimately Schellings God is both subject to time yet also free of it, just as God has one pole of
necessity and one pole of freedom.
The final question remains then, what will happen when the creation ultimately unites with God
through the mediation of love? Through this process God has become fully conscious of Godself
and the poles are completely balanced. As both subject to and free of time will the cycle end in
harmonious balance or, like a seed planted in the earth, will a new creation germinate and sprout
to a truly new florescence?
Appendix
Just as the structure of Gods being can be found throughout the creation of nature, it is also
mirrored in the realm of archetypal astrology, especially as it pertains to Schellings own birth
chart. Schelling was born January 27, 1775, at 3:00 am in Ragaz Switzerland, Germany. The
most prevalent aspect in his chart is a stellium of four planets: Sun, Mercury, Venus, and Pluto.
The configuration of these four planets correlates perfectly with the Cabiri myth, and thus
corresponds to his ontology of God as well. Venus represents the first potency, and like the
Cabiri myth relates simultaneously to both Demeter and Persephone. Venus is the archetype of
beauty, as portrayed by the young maiden Persephone, and also of flowers and that which grows
upon the earth. As the archetype of love, Venus also relates to the loving bond between mother
and daughter in this myth. Pluto correlates directly to Hades and Dionysos, both of whom are
represented by this archetype. Pluto rules the Underworld and the entire death-rebirth process,
which is the primary theme of both this myth and the mystery rites associated with it. Mercury
correlates to its namesake Hermes, and acts as mediating messenger, but also a bringer of love,
represented by the Mercury-Venus combination. Finally, the Sun represents the Godhead, which
the first four gods are heralding, the ultimate shining principle in its singularity and perfection,
bringing all the other archetypes into a single conception of God.
An additional aspect of note is that Schellings birth chart has Saturn in a trine with the SunPluto stellium, which can be seen as both the inherent structure of the Godhead, but also the
prevalence of time as the true creator and that which drives the evolution of Gods creation.
Works Cited
Baring, Anne, and Jules Cashford. The Myth of the Goddess: Evolution of an Image. London,
England: Viking Arkana, 1991.
Metzner, Ralph. Green Psychology: Transforming Our Relationship to the Earth. Rochester, VT:
Park Street Press, 1999.
Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von. Schellings Aphorisms of 1805. Translated by Fritz
Marti. Idealistic Studies 14.3 (1984): 237-258.
Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von. Schellings Treatise on The Deities of Samothrace.
Translated by Robert F. Brown. Missoula, MT: Scholars Press, 1977.

[1] Anne Baring and Jules Cashford, The Myth of the Goddess: Evolution of an Image (London,
England: Viking Arkana, 1991), 370.
[2] Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling, Schellings Treatise on The Deities of
Samothrace, trans. Robert F. Brown (Missoula, MT: Scholars Press, 1977), 45.
[3] Schelling, Samothrace, 47.
[4] Ibid, 45.
[5] Ibid, 48, 46.
[6] Ibid, 47.
[7] Ibid, 48.
[8] Schelling, Samothrace, 48.
[9] Ibid, 49.
[10] Ibid, 47.
[11] Ibid, 50.
[12] Ibid, 49-50
[13] Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling, Schellings Aphorisms of 1805, trans. Fritz
Marti, Idealistic Studies 14.3 (1984): 250.
[14] Schelling, Samothrace, 47.
[15] Schelling, Samothrace, 15.
Ralph Metzner, Green Psychology: Transforming Our Relationship to the Earth (Rochester, VT:
Park Street Press, 1999), 128.
[16] Schelling, Samothrace, 16-17, 56.
[17] Metzner, Green Psychology, 128-129.
Baring and Cashford, Goddess, 364-372.
[18] Ibid, 366.

[19] Ibid, 367.


[20] Schelling, Samothrace, 21.
Baring and Cashford, Goddess, 370, 383.
[21] Schelling, Samothrace, 21.
[22] Ibid, 20, 52.
[23] Baring and Cashford, Goddess, 364.
[24] Schelling, Samothrace, 18, 20.
[25] Ibid, 18.
[26] Baring and Cashford, Goddess, 367.
[27] Schelling, Samothrace, 21.
[28] Ibid, 22.
[29] Ibid, 24.
[30] Schelling, Samothrace, 49, 52.
[31] Ibid, 20.
[32] Ibid, 52.
[33] Ibid, 52.
[34] Ibid, 53.
[35] Schelling, Samothrace, 49, 53.
[36] Ibid, 49.
Metzner, Green Psychology, 128.
[37] Baring and Cashford, Goddess, 374.
Metzner, Green Psychology, 128.
[38] Schelling, Samothrace, 24-25.

[39] Ibid, 28.


Baring and Cashford, Goddess, 382.
[40] Ibid, 377, 380.
[41] Metzner, Green Psychology, 144.
[42] Schelling, Samothrace, 28.
[43] Ibid, 39-40, note 113.
[44] Ibid, 29.
[45] Ibid, 40, note 118.
[46] Baring and Cashford, Goddess, 381.
[47] Ibid, 377.
Metzner, Green Psychology, 144.
[48] Baring and Cashford, Goddess, 368-369.
[49] Ibid, 383.
[50] Schelling, Samothrace, 50.
[51] Ibid, 56.
[52] Schelling, Samothrace, 58.
[53] Ibid, 55, 59.
[54] Ibid, 56.
[55] Schelling, Aphorisms, 246.
[56] Schelling, Samothrace, 58-59.
[57] Schelling, Samothrace, 19.
[58] Ibid, 33, note 44.
[59] Ibid, 61, note 8, 48.

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by Becca S. Tarnas on April 4, 2012 Permalink
Posted in Essays
Tagged Anne Baring, Archetypal Cosmology, Astrology, Demeter, Divine, Earth, Eleusis,
Goddess, Greece, Hades, Mystery Rites, Mythology, Persephone, Philosophy, Ralph Metzner,
Samothrace, Schelling
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5 Comments

1.
wendy
/ April 13, 2012
so well written, becca!! this paper reminds me of schellings equation of ontology (if i
can call it that). i found myself attempting to plug in the archetypal powers i keep
getting an image of the yin-yang as a composite glyph/symbol for the demeter|
persephone mediated by love element, but i wonder if the new dwarf planet ceres fits
the bill for demeter|persephone before love comes into the picture; a=ceres? curious to
know what you think =)

o
beccatarnas
/ April 13, 2012
Thank you, Wendy! The subject of this paper is of course a picture of that
equation of Schellings God. And as you probably saw in the appendix I did draw
on the planetary archetypes as well, at least as it relates to Schellings chart.

In many ways the yin-yang symbol does fit the conception of Schellings God, or
the relationship between Demeter/Persephone (as one being representing the
centripetal force) and Hades (representing the centrifugal force). Hermes is the
unifying mediator, or love in Schellings God.
I do not know much about the archetypal nature of the asteroid Ceres, but it does
seem thus far to be aptly named (Ceres is just the Roman name for Demeter) from
what I have heard so far. If you learn more about Ceres in astrology please let me
know!

2.
Eurydice
/ June 14, 2016
Dear Becca,
Thank you for this great article ! Do you know where I could possibly find Schellings
book ? Unfortunately it is not edited anymore

o
Becca Tarnas
/ June 14, 2016
It seems this particular text of Schellings is very hard to find. I would
recommend checking out a university library since it doesnt seem to be available
online or for a reasonable price through any booksellers that I can find.
Im glad you enjoyed the essay!

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