Indeterminate, limitless. But perhaps much more earthly than that. The ancient Greek word àpeiron is commonly translated as a principle pertinent to cosmology. In L’infinito: un equivoco millenario, the Infinite: a millenarian misunderstanding, the Italian philologist and linguist Giovanni Semerano (1913-2005) instead brings the term back to Semitic-Akkadian origins, corresponding to the meaning of “earth”. Indeed, “earthy sea“. This makes the terms intriguing for an alchemist.
Giovanni Semerano’s essay aims to reinterpret the culture, especially the philosophy of classical Greece, with the assumption of deriving all languages from a common Akkadian-Sumerian matrix. This allows him to a radical reinterpretation of the archaic and classical Greece’s entire story, no longer seen as a miraculous island of rationality but as an integral part of a single community, which included Mesopotamia, Anatolia, and Egypt.
Indeed, despite his important role in the so-called “Greek miracle” – whereby existing mythical tales were rationally elaborated into a new logical way of thinking – Anaximander’s theories were commonly recognized not only as influenced by Greek mythical tradition – specifically, from some ideas of his teacher Thales – but also from observations made by ancient oriental civilizations, in particular by Babylonian astrologers.
Based on this interpretation, Semerano then reads the development of pre-sophistry philosophy in anti-idealist and anti-metaphysical keys. Redrawing the boundaries between differences and similarities between the ancient thinkers and making the most to derive within a corpuscular physics, he connects among the others, Anaximander, Thales, and Democritus.
The concept of infinite àpeiron is so important to Semerano that it is the title of his entire book. And we cannot talk about the concept of Apeiron without mentioning Anaximander: apparently, the term àpeiron ἄπειρον was just created by him.
Anaximander was allegedly the father of cartography and devices measuring time. He studied geometry and became a master of Thales school, where Pythagoras was argued to be a pupil. But, very likely, that was just a conjecture similar to the legend that wanted him as the discoverer of the gnomon and the concepts of solstices and equinoxes.
Only one fragment of Anaximander’s attributed treatise “On Nature” has reached us, not enough to assemble an entire philosophical system. So, information about his philosophy comes from summaries by other writers, especially Aristotle and Theophrastus. Exhaustive historical notes on Anaximander can be found elsewhere; this article will only try to determine how his philosophical views on the first principle and opposites might be applied to the alchemical Secret Fire.
When reading the unique Anaximander’s fragment, fr. B 12 1 from Simplicius of Cilea ( Byzantium, sixth century A.D. ), we can not avoid to be puzzled by the role of Time in it: “ Ἀναξίμανδρος. . . . ἀρχὴν . . . εἴρηκε τῶν ὄντων τὸ ἄπειρον . . . ἐξ ὧν δὲ ἡ γένεσίς ἐστι τοῖς οὖσι, καὶ τὴν φθορὰν εἰς ταῦτα γίνεσθαι κατὰ τὸ χρεών: διδόναι γὰρ αὐτὰ δίκην καὶ τίσιν ἀλλήλοις τῆς ἀδικίας κατὰ τὴν τοῦ χρόνου τάξιν”. Anaximander … said … that principle of beings is the infinite (ἄπειρον, àpeiron) … where beings have their origin, and also the destruction as necessary: because they pay each other punishment and atonement of injustice according to the order of time.
From an ethical point of view, the word àpeiron may have seemed intolerable to the ancient Greeks due to its underlying meaning of “the misfortune of living and atoning for the guilt of existing”.
The Greek writing for àpeiron is ἄπειρον, whose etymology is nowadays a little obscure. The most accepted translation makes the Greek term bringing back to ἀ- a-, “without”, and πεῖραρ peirar, “end, limit”. The Ionic Greek form of πέρας péras, means “end, limit, boundary”, but also “finite and definite”. In fact, the the translation of the term has been “unlimited, infinite, or indefinite”.
The first part of the word ἄπειρον seems to be αέρα. Aristotle defines αέρα as air and calls it the principle of simple bodies (Aristot. metaph. I, 3, 984a 5 = 13 A 4 D-K). This brings us back to the original semantic values
We have seen above that Semerano’s assumption of a derivation of all languages from a common Akkadian-Sumerian matrix makes Greece less of an “island” separated from other ancient cultures. The term àpeiron is no exception, indeed, Semerano makes his book thesis based on a new interpretation of this word.
Traditionally considered to be composed of a-privative (“without”) and péras (“determination”, “time”, and therefore translated as “indeterminate” or “infinite”), according to Semerano, however, since the word péras has a short ” and “, while àpeiron has a diphthong “ei”, which reads like a long closed “e”, the diphthong cannot have been produced from the short “e” of péras. Semerano reconsiders the term àpeiron, bringing it back to the Semitic ‘apar, corresponding to the biblical ‘Afar and the Akkadian eperu, all terms meaning “earth”.
