Plague-Busters, Skywalkers,
and Time-Travellers
As we have already seen, Pythagoras was not the only famous Greek sage at large at the time. There were certain people whose apparently magical abilities and exploits had made them famous throughout the Greek world, and it seems Pythagoras was on a mission to connect with many of them in his quest for divine knowledge. One of these extraordinary people was said to have acquired his magical powers while lost to the world in a deep cave, which must have made him of particular interest to Pythagoras.
Epimenides: The Tattooed Cave Prophet
Possibly at the suggestion of Themistoclea, Pythagoras travelled to Crete to meet the legendary tattooed prophet, seer, and “purification priest” Epimenides.92 The most famous story about Epimenides is essentially the same as that of Rip Van Winkle. As a young shepherd, Epimenides was searching for a lost sheep in the mountains, when he came across a cave where he lay down to rest. When he awoke, he returned to his village and could find no one he recognised. He eventually found his brother, who had become an old man, while Epimenides himself was unaged. The brother told him that he had disappeared fifty-six (some say forty) years before. The cave in which Epimenides had fallen asleep turned out to have been Zeus’s sacred cave and during his sleep he met and conversed with the gods, including Aletheia (truth) and Dike (justice), whose qualities he exemplified ever afterwards, together with such newfound powers as prophecy, plague-busting, and catharsis.93 He became known to the Greeks as theophilistatos, “the most beloved of the gods,” was said to have lived for 157, 199, or even 299 years, and achieved such a superhuman reputation while alive that he was worshipped as a god after his death.
His fame was such that the Delphic Oracle advised Plato’s forbear Solon the Athenian to send for him to cure the city of a plague, which he duly did. Again sheep come into the story, for Epimenides had some sheep brought to the Areopagus (the “Rock of Ares”) above the city and told the Athenians to help him observe the sheep and mark the spots where they lay down to sleep. On those spots, sacrifices were made to the unknown local divinity, which was deemed responsible for the plague. Altars dedicated to Agnosto Theo, “An Unknown God,” became a feature in Athens thereafter and are mentioned by the likes of Apollonius of Tyana and St. Paul.
According to Plutarch, Empimenides founded various sacred buildings, curbed some of the more “severe and barbarous ceremonies which the women usually practiced,” and generally made the citizens “more submissive to justice and more inclined to harmony.” Plato recalls that Epimenides reassured the Athenians that the Persian invasion they feared would not happen within ten years and would fail in its aims. His visit established a long-standing alliance between Athens and Crete.
One of the most remarkable things I have discovered about Epimenides is that his tattooed skin is supposed to have been flayed from his body following his death and preserved on display at the court of the ruling “Ephors” in Sparta. There is a lot of strangeness to chew over here. For a start, it seems that tattooing was very unusual in the Greek world at the time; it was only used to mark slaves and criminals. It was therefore associated with barbarians, such as Thracians 94 and Scythians. Herodotus happily shares with us the Scythians’ habit of scalping (“The way a Scythian skins a head is as follows …” 95), but ritually flaying a whole body and preserving the skin is an extremely unusual thing anywhere and otherwise unheard of in ancient Greece, as far as I can tell.96 Epimenides was certainly a significant figure in Sparta, having purified a plague there and correctly prophesied on their behalf. Most of the prophesies foretold defeats and disasters for them, however, and it has even been suggested that the Spartans killed him after capturing him on a military campaign against the Cretans. The Spartans had a reputation for fierce warrior zeal, but they were not barbarians, and anyway, why would they want his skin? It must have something to do specifically with the tattoos themselves. Some sources say the tattoos were “grammata” (writings); they may have been his own poetry, possibly oracles or, as some have suggested, they may have been magical symbols or initiation marks—proofs of shamanic attainments as/or passwords to the Underworld/other worlds. For the latter to be true, Epimenides must have been working with ritual ideas inherited from Central Asian shamanism, for which I can only find one piece of evidence, in the form of a visiting Asian shaman, who is about to enter the story. A more prosaic, but also interesting, solution to this strange business, is the possibility that there was at some time an oracle or sorcery book in circulation called “Epimenides Skin.” The term became proverbial for mysterious, oracular, or magical writing, and if vellum was used, which is very like cured human skin, it may just account for this oddity.
Epimenides wrote many works (including the earliest Argonautica 97 ), none of which have survived. He was famed for his profound knowledge of herbal medicine and magic, and subsisted on such a meagre diet of herbs that he never had to evacuate his bowels. One source says he ate a pill made up of mallow and asphodel, two herbs highly valued in the famous vegetarian diet that Pythagoras is said to have recommended or imposed upon his followers. The idea was that the lighter and more natural the diet, the more the body’s hold on the soul was loosened, allowing closer communion with the Divine. As an annual faster myself I can certainly attest that I become much more “spiritual,” or rather soulful, after a few days fasting. One’s centre of attention seems to move from the head to the heart, and the mind is calmed, becoming more contemplative and understanding. The gods themselves were believed by Pythagoreans to subsist on essence alone, which is why sweet-smelling incense and spices were burned in their honour. An altar at Delos, said to be the one most revered by Pythagoras, which forbade animal sacrifices and consisted only of cereals, herbs, and spices, may well have been inaugurated by Epimenides, who was also revered for curing that city of a plague.
It may well be that Pythagoras learned much of his dietary and herbal lore from Epimenides. What is a matter of record is that his host took him down into the cave where Zeus was born on Mount Ida. It is fair to assume that he initiated him into the mysteries of Cretan Zeus. Porphyry confirms the visit to Crete, but doesn’t mention Epimenides at this point. He recounts the following:
Going to Crete, Pythagoras besought initiation from the priests of Morgos, one of the Idaean Dactyls, by whom he was purified with the meteoritic thunder-stone. In the morning he lay stretched upon his face by the seaside; at night, he lay beside a river, crowned with a black lamb’s woolen wreath. Descending into the Idaean cave, wrapped in black wool, he stayed there twenty-seven days, according to custom; he sacrificed to Zeus, and saw the throne which there is yearly made for him. On Zeus’s tomb, Pythagoras inscribed an epigram, “Pythagoras to Zeus,” which begins: “Zeus deceased here lies, whom men call Jove.” 98
The tomb of Zeus inspired one of Epimenides’s famous sayings, which is quoted by St. Paul in his epistle to Titus (1:12): “It is said by one of themselves, a prophet of their own - ‘Always liars and beasts are the Cretans, and inwardly sluggish.’ ” The original saying is intriguingly reminiscent of St. Paul’s Christianity:
They fashioned a tomb for you, holy and high one,
Cretans, always liars, evil beasts, idle bellies.
