Parmenides, the shaman
In his excellent book In the Dark Places of Wisdom, author Peter Kingsley explains that Parmenides, the early Greek philosopher credited with establishing Western logic, was more than just a boring rationalistic thinker. He, and other notable figures of his time, were mystical shaman-like figures. That’s certainly something I’d never heard of when learning about Greek philosophers in school.
In A History of Greek Philosophy: Volume 2, The Pre-Socratic Tradition from Parmenides to Democritus, William Keith Chambers Guthrie writes that, “there was a ‘shamanistic’ strain in early Greek thought,” and that legendary figures in early Greece went on magical journeys, left their bodies, and visited the underworld. Shamans from indigenous cultures similarly claim to “project their souls into the sky where they acquire superhuman knowledge.”
Parmenides is thought to have been influenced by esoteric Greek oracles, served as a priest to the god Apollo, and was as an iatromantis, a prophet-healer. His techniques and practices draw striking parallels to well-known shamanistic practices from other cultures. Two examples:
Incubation was a commonly used practice in which a practitioner entered a divine state of consciousness via sensory deprivation and utter stillness.
In this state, the practitioner “received wisdom, knowledge, laws, in general, answers to questions and problems.”
Healing of the practitioner and/or others would be facilitated upon returning to waking consciousness.
This is reminiscent of Sri Ramana Maharshi’s transformational experience of lying still on the floor experiencing a “death” of sorts.
Parmenides’ poem On Nature seems to use the technique of repetitive incantation.
In Sacred Surrealism, Dissidence and International Avant-Garde Prose, author Vivienne Brough-Evans explains that a shaman’s body “during the incantation, enters a state of eckstatis (basically ecstasy), which may similarly affect the (listener),” and she goes on to discuss “how the repetition of a single syllable gives rise to a certain rhythm” that facilitates this special state of consciousness in the body. I personally have experienced this to be the case when singing devotional Kirtan.
Kingsley believes that Parmenides’ repetition of words creates a journey for the listener. Kingsley describes how through the repetition, “everything becomes simpler and simpler – less unique, an echo of something else – until gradually you see where all this repetition of detail is leading.”
One enters a state of clarity in which one no longer experiences the world as a multiplicity of things. Instead one experiences a binary interplay of “night” and “day” which creates the illusion of a multiplicity of things. These two factors, light and dark, “repeat themselves endlessly in different combinations to produce the universe we think we live in.”
Interestingly enough, this correlates with the Chinese philosophical idea of the Ten-Thousand Things originating with a simple binary light and dark/Ying and Yang dichotomy.
So it turns out that Parmenides and other early philosophers in ancient Greece laid the groundwork for rational Western thought and civilization by accessing alternative states of consciousness. That’s cool. This isn’t the only case of this sort of thing, just two examples:
Brian C. Muraresku’s recent best seller The Immortality Key, takes a deep dive into the subject of how spiritual inner exploration and consciousness journeying was an essential part of Greek society and early Christianity.
Rene Descartes, founder of science, had visionary dreams in which a divine spirit revealed to him the philosophy of science on November 10th, 1619.
A lot can happen when explores and listens to inner wisdom…
