THE GOLDEN VERSES Step 4

OUR KINDRED

In Step 4 we look into the penultimate relationship of Part One’s Respect and Reverence: our parents, relatives and elders, spreading our view of the cosmos wider with the help of ‘the other Hierocles of Alexandria’ who lived 2 centuries before the author of the Golden Verses. Those who are closest to us in kinship are often those with whom we have the more difficult or most acrimonious relationships, but help and advice is to hand.

Aeneas carries his father Anchises from the Sack of Troy.

* Step 4. Honour your parents and your nearest kindred. *

HONOURING THE ELDERS AND RELATIVES

Pythagoras urged his followers to behave decently to those older than themselves, to pass on the good they had inherited from their parents, and to practice lovingkindness towards their relatives and others with the fellowship that is due to another human being. (VP, 9.) How far we have come from this ideal!

Back in 1997, the Channel 4 tv network in Britain showed a three-part series called Meet the Natives, which followed the visit of five men of the traditional Kastom people from the island of Tanna in the South Pacific. It reversed the usual anthropological view of white academics scrutinizing the customs of traditional societies: this time, it was the Kastom men who were viewing us. They stayed in many different places in Britain, on a farm, in central London, and also learning about life here by staying with a British family. I remember how shocked they were to find that their host’s elderly grandfather was living in a retirement home and not with his family. Their distress and shock was palpable: how could this kind family allow their elder to live far away from them, to be cared for by some other strange people? How could this be? No-one could explain it to them satisfactorily.

This encounter of a stone-age culture with our own modern society and its very different values is probably the nearest we can come to understanding how parental neglect has become normalised in our own civilization. In ancient Greece, it was equally disgraceful to not care for one’s parents. To tend to them, give them a home, to try hard to please them was a religious act: to neglect them was tantamount to neglecting Zeus and Hera.

‘Pythagoras noted the example of Heracles, who was the patron hero of the Pythagorean colonists in southern Italy, as to why it is necessary to willingly obey what parents ask of them. For he, being a god, was yet obedient to someone older than himself, and struggled through his labours, but established for his father Zeus the triumphal contest at Olympia in commemoration of his achievements.’

- Iamblichus: The Pythagorean Life 8, 4.

Plato makes it plain that ‘throughout all our lives we must diligently observe reverence of speech towards our parents above all things, seeing that for light and winged words there is a most heavy penalty,—for over all such matters Nemesis, messenger of Justice, is appointed to keep watch; wherefore the child must yield to its parents when they are angry, and when they give rein to their anger either by word or deed, the child must pardon them, seeing that it is most natural for parents to be especially angry when they deem that they are wronged by his own child.’ (Plato Laws 717c-d, edited)

HIerocles makes it clear that looking after your parents in their old age is expected of all children, and that ‘to refuse them the care that lies in our hands to accomplish’ is unnatural, however burdensome it may be. (GV, V, 7.) This duty was sometimes fulfilled by adult children, but equally, parental care was sometimes furnished by slaves who were bought in order to look after the parents. Those without children, would often adopt someone as their heir, with the expectation that they would be tended. Which is not unlike several options open to us in modern society, where live-in helpers, or nursing and retirement homes are serving the needs of elders.

For the Ancient Greeks, the dishonour of parental neglect was not just seen as against the parents, but also as a rooted impiety that strikes against the gods themselves, for the Greeks regarded themselves as ‘all coming from Zeus’, the God of Kindred relations.

In Athens, refusing to care for your parents was actually punishable by loss of citizenship, since the carelessness of one person towards their parents was felt to reflect upon the whole city state. In ancient Sparta, the power of elders was very much stronger, possibly due to their strictness in bringing up children. Their Gerousia was a council of elders comprising the two sitting kings and 28 elected men all over the age of 60, who served for life. This powerful council controlled Sparta’s legislative agenda, selecting which bills would go to the larger Assembly for votes, with the Gerousia members retaining a veto over the Assembly’s actions. The Gerousia also constituted the criminal court for the worst crimes, such as treason and murder, where the penalty was the loss of citizenship, exile or death. Within the larger Assembly itself, those over 50 years of age were permitted to speak first – thus providing them with a platform for their candidacy in the Gerousia when they turned 60. Cicero has a wonderful story about them:

‘Lysander, the Spartan…. is reported to have said more than once that in Sparta old age has its most fitting abode; because nowhere else is so much deference paid to age and nowhere else is it more honoured. For example, there is a story that when an old man entered the theatre at Athens during the dramatic performances, not one of his countrymen in that vast crowd offered him a place; but when he came to the special seats occupied by the Lacedaemonians and assigned to them because they were ambassadors, all of them arose, it is said, and invited him to sit down. After this action had been greeted by the whole audience with repeated applause, one of the Spartans remarked: “These Athenians know what politeness is, but they won't practise it.”’ (Cicero, De Senectute 63-64)

I remember a similar situation, while I was sitting on a panel at a conference in USA, with four other speakers. During a lively interchange with the audience, a very frail elderly man entered the room and couldn’t find a seat. One of the panel, a woman from Burkina Faso, immediately stood and went to attend on him, finding him a chair - shaming everyone in the room for their lack of alacrity. Coming from a country where elders were given foremost respect, her attentiveness reminded us all how we ought to act.

FAMILY FEUDS AND FRACTURES

Now, I hear your thought! What about how we are to behave with relatives who are not honourable, but irritating, or even downright badly behaved? Epictetus catches that thought for us, allowing us to hear our own voices of objection:

‘Our appropriate actions are measured on the whole by our social relationships. He’s your father: and you’re obliged to take care of him, to give way to him, and everything, even to put up with it when he scolds or strikes you.

“But he’s a bad father!”

So, do the ties of nature bind you then only to a good father? No, just to your father. “But my brother is wronging me.”

Very well, maintain the relationship that you have towards him, but don’t look to what he is doing, rather what you must do if you were to keep your choice in harmony with nature. Because no one will cause you harm if you don’t wish it; you’ll have been harmed only when you supposed that you’ve been harmed. In this way then you’ll discover the appropriate action to expect from your neighbour, from a fellow citizen, from a general, if you get into the habit of examining your social relationships.’ (Epictetus Handbook 30.)

We all know that families can be the first to fall out, especially when individual benefit is at issue, ‘Whoever sees to someone to be standing in the way of that benefit, whether it be a brothers, father or child, a lover or beloved, then they will start to hate, reject and curse. There is nothing that a human being loves so much as their own benefit, for that becomes for him their father, brother, family, country and god. And even were we to suppose that the gods were standing in the way of own interest, we revile them and cast down their statues and burn their temples, which is what Alexander did when his beloved Hephaeston died, ordering the temple of Asclepias to be burned down. (ED 2:22, 15-17.) What is the remedy for this?

Epictetus goes on, ‘If we identify our own benefit with plenty, honour, your country, parents, friends, then all of them will be kept safe; but should you place your interests in one pan of the scale. and your friends, country, your parents, even justice herself in the other pan, the latter will all be lost, because it will be outweighed by your own interest.’ (ED 2:22,15-18)

We often see how a seemingly close-bonded family can come apart at seams when the death and funeral of an elder takes place, when those who stand to gain from the will, or who seek to step up and swing the power-balance of the family towards their own rightful sway, or who make assumptions about their own place in the family, can become a nightmarish reality for which no-one is quite prepared.

Families are experts at manipulation because family loyalties predispose all of us to support our family’s values and system, but there are times when we must wake up and be first a citizen of the cosmos. When the carer becomes the curser, then there arise situations that seem unforgivable – when the abuse, violence or cruelty of a parent towards their child alienates that child forever. Such serious matters must be seen from the longer perspective – something that I have to do daily in my ancestral healing work, as I range through time to find an epicentre of causation for shocking deeds or harmful beliefs that have become generationally wound into the family system. The ancestral bequest gives us our colouration, our skills and dispositions, but it often stretches forward into our own generation and beyond, bringing it with it burdensome and harmful behaviours which become an affliction to us. No baby born comes into life with the intention of harming another, yet harm arises and is inflicted. These kinds of bequests make any consideration of parents and family very difficult to approach, I am aware, so let’s be clear we are not condoning harmful behaviour here. Hierocles is very clear about what is necessary:

‘But if the will of our parents be not always conformable to the divine laws, what can one do who finds themselves in this sort of bind between the two laws? If two good actions offer themselves to us and one is barely good and the other better, we ought to prefer the better when we cannot accomplish both. It is a good action to be obedient to God, and it is it is good likewise to obey our parents. If what God and our parents require of us agree, so that in obeying both we tend to the same end, it is a great happiness for us and the double duty is indispensable; but if the law of God commands us one thing and our parents another we ought, in this contradiction which cannot be reconciled, to obey God by disobeying our parents only in those things where they themselves are disobedient to the Divine Laws, for it is not possible that anyone who would observe the rules of virtue could ever agree with those that violate them.