But you are not dead: you live and abide forever,
For in you we live and move and have our being.99
Porphyry mentions the “Idaean Dactyls,” and they are definitely worth a mention here. The Dactyls are mysterious subterranean “spirit men” that were set by Rhea, the mother of Zeus, to guard the infant god in his cave from his infanticidal father, Kronos. Their name means fingers, and they came into being as Rhea clawed and kneaded the earth from the pain of giving birth to Zeus. The Dactyls are associated with the magical art of metallurgy, mathematics, and music, a combination that makes sense when one considers that the striking of bronze discs of different sizes create different harmonics. They are credited with the discovery of iron and the focus of ancient warrior initiation rites.100
Zeus was believed throughout the Greek world to have been born in Crete, but it was only in Crete that he was worshipped as an eternal youth, who was killed and descended into the Underworld. There his cult had such close parallels with Dionysus that he is often referred to as Zeus-Dionysus by scholars. He also has close affinities with the Egyptian god Osiris and like him (and later Jesus Christ) was believed to have suffered a violent death, whereupon he became a judge of the dead.
To descend into one of this deity’s sacred caves with someone like Epimenides is to be initiated into a technique for separating the soul from the body and encountering the deity face to face. The true nature of that encounter remains a mystery to all but those who experience it, but I can say that to experience a god is in a sense to be it, because in the moment of encounter, the mortal human is completely displaced, while the soul is deeply impressed; and the impressions received leave their mark. This is why prophets are supposed to shine, why saints are depicted with halos. Pythagoras was said to have shone like the sun. And in ancient Greece this radiant inner light was the outward sign of special abilities conferred by close encounters with a particular divine being.
Given the special abilities associated with Epimenides, and later with Pythagoras, could it be that the deity encountered deep in the Stygian darkness of the Idaean cave was not Zeus-Dionysus, but Apollo? At first this seems to make no sense. For a start, how can a masculine Olympian sky god, the god of light, be found in subterranean darkness? Surely that is the domain of earthy, chthonic deities such as androgynous Dionysus. And anyway, the cave in question here was sacred to Zeus-Dionysus. But as we have seen, Apollo and Dionysus are closely entwined; they are two sides of the same coin, a sort of yin and yang. Dionysus presides over the endless cycle of life and death, emerging from darkness into the light to possess the ecstatically dancing bodies of those who surrender to him in enthusiasmos; while Apollo is a god of light and truth who can only be encountered in utter darkness when utter stillness has been achieved. Where the two gods meet is in their ability to inspire prophecy: they are both oracular deities able to transmit supernatural knowledge and are doors to each other.
Holy Smoke
If utter darkness and stillness are required, then a cave, particularly one guarded by the Dactyls, is the perfect place to encounter Apollo, because the deeper you descend, the greater the sensory deprivation. Darkness, silence. Stilling the senses helps still the mind and the body, and one trained in the art of surrendering all sense of self can become present enough to receive. But the receiver must be beside him- or herself, in the terrific ekstasis that can only be achieved in the part of self not subject to endless flux: the soul.
When I first started reading about these ancient Greek sages finding illumination in caves I was struck by the parallels with my own experience. In the mid-1990s I found myself unexpectedly invited by a family of Mexican goat herders to live in a cave near to their mountain rancho in the Sierra Catorce, above the high desert plains of north-central Mexico. When I arrived at the Cueva de la Leona (“the lioness’s cave”) I spotted three specimens of a plant known to some as Santa Maria, a vision-inducing plant sacred to Our Lady of Guadelupe, herself a manifestation of the pre-Columbian mother goddess Tonantzin. I dutifully harvested the plants and cured them, and a few days later smoked a pipeful. Deeply chastened and awed by the remarkable experiences that had led me to the cave, my intention was not to relax and get high, but rather to surrender myself in humility to whatever higher apprehension of truth there may be within me or without. I took the smoke deep into my lungs and held it down as I became smaller and smaller and descended deeper and deeper, slowly sinking to the bottom of myself. All sense of descent having ceased, I eventually heard a still, small voice in the darkness say “Thank you.” I felt myself expanding upwards and outwards and realized with great wonder that I contained the entire world. Everything was a part of me. This was, as I would later understand, my first experiential encounter with the concept of the “microcosm,” a key magical understanding that teaches that the individual contains the whole within itself, as exemplified by the Hermetic maxim: as above, so below.
The next day I walked over the mountains to the old mining ghost town to get some supplies and dropped by some friends who ran the Café Nagual. Perusing their magical bookshelf, I pulled out a book called The Practical Handbook of Plant Alchemy, which initiated a process that now finds me writing these words. I realize this is on a minute ratio of equivalence with Pythagoras and Apollo, but I believe it resonates nevertheless. As for my means of descent …
Herodotus writes about the Scythians enjoying the intoxicating benefits of cannabis incense, and it is hard to imagine that such a significant and useful plant, with its wide range of applications including medicine, textiles, and ritual use, would not have been intimately familiar to the Greek world by the sixth century BC. A major conduit for Scythian ideas into Greece was Thrace, that Greek-speaking territory north of Macedonia where Orpheus and the worship of Dionysus came from. I remember reading this long ago:
The sorcerers of these Thracian tribes were known to have burned female cannabis flowers (and other psychoactive plants) as a mystical incense to induce trances. Their special talents were attributed to the “magical heat” produced from burning the cannabis and other herbs, believing that the plants dissolved in the flames, then reassembled themselves inside the person who inhaled the vapours …101
Mercea Eliade, in his groundbreaking studies of shamanism, mentions the use of “Hemp seeds among the Thracians … and among the Scythians,” and refers to an ancient term used to describe certain shamans as Kapnobatai: “those who walk in smoke.” 102 There is clearly the possibility that cannabis use may have at least been peripheral, if not central to the Dionysian ecstasies and, subsequently, Orphism.
That said, it is not necessary to overstate the case, either for or against, with regard to the role consciousness-altering plants may have played in Greek magic or religion. In India, after all, the ancient science of using techniques such as yoga to achieve a wide variety of different states of consciousness does not rely on the use of drugs.103 On the other hand, to dismiss the possibility of the widespread use of entheogenic plants in ancient Greece because of a paucity of hard evidence smacks of prejudice, particularly given that the Pythagoreans were sworn to secrecy regarding their techniques of ecstasy. Regardless of the specific techniques being used in these god-manifesting cave rituals, they remain profoundly fascinating and mysterious precisely because they seem to have been so effective.
