The Pre-Socratics were pre-occupied with the mysterious relation between opposites. Heraclitus is famous for making paradoxical claims like “immortals mortal, mortals immortal, living the others death, dead in the others life.” Parmenides explored the opposites of thinking and ‘seeming’ or ‘opinion’ (doxa in Greek). When it comes to thinking of what is, can ‘being’ even be said to have an opposite? In the strange and cosmic text of Empedocles, the counter-forces of Love and Strife drive the movement of the kosmos as Love mixes the ‘four roots’ together while Strife allows them to separate from one another and return to their unmixed nature. The movement of strife allows the four roots to return to themselves, which Empedocles suggests that they want to do. Aristotle suggests Empedocles ‘four roots’—earth, aither, fire, and water—are simply the ‘elements,’ even though Empedocles describes them as divine, in the figure of different deities (Zeus, Hera, etc.). The roots thus seem to have agency, and divine agency at that!
While these Presocratic philosophers focus on different philosophical questions, the liminality of opposites is crucial to their teachings. They share a common and significant trait: they all wrote in poetic language. In exploring their philosophical interest in opposition, the poetic context of Ancient Greek myth and culture that preceded them is a fruitful place of inquiry. Many of these early poetic texts suggest a fluid and nuanced understanding of opposites. The major Homeric Hymns (written in honor of Apollo, Demeter, Aphrodite, and Hermes) are emblematic of this liminal conception of opposites, particularly in thinking the oppositions between life and death, immortality and mortality, and sexual difference.
The Ancient Greek world may not seem like an obvious thing to ‘queer’: with the exception of Hermes, the Greek deities seem very tightly parsed as ‘masculine’ or ‘feminine’ in nature. But the identities and movements of these mythological figures suggest a fluidity between opposites, which resists rigid identity. Heraclitus denies that the world consists of discrete identities. He postulates a world of movement and change; even the seemingly static identity of a thing is ‘self-differing.’ In DK 51, he says “they do not comprehend how a thing agrees while differing from itself: it is a backwards-stretched harmony like that of the bow or the lyre.” The lyre is only a lyre when its strings are in motion and able to create music; without this motion, it ceases to truly be a lyre: identity is dynamic. If this observation is taken seriously, our traditional concepts, identities, and categories use static names to describe moving things—there is a misalignment between our thinking and the world (or physis, ‘nature’). Before the principle of non-contradiction became canonical, Heraclitus challenged the very notion that a thing can only be identical with itself, instead suggesting a world of self-differing, motile, and changing things.
The term ‘queer’ expresses a resistance to rigid identities, concepts, and categories in favor of a liminal movement that is always hybrid, transforming, and unable to be pinned down into clear binaries. In a recent work, Emanuela Bianchi explores the Ancient Greek concept of physis (‘nature’) in the context of ‘queer performativity’ in order to subvert the traditional (and oppressive) identification of ‘femininity’ with ‘nature.’ The work of Gloria Anzaldúa suggests that interrogating rigid borders is a radical way of thinking our way out of oppressive concepts and identities and allowing for more nuanced understanding of hybridity (whether racial, gendered, sexual, etc.). There are many other binaries besides gender that can be ‘queered’ if the borders between opposites are called into question, as explored in Otherwise Than the Binary: New Feminist Readings in Ancient Philosophy and Culture. This project of ‘queering’ the Ancient world has both epistemological and ethical urgency: our static models (if we consider Heraclitus’ position, or quantum physics, for instance) do not match up with a world of moving things, and many binaries are constructed in an antagonistic way such that one term is superior or valuable while the other is not (male/female, mind/body, culture/nature, immortal/mortal, etc.).