The well-known fragment of Anaximander, which says that all things come from and return to ‘àpeiron, therefore, does not refer to a philosophical conception of infinity but to a concept of “belonging to the earth” that can be found throughout an earlier sapiential tradition of Asian origin and which is also present in the biblical text: “dust you are and dust you shall return.”
Some researchers confuse this reconstruction, saying that Semerano seems to ignore an essential fact: in the Ionic dialect, unlike in the attic one and many other Greek dialects, the alternation between “e” and “ei” between short vowel and diphthong, is often present and arises from well-known linguistic dynamics. Synonymous with the term used by the philosopher is, in fact, in Homer, where he speaks of pontos apèiritos, which, according to Semerano’s thesis, should be translated not as an “infinite sea”, but as “earthy sea”.
Semerano goes even further: Thales believes the stars are earthy (AËT II, 13, 1 = Dox. 341 = 11 A 17a DK) and so that the sun has an earthy appearance (Ibid., 20, 9 = Dox 349 = 11 A 17a DK), and even that the moon is earthy. Anaximenes describes the air as a dynamic cosmogonic element and associates ἄπειρον as a structural element.
I can not remember where Homer used this phrase, but it is amazingly appropriate to our alchemical doctrines. In fact, not only our mercurial sea, from which everything comes, is enclosed in the earth ( because picking it up from the air gives very poor results), but the eternal game of Solve et Coagula (3) lies the whole operations of our art.
Secret Fire runs along a constant density scale from “solute” to “fixed” and vice versa. According to Anaximander, we’ll see how the harmony of opposites mentioned by modern philosophers is just an alternation of hot and cold. We have already seen in previous articles that this is, for alchemists, the alternation of the sky, or dissolved matter, and earth, or fixed matter. Movement and stasis. It is said that the alchemist’s task is to transform everything that is not yet embodied in a body. Secret Fire, or Mercurius, is also called the Great Sea, perhaps because it is hugely available, indeterminate, and indefinite. This sea matter is our Spirit of Life, not yet defined as the soul. It is a sea because it tends to move like a snake; it flows.
Martin Heidegger’s commentary on this fragment was outstandingly out of the pack. He supposed Anaximander to develop the concept of justice through the logic of “being for death”. All things originate from àpeiron separation and is part of an “eternal” cycle that has been active ever since. Everything is contained in the essential character of death, but it is not charged with a negative meaning. It leads to the very nature of things. I don’t know if Heidegger knew that this idea of death as necessary “ nature of things” is very alchemical since before a new alchemical body is born, there is always a death of the old body.
It is helpful to recover the sense of the connections that at the origins bind “air” and ἄπειρον. Theophrastus (Phys. opin. fr. 2 = Dox. 476 = Simpl. phys. 24,26 =13 A 5 D-K) says that Anaximene affirms the unity of substance “which acts as a substratum: infinite, like ἄπειρον and not indeterminate, like that, but determined: it calls it to air. Air differs among substances by rarefaction and condensation ». Aristotle had already detected rarefaction and condensation (Simpl. phys. 149, 32 = 13 A 5 D-K).
With the air, asἄπειρον, Anaximenes, in arguing around the reasons for creation, bears an explanatory reason intended to ensure the dynamics that animated the original element. He ran to the aid of that principle that would seem destined to play a role without limits. The disciple of Anaximander seems to prevent the reserves of Aristotle and his followers and anticipates Democrito’s intuition that sees in the movement a structural property of the original principle itself, without the need for support. Anaximander must have already felt strengthened by the faith of Thales, who felt the things animated by divinity ( Plat. legg. X, 899 B (cfr. 11 A 22 D-K) but he did not think it appropriate now to disturb the gods. The same faith strikes the Phoenician Taletes as Jacob; he can bend on the betilus, on the desert stone, to adore the same arcane spirit that moves the whole, like the one listening in the hollow of the shell the thousand echoes of abysmal oceans. Anaximander could have set a certainty in that faith that “the soul is something capable of communicating motion” (Aristot. de an. I, 2 , 405a 19 = 11 A 1 D-K), that “the soul is a substance in motion, without self-propelled end” (Aet. IV, 2,1 = Dox. 386a 10 = 11 A 22a D-K).
Let’s see for confirmation of what was said and how opposites are generated by separating from the original unlimited principle and, what’s more, what Anaximander meant by “opposite”, in subsequent ancient thinkers’ writings.