The Birth of Chillout
As we have seen with Orpheus and Delphi, the encounter with Dionysus can lead the ardent seeker to the encounter with his brother Apollo. The dissolution of the self presided over by Dionysus prepares the chosen few for the encounter with truth that can only occur in the absence of self-identification. A modern expression of this archetype can be seen in the rave culture that emerged in England in the late 1980s. Enthusiasts of electronic dance music would gather at secret locations, ingest a potion called ecstasy, and “go into dithyrambs” dancing to repetitive rhythms right through the night. Out of this wild raving emerged a completely different form of music more suited to tiring bodies and the arrival of dawn, known as “chillout,” that promoted a calmer, more spiritual, but no less ecstatic state. The creators of such music were inspired by a non-rhythmic style known as “ambient,” a favourite example of which just happens to be Brian Eno’s classic “Apollo.” An inner core of ravers also started experimenting with drugs such as DMT, which required the participant to be lying down in a quiet shaded place, such as a “chillout room” attended by initiates. Profound religious or quasi-religious experiences were common, as were encounters with intelligent entities or divinities. The ravers emerged from a hedonistic culture centred around music and drugs rather than a religious one, but the piety of Orphism was preceded with the hedonistic abandon of the Dionysian revels, so the parallels are obvious and not uninstructive to note.
Writers like the highly engaging but often misleading Camille Paglia insist that in ancient Greece, unlike in Egypt, there was a separation between the earth cults and sky cults.104 She, along with everyone else, had no idea of the chthonic encounters that the likes of Epimenides and Pythagoras (and others we have yet to meet) were having with radiant Apollo (and even with Zeus himself, the greatest sky god of all) in the depths of sacred caves. Proclus, in reference to the Greek mysteries, says: “The gods assume many forms and change from one to another; now they are manifested in the emission of shapeless light, now they are of human shape, and anon appear in other and different forms.” 105 In subterranean Apollo, all the gods and goddesses of Greece merge in the encounter of the divine with the human.
Another legendary, possibly mythical, troglodytic sage, closely associated with both Pythagoras and Apollo, is a character called Zalmoxis. He is variously described as a god, an ancient hero, and a slave or pupil of Pythagoras. Porphyry gives us the latter identification, reporting that “Pythagoras had another youthful disciple from Thrace. Zamolxis was he named because he was born wrapped in a bear’s skin, in Thracian called Zalmus. Pythagoras loved him, and instructed him in sublime speculations concerning sacred rites, and the nature of the Gods. Some say this youth was named Thales, and that the barbarians worshipped him as Hercules.” 106
Apollo has been twisting and morphing in this story. He started out as the cool, aloof, rational god of truth, form, harmony, and beauty, the lord of the Muses, the egregore 107 of classical Greece in the imagination of my school Classics masters. The antithesis of Dionysus, he seemed sober and orderly, lacking in personality, a square prude compared to the hip, counterculture hedonism of his darker brother. This is the image that has come down to us, but as is becoming clear, Apollo is also a dark horse. We have discovered that he is a god of prophecy, initiation, and the terrifying encounter with truth in the darkness. He is a god of healing, but he is also a plague god. It is not so much that Apollo causes plague, although he can108; it is more that wherever Apollo is neglected, disrespected, or absent, plague is likely to break out. And when it does, who ya gonna call? A “purifier” —a healer who has been touched by Apollo.
Pythagoras emerges from the Idaean cave ecstatically inspired; maybe not quite divine as such, but no longer quite human. From this point on he is credited with a wide range of impressive powers, and his legend waxes with stories of him predicting earthquakes, chasing away plagues, stopping hailstorms, calming winds and water, and exercising “absolute dominion over beasts and birds by the power of his voice, or influence of his touch.” 109 Arriving in Croton, a thriving Greek city state in Calabria (modern-day Italy), renowned for its advances in medicine, he was shown such reverent attention that he was persuaded to start a school to pass on his knowledge.
Around this time Pythagoras was seen at the Olympic Games, where he had been a boxing champion in his youth, using techniques never seen before. This time he is said to have flashed a naked thigh for all to see. Naked thighs were hard to miss in ancient Greece, particularly at the Olympics, but all were in agreement that Pythagoras’s thigh was golden. Everyone saw it. And not just everyone who was there, it seems.
Abaris Aethrobates: The Skywalker
Thousands of miles to the north, a man called Abaris felt the flash of gold and knew that Apollo had landed. He took his golden arrow, the arrow of Apollo, and told it the news, saying “we must find him,” and the arrow knew it and could feel him and had to find him. So the two took off together, guided by the magnetic pull, and bore each other thither to the source, barely pausing to eat or sleep.
Who was this Abaris? His legend proved so enduring that the first great encyclopaedia of the modern era, the third edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica (1788–97), gave him his own entry, which reads as follows:
Harpocration 110 tells us, that the whole earth being infested with a deadly plague, Apollo, upon being consulted, said that the Athenians should offer up prayers on behalf of all other nations; upon which several countries sent ambassadors to Athens, among whom was Abaris the Hyperborean. In this country [ancient Greece] he renewed the alliance between his countrymen and the inhabitants of the island of Delos. It appears that he also went to Lacedaemon: since, according to some writers, he there built a temple consecrated to Proserpine the Salutary. He wrote a book on Apollo’s arrival into the country of the Hyperboreans. … The fictions and mistakes concerning our Abaris are so infinite: however, it is by all agreed that he travelled quite over Greece and thence into Italy, where he conversed familiarly with Pythagoras, who favoured him beyond all his disciples, by instructing him in his doctrines, especially his thoughts of nature, in a plainer and more compendious method than he did any other. This distinction could not but be very advantageous to Abaris. The Hyperborean, in return, presented the Samian [Pythagoras], as though he equalled Apollo himself in wisdom, with the sacred arrow, on which the Greeks have fabulously related that he sat astride, and flew upon it, through the air, over rivers and lakes, forests and mountains; in like manner as our vulgar still believe, particularly those of the Hebrides, that wizards and witches fly whithersoever they please on their broomsticks. The orator Himerius above mentioned, though one of those who, from the equivocal sense of the word Hyperborean, seem to have mistaken Abaris for a Scythian, yet describes his person accurately, and gives him a very noble character. “They relate (says he) that Abaris the Sage was by nation a Hyperborean, appeared a Grecian in speech, and resembled a Scythian in his habit and appearance. He came to Athens, holding a bow in his hand, having a quiver hanging on his shoulders, his body wrapt up in a plaid, girt about the loins with a gilded belt, and wearing trowsers 111 reaching from his waist downward.” By this it is evident that he was not habited like the Scythians, who were always covered with skins; but appeared in the native garb of an aboriginal Scot. As to what relates to his abilities, Himerius informs us, that “he was affable and pleasant in conversation, in dispatching great affairs secret and industrious, quick-sighted in present exigencies, in preventing future dangers circumspect, a searcher after wisdom, desirous of friendship, trusting little to fortune, and having everything trusted to him for his prudence.” Neither the Academy nor the Lycaeum could have furnished a man with fitter qualities to travel so far abroad, and to such wise nations, about affairs no less arduous than important. And if we further attentively consider his moderation in eating, drinking, and the use of all those things which our natural appetites incessantly crave; joining the candour and simplicity of his manners with the solidity and wisdom of his answers, all which we find sufficiently attested: it must be owned, that the world at that time had few to compare with Abaris.