The divine figures in the Homeric Hymns exercise a kind of border-crossing agency, shifting between places, positions, and identities. The most obvious example of this kind of ‘queer agency’ is Hermes, who (besides the strange figure of Hekate, who plays a crucial role in the Homeric Hymn to Demeter) is the only deity who is capable of crossing the borders between the world of the gods, the mortal world, and the underworld. Border-crossing deities ambiguate the relationship of life and death, calling the borders into question by crossing them, and paradoxically, keeping them intact. Their movements’ effect is double: their traversal of the border manifests the border and affirms its existence, while their crossing of the border is only possible if the border can be transgressed. Such border-crossing is both liberatory and epistemologically valuable because it instigates the breakdown of oppressive binary categories (of which ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ are only one instantiation). It corrects our thinking, which, as Heraclitus suggests, often attempts to capture moving things in static names, categories, and concepts. Despite the canonical principle of non-contradiction, something may ‘be’ and ‘act’ both masculine and feminine, or (like the seed in the Homeric Hymn to Demeter or Schrodinger’s famous cat) be both alive and dead, or (like the Ancient Greek heroes) both mortal and immortal.
Of all the major Homeric Hymns, the Homeric Hymn to Demeter most explicitly takes up questions of life and death in the context of reproduction and sexuality (mortal, immortal, and vegetal). The ambiguous figures of Demeter and Persephone exemplify liminal identity as they seem throughout their movements in the narrative to be reflections of one another, while Persephone’s mysterious ascent and descent (accompanied by Hekate) is an example of border-crossing queer agency. Whether we call Persephone’s movements ‘ascent’ or ‘descent’ depends on where we begin: for as Heraclitus suggests, the “way up and down are one and the same” if we are describing the same road. The identities of Demeter and Persephone become ambiguously mixed with one another as their actions in the hymn express a deep symmetry: just as Persephone is described as a fertile maiden paradoxically carried below the earth to a place of death by Hades, her mother, goddess of fertility, Demeter travels to the world of mortals and disguises herself as an infertile crone. Both mother and daughter undertake mysterious actions involving the seed: Demeter stops all the seeds from growing and causes a dread famine that threatens mortals and gods alike, while Persephone has a pomegranate seed placed stealthily in her mouth by her new husband, Hades. Whether we consider the ‘death seed’ situation of Demeter or the ‘sexy seed’ scene that hints at the consummation of Persephone’s marriage, it is clear that the secret of life and death, including the mysteries of sexuality, reproduction, and immortality, is the crux of the Homeric Hymn to Demeter. This text was associated with the famously popular Eleusinian Mysteries (which, due to secrecy oaths exceeding even those of Fight Club, have remained a mystery for thousands of years), which celebrate liminality and were deeply woven into the religious practices of the Ancient Greek world.
Demeter speaks with two divinities when she realizes that Persephone is missing: first, Hekate tells her that she heard her daughter cry out but did not see what happened; Hekate joins Demeter in her search and they then speak with Helios, who saw Hades take Persephone. In case the narrative in the hymn was not of sufficient cosmic proportion, now we have the Sun (Helios) and the Moon (one of Hekate’s most prominent associations) involved as the only witnesses to the event: not only is this a tale of life and death, immortality and mortality, and the mysteries of sexuality and sexual difference—now it is also a tale about those deeply experiential opposites, day and night. Thus, while the action of the hymn is certainly focused on questions of mortal (and vegetal) reproduction, the liminal movements of opposites in the hymn are explicitly represented in the movements of divine figures. This trinary formula of the three goddesses Demeter, Hekate, and Persephone allows for passage across borders. It is no accident that Hekate, frequently pictured as a triple goddess and associated with the crossroads (keeping in mind that ancient Greek crossroads were shaped like a “Y”), is the primary liminal agent in the narrative.
This theme of day and night helps explain the paradoxical double nature of Apollo: he is both the god of clarity and light, the Sun God, and the god of terrible destruction—figured in the dark obscurity of the oracle as well as his penchant for sending plagues (has anyone tried a good sacrifice to Apollo lately?). Most crucial for his role as a liminal agent, Apollo serves as a mediator between the world of mortals and the world of the gods, as his oracle speaks the will of Zeus to human beings—but if you are familiar with any of the famous stories about the oracle (woe to Oedipus!), you know that these transmissions require a translator. The movement of language between worlds results in some distortion: divine language cannot simply be translated into mortal language.