SIMPLIC. phys. 24,13 (from THEOPHR. phys. opin. fr. 2; Dox. 476): “Among those who say that (the principle) is one, infinite and in movement, Anaximander, son of Prassiade, Milesian, successor, and disciple of Thales, said that principle and element of beings are the infinite, having first introduced this name of principle. And he says that the principle is neither water nor any other of the so-called elements, but another infinite nature, from which all the heavens and the worlds come in there … and have expressed that with rather poetic words. It ”s clear that having observed the mutual change of the four elements, it is clear he thought not to posit any of them as substrate but something other than these. According to him, the birth of things is not due to alteration of the element, but to the separation of opposites [from infinite] because of the eternal movement.”
SIMPLIC. phys. 150, 24: “Opposites are hot and cold, dry and wet, and so on…” See Aristot. phys. A 4. 187 to 20.
HIPPOL. ref. I 6, 1-7 p. 10 sg. [Dox. 559]: “ He said that the beginning of things was some infinity, from which the heavens and the ordering are produced. It is eternal and insenescent [B 2] and encompasses all the worlds. And he defines time as what determines generation, existence, and destruction. (3) He says that the principle and element of things are the infinite, having first given the name to the principle, and further that the movement is also eternal and it consequently formed the heavens… (6) Living things come from humid evaporated by the sun.”
HERM. irris. 10 [Dox. 653]: “ Anaximander, a citizen of Thales, said that the eternal movement is a principle older than the humid and that it will produce certain things and others are destroyed…
AËT. I 3, 3 [Dox. 277]: “ Anaximander, son of Prassiade, Milesian, says that the principle of what exists is infinite, which is where all things come from and by this are all destroyed. Thus infinite worlds are formed and then get destroyed in which form they come. It says it is unlimited because the generation never stops. But he is wrong because he does not say what is infinite: air, water, earth, or other body. He is wrong because he admits the matter but suppresses the efficient cause. The infinite is nothing but matter, and matter can not be acting if there is no efficient cause.”
ARISTOT. Phys. 4. 203 b 3 sgg: “… it is divine because it is immortal and indestructible, as required by Anaximander and the majority of physics.”
ALEX. metaph. 60, 8: “ Aristotle adds in his research also the opinion of Anaximander, who argued as a principle an intermediate between air and fire or between air and water.”
ARISTOT. Phys. A 4. 187 a 12: “ Some, stating the being as one body that acts as a substrate, and which is either one of the three elements or another denser than fire and thinner than air, produce everything by condensation and rarefaction …
ARISTOT. Phys. A 4. 187 to 20: “… The others, however, argue that from one division does split the opposition inherent in it, like Anaximander.”
SIMPLIC. de cael. 615, 13: “ Anaximander, neighbor, and friend of Thales … first assumed the infinite, so that it could be used without saving in the production of things, he also assumed infinite worlds, each of which, it seems, comes from such an infinite primordial element.”
AËT. I 7, 12 [Dox. 302]: “ Anaximander argued that the infinite heavens are gods.”
AËT. II 1, 3 [Dox. 327]: “Anaximander, Anaximenes, Archelaus, Xenophanes, Diogenes, Leucippus, Democritus, Epicurus admitted that infinite worlds are produced and destroyed in the infinity in each rotation.”
CICER. de nat. d. I 10, 25: “ Is Anaximander’s opinion that gods have been given birthing, that they born and die at certain ling intervals, and that they are the countless worlds.”
AËT. II 11, 5 [Dox. 340]: “Anaximander (says that the sky is derived) from the mixture of hot and cold.”
It is enough, and that’s Alchemy, in my opinion. Pay attention to the sentence “ from the mixture of hot and cold” (4). That is precisely how Secret Fire/ Mercurius works and operates; that’s the alchemical world machine. Observe how all things are born to be then destroyed, like in Alchemy, and be aware of Anaximander’s statement that the infinite heavens are gods. As far as rotations are involved, they are a hidden part of alchemical operations: Mercurius tends to rotate around another Mercurius. It is said that in so doing, Secret Fire/ Mercurius gives life. It would be interesting to know what of the Osiris-Isis myth was acknowledged by that sixth century b.C. greek physics.
In coming posts, we will also see how Anaximander’s thought affected alchemical symbolism, at least as far as wheels (2), columns, fishes, and flutes are concerned.
- L’infinito: un equivoco millenario. Le antiche civiltà del Vicino Oriente e le origini del pensiero greco. Giovanni Semerano. Editore Mondadori Bruno 2005;
- See also Cesare Ripa, Wheels Spindles and Celestial Pointers ;
- See also Basilius Valentinus & Solve et Coagula Tree , Philosophia Reformata, Father Sun and Mother Moon , Wenceslaw Lavinius and the Sky and Earth Properties and Stoll, the Lacinius Translator on Male and Female Elements ;
- See also Codex Marcianus Ouroboros , Cesare Ripa & the Hot Frozen Ouroboros World Machine and Dorneus & the Third Level;