By the 1840s, however, rational scepticism had hardened to the point that the accounts given by all the ancient authorities were dismissed out of hand by the Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography and Mythology (1849), which declared his historicity as “entirely mythical.” Fortunately, such presumptuous positions are no longer fashionable in academia, so we will not be considered entirely naive for exploring the story of Abaris with an open mind. All the ancient sources agree that the incomparable Abaris was a foreign priest of Apollo, of immense personal charm and amazing abilities, who sought out Pythagoras and gave him the golden arrow he always travelled with. Like Pythagoras, he clearly made an enormous impression everywhere he went, making friends and giving prudent advice in perfect Greek, all while quietly “dispatching great affairs” in a quick-sighted and industrious fashion. As for the amazing abilities, apart from prophecy and plague-busting and never eating, the most striking is his reported ability to fly through the air on his arrow, which some said had been given to him by Apollo. At their meeting Abaris gave Pythagoras the arrow, declaring him to be the “Hyperborean Apollo” he had been seeking, and, as if to confirm the truth of this, Pythagoras showed him his golden thigh. All of this is very extraordinary and of course very hard to reasonably account for. To try to get a handle on the true significance at play here, it is worth breaking the story down into bite-size chunks for closer consideration.
Hyperborea: The Land Beyond the North Wind
For a start, where on earth is/was Hyperborea? Good question. Hyperborea was a name well known to the Greeks, but there was no consensus as to where it was located, apart from that it lay to the distant north, beyond the Riphaean Mountains. Unfortunately, the mountains themselves were of uncertain location. The earliest Greek accounts suggest the Alps, but they could have been the Caucasus, they could have been further north and east. No one knew for sure, except the people who did know, the travellers, but no one tended to believe them. Pytheas the Phocaean, for example, travelled all the way to Britain and beyond in the fourth century BC. Heading ever north, beyond an island he called Thule, he must have approached the Arctic Circle, describing luminal regions that seemed to him to be the very end of the earth, where “the earth, the sea, and all the elements are held in suspension; a sort of bond, which you can neither walk nor sail upon.” He recorded detailed and accurate accounts of his discoveries, but his compatriots scoffed and scorned them. Greek authorities of the Classical Age were not easily convinced. Despite an abiding fondness for their myths and folklore, they prided themselves on having sensible ideas and were suspicious of fabulous tales that were not central to their tradition. It is for precisely this reason that the extraordinary stories surrounding the likes of Abaris, Pythagoras, and Epimenides cast such an enigmatic spell to this day.
Hyperborea was terra incognita—“unexplored territory”—a fabulous Golden Age land of eternal spring that lay beyond the north wind Boreas. Its river Eridanos was adorned with swans and lined with poplar trees that wept golden tears of amber. Its people were a blessed, long-lived race, untouched by war, hard toil, and the ravages of old age and disease. They were harmoniously ruled by the three gigantic sons of Boreas, high priests of Apollo who honoured their god in an eternal festival of music, song, and dance; their soaring paeans joined by the sweet song of the circling Hyperborean swans who drew Apollo’s golden chariot across the sky when he wintered there every year.
Hyperborea was protected to the south by the bitterly cold and impassable Riphaean Mountains, whose peaks were inhabited by gold-guarding griffins and its valleys by the cyclopean Arimaspoi tribe. Beneath the southern slopes lay Pterophoros, a desolate, frozen desert cursed with eternal winter.
Diodorus describes the account given by the sceptical fourth century BC philosopher Hecataeus of Abdera:
Hecataeus and certain others say that in the regions beyond the land of the Celts there lies in the ocean an island no smaller than Sicily. This island, is situated in the north and is inhabited by the Hyperboreans, who are called by that name because their home is beyond the point whence the north wind (Boreas) blows; and the island is both fertile and productive of every crop, and since it has an unusually temperate climate it produces two harvests each year. Moreover, the following legend is told concerning it: Leto 112 was born on this island, and for that reason Apollo is honoured among them above all other gods; and the inhabitants are looked upon as priests of Apollo, after a manner, since daily they praise this god continuously in song and honour him exceedingly. And there is also on the island both a magnificent sacred precinct of Apollo and a notable temple which is adorned with many votive offerings and is spherical in shape. Furthermore, a city is there which is sacred to this god, and the majority of its inhabitants are players on the cithara; and these continually play on this instrument in the temple and sing hymns of praise to the god, glorifying his deeds.
The Hyperboreans also have a language, we are informed, which is peculiar to them, and are most friendly disposed towards the Greeks, and especially towards the Athenians and the Delians, who have inherited this good-will from most ancient times. The myth also relates that certain Greeks visited the Hyperboreans and left behind them there costly votive offerings bearing inscriptions in Greek letters. And in the same way Abaris, a Hyperborean, came to Greece in ancient times and renewed the good-will and kinship of his people to the Delians. They say also that the moon, as viewed from this island, appears to be but a little distance from the earth and to have upon it prominences, like those of the earth, which are visible to the eye. The account is also given that the god visits the island every nineteen years, the period in which the return of the stars to the same place in the heavens is accomplished; and for this reason the nineteen-year period is called by the Greeks the “year of Meton.” At the time of this appearance of the god he both plays on the cithara and dances continuously the night through from the vernal equinox until the rising of the Pleiades, expressing in this manner his delight in his successes. And the kings of this city and the supervisors of the sacred precinct are called Boreadae, since they are descendants of Boreas, and the succession to these positions is always kept in their family.113
Abaris the Celt: Druid Priest of Albion
British scholars over the centuries have, of course, been particularly keen to identify this Hyperborean island “beyond the land of the Celts” (Gaul) as Britain, and the “notable, spherical temple” as Stonehenge, while the “magnificent sacred precinct of Apollo” makes me think of Avebury. Patriots from different parts of Britain have sought to claim the splendid Abaris as one of their own, as amusingly enunciated by Godfrey Higgins in the 1830s:
The Abaris of whom mention has been made, was a very celebrated philosopher of the Hyperboreans. It seems to be pretty well established that he was from the British isles, and much pains have been taken by the authors of the different islands to get possession of him. Every true and loyal Scot is certain that he came from the Hebrides: Mr. Vallencey proves, as clear as the sun at noon, that he was an Irishman. This seems odd to the Welshmen, who are quite certain that he came from Wales; and Mr. Borlase does not fail to secure him for Cornwall. I shall not be rash enough to attempt the decision of this grand question. I am quite content that we have him amongst us. He appears to have been a priest of Apollo, and an Irish or British Celtic Druid.114
The Mr. Vallencey mentioned by Higgins attempts to make a case for an Irish character called Abhras, who, he assures us, travelled “to distant parts in quest of knowledge and, after a long time to have returned by way of Scotland, where he remained seven years, bringing a new system of religion. This was opposed by the Fribolgs, in consequence of which a civil war arose, which lasted twenty-seven years before the new religion was established.” 115
By “Fribolgs” Vallencey presumably means the Fir Bolgs, a legendary group of settlers mentioned in the Lebor Gabála Érenn (The Book of the Taking of Ireland), whose ancestors left Ireland after a great calamity and went to Greece, where they were enslaved for 230 years before returning (apparently at the same time as the Israelites left Egypt) as conquerors. They in turn are displaced by their ancient relations, the Tuatha Dé Danann, who return from the north having achieved supernatural powers. There are some intriguing matches here, but not enough to make a convincing case, especially since I can’t find any further mention of Abhras.