Parmenides offers an interesting analysis of this problem of translation from divine to mortal: the goddess who offers her teaching about truth diagnoses a primary issue with mortal thinking—human beings are called ‘twin heads’ (dikranoi). While the reality described by the goddess is one, human thinking is habitual and cannot help breaking everything into opposites. This habitual operation is not a problem in itself; the difficulty arises because mortal thinking cannot recognize opposites as fluid, permeable and inseparable from one another but instead assumes their absolute antagonism and rigid separation (the goddess cleverly calls mortal opinion a “battle formation” at 8.60). While the goddess is able to shift between perspectives—labeled ‘truth’ and ‘doxa’ by philosophers—mortals choose one of these as ‘real’ and relegate all of mortal opinion or ‘seeming’ to the ‘not real’—or even more problematically, ‘not being’! The catastrophic effect is that all of mortal experience is rejected as somehow ‘unreal.’ The goddess’ divine ability to shift between these seemingly opposite perspectives and recognize how their relation is ‘both’ rather than the mortal thinking that makes them ‘either/or’ is an excellent example of liminal agency. Both Parmenides and Empedocles associate this divine ability to comprehend multiplicity (the logic of ‘both’) with the skill that Ancient Greek culture called ‘metis’—a cunning resourcefulness steeped in a kind of quantum awareness of multiple registers.
Like Apollo’s oracle, the divine speech of the goddess is double in character—divine language is deceptive to mortal beings because it is multivalent. Hesiod’s warning of the Muses’ ‘double speak’ may explain Heraclitus’ choice of medium, as he lobs many timebomb-like oracular riddles at unsuspecting listeners. In closing, I would like to turn to a divine figure famous for deceptive (and dangerous) speech: Aphrodite. While one of her epithets is ‘laughter-loving,’ we might wonder at whom is she laughing? Her Hymn reminds us that she has power over animals, mortals, and gods, so she is probably laughing at everyone except for those three chaste goddesses. While she is depicted in the Iliad as a helpless crybaby who runs to her daddy Zeus because the mean warrior Diomedes cut her hand, she is also the sly destructive force that began the Trojan War in the first place.
The Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite tells the tale of Zeus’ indignation towards her for compelling him to love goddesses, nymphs, and mortal women which most disturbingly for his reign, and especially for his carefully drawn borders between divine and mortal, has caused the birth of half-divine, half-mortal children. Aphrodite’s agency is perhaps the most radical and outlaw version of liminal agency as she is calling into question the border that demarcates mortal from immortal. Even more alarmingly, she does all this covertly: while appearing to be a harmless pretty thing. Her weapons are not swords and bows, but the overwhelming forces of seduction, eros, and persuasion—Sappho famously recognizes this character of the goddess and calls on Aphrodite to be her ‘summakos’ or comrade-in-arms in her version of the “Hymn to Aphrodite.”
Empedocles, like Anchises and Sappho, does not fall for Aphrodite’s ‘damsel in distress’ act and recognizes her as a powerful goddess: much of Empedocles’ teaching describes the terrible effect of Love, whom he also calls Aphrodite as she is able to create ‘mixture’ of the divine four roots, and essentially transform them from immortal to mortal. The words and works of these deities canvassed here shows how the liminality of opposites so pervasive in Presocratic texts has its roots in the border-crossing movements of the divine figures honored in the major Homeric Hymns. While later interpretations of these early texts might have created the impression of stark binary thinking, these poetic texts suggest otherwise: that the ‘queering’ of these borders is not a new practice in Presocratic texts, but has its roots in the archaic culture and imagination of Ancient Greece.
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Jessica Elbert Decker
Jessica Elbert Decker is Associate Professor of Philosophy at California State University, San Marcos. Her publications approach Ancient Greek texts (especially Homer, Sappho, and the Presocratics) from a feminist perspective. She is co-editor of Borderlands and Liminal Subjects (with Dylan Winchock), Otherwise Than the Binary: New Feminist Readings in Ancient Philosophy and Culture (co-edited with Danielle Layne and Monica Vilhauer), and has articles forthcoming in the Routledge Handbook of Women and Ancient Greek Philosophy, Inquiries Into Being: Essays on Parmenides, and Hearing, Sound, and the Auditory in Ancient Greece.