Bladud the Wolf Lord
Another bold claim is made on behalf of the English city of Bath by the eighteenth century English antiquarian John Wood the Elder. In An Essay Towards a Description of Bath he recounts the legend of the mythical founder of Bath, King Bladud, father of Shakespeare’s King Lear, telling us that, according to Geoffrey of Monmouth,116 Bladud was sent by his father to be educated in the liberal arts in Athens. After his father’s death he returned, with four philosophers, and founded a university at Stamford in Lincolnshire, which flourished until it was suppressed by Saint Augustine of Canterbury “on account of heresies which were taught there.” He ruled for twenty years from 863 BC or 500 BC, in which time he built Kaerbadum or Caervaddon (Bath), creating the hot springs there by the use of magic. He is said to have made or grown a set of wings with the help of necromancy, and it is on such scanty and dubious foundations that Wood conjures up his conviction that Bladud is none other than Abaris Skywalker and that the knowledge he returned from Athens with, and upon which he founded the university, was that which was imparted to him by Pythagoras.
Alas, in attempting to fly to (or from) the temple of Apollo in London, he plunged, Icarus-like 117 to his death. The connection with Athens and Apollo is again intriguing but unconvincing, and Wood misses an opportunity when he attempts to explain Bladud’s name as meaning something like “star dude,” when in fact it means “Wolf Lord,” which is much more suggestive, since several of Apollo’s epithets connect him with wolves: Lykeios, “Wolf-god”; Lykegenes, “Wolf-born”; Lykoktonos, “Wolf-killer”; the wolf who protects the flocks. Apollo’s mother Leto is said to have fled Hyperborea in the form of a she-wolf to escape the murderous jealousy of Hera, and Apollo is associated with werewolf cults in Arcadia.
So John Wood missed a trick here, but lest I leave you with the impression that he was a feckless historian, I should point out that a plan he drew of Stonehenge is considered the most important ever made and his detailed survey of much greater value than that of his celebrated contemporary William Stukely.
It is quite possible that the builders of the Neolithic stone circles worshipped a god that was identical to Apollo. Renowned Stonehenge archaeologist Dennis Price is even convinced that the remains of the lost city of Apollo, referred to by the explorer Pytheas, are situated under King’s Barrow Ridge overlooking Stonehenge. It is possible too that the Celtic Druids were influenced by, or shared some of the same knowledge as Pythagoras. Higgins insists that in the Celtic Welsh language the verb pythagori means “to explain the system of the universe.” This would be fascinating if true, but unfortunately the verb does not appear in the Welsh dictionaries I have consulted. I have, however, found another, perhaps more compelling lead with regard to possibly Pythagorean Druidism.
Zalmoxis: The Subterranean Man-God
St. Hippolytus, writing around 220 AD, intriguingly insists that the person responsible for transmitting to the Celtic Druids their Pythagorean understanding of the cosmos and the soul was an intriguing semi-mythical character called Zalmoxis or Zamolxis 118:
And the Celtic Druids investigated to the very highest point the Pythagorean philosophy, after Zamolxis, by birth a Thracian, a servant of Pythagoras, became to them the originator of this discipline. Now, after the death of Pythagoras, Zamolxis, repairing thither, became to them the originator of this philosophy. The Celts esteem these [the Druids] as prophets and seers, on account of their foretelling to them certain (events), from calculations and numbers by the Pythagorean art; on the methods of which very art also we shall not keep silence, since also from these some presumed to introduce heresies; but the Druids resort to magical rites likewise.119
Zalmoxis appears to have been an ancestor or hero divinity of the Getae or Dacian people of Northern Thrace, who were affected by a massive migration of Iranian Scythians moving east to west during the first half of the first millennium BC, followed by a second equally large wave of Celts migrating west to east. When Celtic warriors first penetrated these territories, they seem to have mixed with the domestic population and merged many of their cultural traditions. Given this understanding, there is no good reason to argue with Hippolytus’s main point, since the western and eastern Celtic tribes were all connected by the great waterways of the Danube and Rhine. Whether Zalmoxis really was directly connected with Pythagoras is doubtful. It may be that his legend accounts for the influx of shamanic influences into Greece via the Iranian Scythians, influencing Orphism and thence Pythagoras. The influence may also have flowed the other way, and in this regard, it is interesting to note that when Julius Caesar arrived in Gaul he found the Celtic tribes worshipping the classical Graeco-Roman gods, including Apollo. We have little choice but to take Caesar’s word for it, because the Celts left no written record of their beliefs. We only have the evidence of Caesar and a couple of other authorities, such as Herodotus.
There is evidence that reincarnation has always been an inherent part of the ancient beliefs held in common among all the Indo-European peoples, including the Celts, the Scythians, and the Germanic tribes.
Classical authors mention a belief in immortality held by the Celts. The Greek ethnographer Posidonius was probably the original source for most of these early references (including the one by Hippolytus quoted above) and equated Celtic doctrine with that of Pythagoras. Caesar used Posidonius as his source when he wrote:
A lesson which they [the Druids] take particular pains to inculcate is that the soul does not perish, but after death passes from one body to another; they think this is the best incentive to bravery, because it teaches men to disregard the terrors of death.120
Diodorus writes:
The belief of Pythagoras prevails among them [the Gauls], that the souls of men are immortal and that after a prescribed number of years they commence upon a new life, the soul entering into another body.121
The Vikings also appear to have believed in reincarnation, for we read in the poetic Edda:
Sigrun was early dead of sorrow and grief. It was believed in olden times that people were born again, but that is now called old wives’ folly. Of Helgi and Sigrun it is said that they were born again; he became Helgi Haddingjaskati, and she Kara the daughter of Halfdan, as is told in the Lay of Kara, and she was a Valkyrie.122
As for Zalmoxis, we know very little about him apart from what Herodotus has to tell us in his Histories, where he says that the Getae (“the bravest and most law-abiding of all Thracians”) worshipped Zalmoxis as a god, and goes on to say:
For myself, I have been told by the Greeks who dwell beside the Hellespont and Pontus that this Zamolxis was a man who was once a slave in Samos, his master being Pythagoras, son of Mnesarchus; presently, after being freed and gaining great wealth, he returned to his own country. Now the Thracians were a meanly-living and simple witted folk, but this Zamolxis knew Ionian usages and a fuller way of life than the Thracian; for he had consorted with Greeks, and moreover with one of the greatest Greek teachers, Pythagoras; wherefore he made himself a hall, where he entertained and feasted the chief among his countrymen, and taught them that neither he nor his guests nor any of their descendants should ever die, but that they should go to a place where they would live for ever and have all good things. While he was doing as I have said and teaching this doctrine, he was all the while making him an underground chamber. When this was finished, he vanished from the sight of the Thracians, and descended into the underground chamber, where he lived for three years, the Thracians wishing him back and mourning him for dead; then in the fourth year he appeared to the Thracians, and thus they came to believe what Zamolxis had told them. Such is the Greek story about him.
I for my part neither put entire faith in this story of Zamolxis and his underground chamber, nor do I altogether discredit it: but I believe Zamolxis to have lived long before the time of Pythagoras. Whether there was ever really a man of the name, or whether Zamolxis is nothing but a native god of the Getae, I now bid him farewell. As for the Getae themselves, the people who observe the practices described above, they were now reduced by the Persians, and accompanied the army of Darius. 123
The relating of Zalmoxis’s underground seclusion is intriguing, as is the assertion that he returned north, like Abaris, with the great wealth that he had gained. Ah yes, Abaris. According to that scholarly esoteric sleuth Peter Kingsley, if we really want to know where Abaris came from we need look no further than his name, which simply means “the Avar” in Greek.
Abaris the Avar: Tulku Shaman of the Steppes
The Avars were a nomadic people renowned above all else for their archery. They developed a light bow that could be used with devastating penetration and accuracy while astride a galloping horse. The design was not bettered for thousands of years. A tribe of mysterious origin, they still exist, retaining a tribal identity in parts of Dagestan in the Russian Caucasus. Their territory has ranged far and wide over the centuries. In the European Dark Ages, they had a large kingdom that, at its height, covered most of the land to the west of the Black Sea as far as Austria, and absorbed much of the Byzantine Empire to the south, from which it leeched enormous quantities of gold in exchange for peace. They were eventually defeated by Charlemagne and almost annihilated. But where they were at the time when Abaris and his arrow found Pythagoras is a matter of conjecture. Peter Kingsley, whose extraordinary and groundbreaking research has shone unexpected light on the mystery of Abaris Skywalker, is convinced that the Avars were originally of Mongolian extraction and were ranging the desert wastelands beyond the Altai Mountains when Abaris set off on his mission.
The earliest sources describe him as a Scythian, which for the ancient Greeks meant someone of eastern appearance of rather vague address: somewhere north of Greece and east of the Black Sea. Kingsley makes an exciting and convincing case for Abaris being essentially a Mongolian shaman and explores the history of Buddhist Tibet back to its indigenous shamanic roots, establishing how the invading monastic culture of Tibet displaced the original shamanic tradition (of which Bön-Po is the last remnant), while appropriating some of its most esoteric treasures. Foremost amongst the latter is the tulku tradition. A tulku is a reincarnated soul of an important lineage, such as those of the Dalai Lamas and Karmapas of Tibetan Buddhism. The process whereby the reincarnated soul is recognized and accepted as the legitimate successor is not a precise science, making it all the more remarkable that the tulku system has survived so successfully within Tibetan Buddhism for more than eight hundred years.
In the late 1980s I had the opportunity to get to know a cousin of a very close friend, who, at the age of seven, was recognised as a tulku by the sixteenth Karmapa following a visit to the Monkey Temple in Khatmandhu in 1974. The boy, Ossian Maclise, kept telling his parents that he wanted to go up to the temple, so one day they took him up there, and he caught the attention of some visiting lamas from the Karmapa’s seat-in-exile in Rumtek Monastery, Sikkim. There was a recognition between the boy and the monks, and he and his mother were invited to visit Rumtek, where a gradual process unfolded, which resulted in the Karmapa formally recognising Ossian as a tulku of an important Karma Kagyu lineage. Ossian was the original Western “Golden Child,” the first of several tulkus to be born to white, Western parents.
His mother Hetty, now dead, whom I also met on a couple of occasions, wrote a fascinating account of Ossian’s story, which begins before he was conceived with a visit she made to the Hopi nation in the southwestern United States in 1966. A venerable tribal elder took her out to the desert and showed her an ancient petroglyph, which he explained marked a prophecy that a Purifier would come “wearing a red hat, a red cloak, bringing a red God and that he would make rain. They said they would try to trick him to find out if he was the Purifier. They would tell him that they hadn’t had any rain. They never have any rain. And he would make rain because he felt sorry for them.” In 1974, the year that he recognized Ossian, the Karmapa visited the Hopi in his full red-hatted regalia and it rained for two days. Hetty’s story is a remarkable document, but it has never before appeared in print and is currently marooned on a blog site that could disappear at any moment. I was hoping to reproduce it in full as an appendix, but I have been unable to find anyone attached to Hetty’s estate from whom to ask permission. I recommend interested readers track her story down.124
In Tibetan Buddhism there are various conventions that help to identify a tulku, but one of the most dependable factors is the ability of a highly conscious soul to recognize another. We don’t know how Abaris knew that a tulku of Apollo had manifested in Greece, or how he was precisely drawn to him, but we can maybe hazard some guesses. Some scholars are very uncomfortable with the use of such terms as shamanism being applied to the likes of Orpheus, Pythagoras, and Epimenides. Some believe that it has too much of an Asian flavour and that it should only be applied to very specific social roles. For example, it is not correct to describe somebody noted by his or her community for their ability to travel outside the body as a shaman, unless they are also serving their community by providing messages or assistance from “the other side.” But in the case of one of Pythagoras’s previous reincarnations, this is precisely the scenario.
Hermotimus of Clazomenae: The Astral Traveller
Hermotimus of Clazomenae was a sixth century BC sage, noted by Aristotle for being the first to propose the idea of psyche being the primal cause of motion. He was famous for claiming to able to travel far and wide in his sleep and was able to demonstrate the truth of this by revealing things he could not otherwise have known and bringing useful messages and news to his friends and neighbours. He would lie on the ground and leave his body, sometimes for days at a time, just like the reports of Siberian and Mongolian shamans.125 The fact (if such it be) that Hermotimus was able to do this is not in itself indicative of East Asian shamanic techniques filtering into Greece. On the contrary, “out of body” experiences or astral travelling, as it came to be called by nineteenth century occultists, can happen spontaneously to people of any culture at any time. It has happened to me. With experience and practice the ability can be controlled, and adept practitioners can do it at will.
Hermotimus famously identified psyche as the fundamental active force, without which matter is inert. Psyche is usually translated as “mind,” but it is also the word almost exclusively used for “soul.” In fact, since its literal meaning is connected to the word for “breath,” it would be best translated as “spirit,” which is derived from the Latin for breath (as in respiration). The only one of the Pre-Socratic sorcerers to use a different word for soul or spirit was Empedocles, who we shall come to in due course. Establishing to what extent the likes of Hermotimus distinguished between mind, soul, and spirit is highly problematic, and clear philological definitions do not appear in written form for quite some time to come. This is not to say that these three things are simply intellectual ideas just starting to dawn in the consciousness of a few exceptional human beings struggling to give them verbal expression. From the esoteric perspective, these vehicles of consciousness are eternal principles just waiting to be understood. As such, the maker of the Lion Man had the same opportunity to discover them and differentiate between them as Pythagoras did or we do today. The qualification for experiencing them for what they are is not predicated upon a chain of culturally received ideas, specific techniques, or even the “evolution” of consciousness.126 The only qualification necessary is the quality of attention that an individual human being is able to bring to bear on the reality of its existence.
It is possible that Hermotimus was initiated into some practical techniques for leaving his body at will, but it seems more likely that he was self-taught. By using his brilliant psyche to pay very close attention to itself he had discovered that it, or at least some aspect of it, had certain abilities that he was able to experience and direct, but which still defy scientific explanation. Precisely what part of his psyche/mind/soul was able to leave his body remained a subject of much debate amongst Greek thinkers for centuries, influencing Plato’s concept of the soul, which in turn influenced all subsequent European thinkers, also impacting Christianity and Islam. The true nature of consciousness remains elusive, of course, to this day. The only way, it seems, to know the reality of the soul/psyche is not through reading verbal explanations, but to experience it for yourself.
So Hermotimus may be an example of spontaneous shamanic activity in a non-shamanic cultural milieu, but let’s not get too caught up in pedantic semantics. If Abaris is an Avar, he comes from a shamanic culture, and yet he is possessed by Apollo and performs the same extraordinary actions, such as plague removal, that others identified as priests of Apollo do in lands thousands of miles away. To be a priest of Apollo you clearly don’t need to be Greek, and equally it seems that to be a shaman you do not need to be a classically employed member of an anthropologically approved shamanistic society.
Aristeas of Proconnesus: Time Travelling Shape-Shifter
Harpocration claimed that Abaris wrote a book about the arrival of Apollo in Hyperborea. It would be wonderful to know what that book had to say, but I don’t believe it is mentioned anywhere else in the surviving literature. After piecing together the clues, however, it is possible to admit that Apollo may have first been introduced to the Avars by a semi-legendary Greek wonder-worker called Aristeas, who lived at some time in the seventh century BC, around fifty to one hunded years before Abaris and Pythagoras. Our two main biographical sources for Aristeas are Herodotus and Pausanias, from whom we can glean the following:
Aristeas was a high-born citizen of Proconnesus between the Aegean and the Black Sea. One day he went into a shop and dropped down dead. The owner locked up the shop and went to find Aristeas’s family. News of his death quickly spread around the town, but was soon contradicted by someone claiming to have spoken to him on the road to Cyzicus. The family, meanwhile, had arrived at the shop to find no sign of him. Having vanished without trace, Aristeas reappeared in Proconnesus seven years later claiming that he had been possessed by Apollo 127 and found himself travelling to the borderlands of Hyperborea. He wrote a famous epic poem about his travels called the Arimaspea (from which the Greeks seem to have derived most of their ideas about Hyperborea) before he vanished again. Two hundred and forty years later he reappeared in Metapontum and told its citizens to establish an altar to Apollo, saying that the god had chosen that city over all others in Magna Graecia and that he himself had travelled there with the god in the form of a raven. He then repeated his vanishing trick, whereupon the perplexed Metapontines “sent to Delphi and asked the god what the vision of the man could mean; and the Pythian priestess told them to obey the vision, saying that their fortune would be better. They did as instructed. And now there stands beside the image of Apollo a statue bearing the name of Aristeas; a grove of bay-trees surrounds it; the image is set in the marketplace.” 128
Metapontum is the city where Pythagoras spent the last years of his life. Was he the Apollo that Aristeas accompanied there in the form of a raven? Telling too is the fact that in retelling the story of Aristeas’s first disappearance, Plutarch substitutes Croton for Cyzicus. Croton, just a hundred miles from Metapontum was the place where Pythagoras was first received as Hyperborean Apollo and where he established his school.
Further delving suggests that Aristeas may not have been the first Greek to introduce Apollo to the Hyperboreans. Legend says that mythic superhero Hercules visited Hyperborea and brought back an olive tree, but more historically Pausanias tells us of a legendary ancient poet from Lucia called Olen who the Delphic Pythia Boeo credits with the introduction of the cult of Apollo on Delos, the birthplace of the god.129 A lost poem of Olen’s celebrates Apollo’s first priestess, or handmaiden, a woman called Achaeia who came to Delos from Hyperborea to worship Apollo. Another legendary poet, said to have lived between Olen and Aristeas, was Melanopus of Cyme, who Pausanias and Herodotus both say wrote an ode commemorating a Hyperborean maiden called Opis, who arrived in Delos with an offering “vowed for the birth of Apollo.”
So when Harpocration mentions that Abaris “renewed the alliance between his countrymen and the inhabitants of the island of Delos,” en route to tracking down Pythagoras, he is referring to a tradition that was already centuries old before Abaris. The tradition also implies, as with Abaris, that rather than being introduced to Apollo by the Greeks, it was the Hyperboreans who picked up on the presence of Apollo and reverently sought him out for themselves. Having established the link, the Hyperboreans continued to send votive offerings to Apollo. When the first emissaries bearing these gifts failed to return, they feared the worst and devised a relay system to deliver the offerings with the cooperation of all the nations lying between Hyperborea and Delos. Herodotus provides a detailed account of this tradition, which rings very true and reports that both Homer and Hesiod wrote of the Hyperboreans, although these references have long been lost to us.
Apollo’s name is not to be found in pre-collapse Mycenaean Linear B script, although the name Paean appears, which was to become one of his epithets. Hesiod identifies Paean as a clearly distinct deity, however: “Unless Phoebus Apollo should save him from death, or Paean himself who knows the remedies for all things.” And in the Iliad, in which Apollo plays a leading role, Homer mentions Paean on two occasions as a healing god. So if what Herodotus tells us is essentially true, then it seems likely that the worship of Apollo was introduced from outside Greece some time after the Mycenean collapse. It seems extraordinary then that he should have become so firmly established in the Olympian pantheon in such a comparatively short period of time and that Homer should have given him such an influential role in the Iliad, which is set at a time in history when there is no sign of him in the Greek world.
Apollo, as we know, spent the winter months in Hyperborea, during which time Dionysus presided over Delphi. It is repeatedly described as his favourite place and the birthplace of his mother, but when the ancient writers refer specifically to “Hyperborean Apollo” it is only ever in the context of Pythagoras and Abaris. It is not clear whether the admirers of Pythagoras in Croton identified him as “Apollo arrived from Hyperborea” 130 before Abaris tracked him down or afterwards. If it was before, then it would be all the more remarkable. Either way it is an extraordinary way to describe a Greek who had never travelled north at all, let alone to Hyperborea. A key distinction between Greek Apollo and Hyperborean Apollo seems to be that the Apollo revered by the Hyperboreans is a shaman god, a god of terror and ecstatic possession and, it seems, a god who is able to incarnate in the flesh as a true demigod, neither god nor human, but a different category of being, as attested by his devotees in Italy.
92 Presumably the same Epimenides who stated, according to Iamblichus, that Pythagoras was sired by Apollo.
93 The Greek word catharsis originally referred to the purging of “spiritual maladies that are vexatious to the soul” or psychological confusion.
94 The Greek Anthology (7.10.1–3), compiled and translated by W. R. Paton, 1917.
95 Herodotus: The Histories, 4, 64. Translated by Robin Waterfield, London: Oxford University Press, 1998.
96 The only other incidence I have come across is a single mention of Pherekydes’s skin also being preserved by the Spartans, but that might be a mistaken conflation with Epimenides.
97 It was something of a rite of passage for Greek writers to compose a history of the voyages of the Argonauts.
98 Porphyry, Life of Pythagoras, 17.
99 Callimachus: Hymns and Epigrams. Translated by Mair, A. W. & G. R. Loeb Classical Library Volume 129. London: William Heinemann, 1921.
100 Interestingly the Bibliotheca of Pseudo-Apollodorus says that the Dactyls were the offspring of Apollo.
101 Sumach, Alexander: A Treasury of Hashish, Toronto: Stoneworks Publishing, 1976.
102 Eliade, 1982.
103 Although the otherwise ascetic sadhus, followers of Shiva, smoke cannabis as a sacrament.
104 See Paglia, Camille: Sexual Personae, Yale University Press, 1990.
105 Mackenzie, 1917. Proclus was a major fifth century Greek Neoplatonist philosopher.
106 Porphyry, 14.
107 Egregore is a Greek word for the presiding spirit of any group—e.g., a tribe, nation, family, football club, or company.
108 The first I ever read about Apollo, aged eight, was right at the beginning of Homer’s Iliad, where he answers the prayer of one of his priests by bringing a plague upon the camp of the Greeks besieging Troy.
109 Iamblichus.
110 Valerius Harpocration was a Greek grammarian of Alexandria, probably working in the second century AD, when the Alexandrian libraries were still intact, providing him with a wealth of sources that no longer exist.
111 Pythagoras was also famous for wearing trousers, a habit considered very “un-Greek” and associated with “barbarians.”
112 Mother of Apollo, daughter of the Titan Phoebe (“Bright”). Phoebus is one of Apollo’s most common epithets.
113 Diodorus, Book 2.
114 Godfrey Higgins, Anacalypsis, IV, IV. London: Longman, 1836.
115 Vallencey quoted by Higgins.
116 Best known for popularising the myths of Arthur and Merlin (mid-twelfth century).
117 Icarus was the son of Daedalus, the architect of the Minotaur’s labyrinth in Crete. To escape the island, they fashioned wings from feathers. Icarus soared too close to the sun and the wax that held his feathers in place melted, plunging him to his death.
118 Esoteric historian Mircea Eliade, who can claim Thracian heritage, calls him Zalmoxis, so I go with that.
119 Hippolytus. The Refutation of All Heresies, translated by Rev. J. H. MacMahon, Edinburgh: T. and T. Clark, 1868.
120 Hippolytus, chapter 22.
121 Diodorus, V, 28.
122 The Poetic Edda (“Helgakvitha Hundingsbana”), II, 50, translated from the Icelandic by Henry Adams Bellows, New York: The American-Scandinavian Foundation, 1923.
123 Herodotus, The Persian Wars, 4, 93–96. First published in this translation as: The History of Herodotus of Halicarnassus, A New English Version edited with copious Notes and Appendices by George Rawlinson (trans.), London: John Murray, Albermarle Street, 1858.
124 The complete version of Hetty’s intriguing and colourful tale “Namtar of the Wee Lama Boy” was posted on Hetty’s blog: www.phantomlyoracula.com. It now seems to have disappeared, but is reproduced in part here: http://tibetanaltar.blogspot.co.uk/2009/10/tibetan-prophecy-hopi-prophecy.html. If any reader wants the full story, they can contact me: guy.ogilvy@gmail.com.
125 Unfortunately for Hermotimus, his wife allowed a rival group of sorcerer initiates called the Cantharids to kill him while his body lay defenceless on the ground. He must have achieved very high standing in his community, however, because a sanctuary was consecrated in his honour following his death.
126 A species’s capacity for consciousness will grow if its brain capacity increases. Consciousness per se does not evolve; it simply is.
127 Interestingly, George Rawlinson translated the original Greek 
, which literally means “taken by Phoebus” (= Apollo), as “wrapt in a Bacchic fury” (1895).
128 Herodotus, The Histories, IV. 13–15.
129 Pausanias, Histories of Greece, V, 7.
130 Diogenes 8, 11.