We ought not to neglect our parents under a protest of virtue, so neither ought we to fall by a blind and senseless obedience into the worst of all evils – impiety. But if they threaten to put us to death for our disobedience, or to disinherit us, we will not be dismayed their menaces, but think immediately on what they will fall. They threaten what they made (the body). But that as to that part of us that is safe from their passion (the soul), that cannot suffer by their injustice, and that comes not from them, we ought to preserve it free and subject to the world of the gods alone.’ (GV, V, 4-5, 6.)

Every spiritual code of the world has enshrined obedience to parents, and it is often very hard for people to go against a deeply-held tenet like this, but there are times when we need to become aware and to leave. Very many times in my shamanic practice, I have had to counsel clients that leaving an intractable and dangerous situation within the parental or family home is essential for their health or for the safety of their children, and that the natural parental duty and love that they were brought up to observe has to hold to a higher spiritual support: in that way, the fleeing child can preserve the respect for life that they can pass down to their children. When the parent-child bond is broken – and I know many people who have crossed continents to avoid a violent and abusive situation – it is always a sadness, but we do not at the same time avoid connections with our wider family nor with our deeper ancestry which is untainted by that abuse.

Pythagoras believed that the separation of parents from child was the greatest of wrongs. (Iamblichus VP 9,49) In an age where very many adult children worldwide are cutting off from their parents for trivial reasons, or where family squabbles or inexplicable distances of silence descend between close relatives, we have to find ways to keep the wider web of relationships strong. Divide and conquer when applied to families, causes irreparable damage and painful consequences, where grandchildren never see their grandparents, and where the children of brother and sister never know their cousins. How can we proceed in such a divisive age?

WELCOMING WONDER AND JOY

Most of the philosophers who have spoken about honouring parents or relatives were men, but I wonder how different this testimony might have been had the understanding of a woman been applied to it? From a Greek perspective, the responsibility for honouring a parent was a primary and essential one. But how children are with their parents can also be a reflection of how parents see their children, which I hope is a useful window into a more wholistic view.

As any parent will tell you, no matter how well or ill prepared they are to welcome a child into the family, babies will change our whole outlook. As adults, our acquaintance with wonder and joy has already begun to elude us, but when a baby comes along, every part of their development reacquaints us with wonder once more, for this tiny new human being starts to learn the minute it can focus its eyes, and through those bright first glances we also can catch a glimpse of the cosmos as it is.

That wider wonder and respect for the world around us was central to Pythagorean life, bringing us closer to all that is alive on earth. From our current understanding of the cosmos as one connected place environmentally, we have a little more help to explore our relationship to nature and to each other.

The person who wrote very helpfully about our wider relationship to the living cosmos was, confusingly, also called Hierocles of Alexandria, but he was a Stoic philosopher. We will call him ‘Hierocles the Stoic’ here, so as not to confuse things. In the second century CE, he developed the notion of oikeiôsis or a concern for ‘the household of the earth.’ He wrote, ‘we are surrounded by many circles, some smaller that are included within the larger, and some larger which include the others….the nearest circle is the one which everyone draws about their own mind, which surrounds their body… The next circle surrounds it and is made up of parents, brothers and sisters, spouse and children. The third circle contains uncles and aunts, grandparents, nieces and nephews. Then the circle of more distant relatives. Beyond this is the circle containing people of the same tribe, then the one that contains citizens, those that live near the capital city, and another circle of those who all live in the same province or county. The outermost and largest circle is that which includes all the other circles, made up of the whole human race.’ ³ This theory took it as read that every living person had a correct relationship to the gods as well. Hierocles was proposing that the way we conduct ourselves to our nearest and most distant kindred could be modelled towards our fellow and sister beings in ever widening circles of familiarity. (Matthews, C. Time Changers Tarot)

Hierocles’ idea practically enables us to ethically consider our relationship to the ever-widening circles of the universe that surround us, and how we might conduct ourselves with those inside each circle: yourself, with your family, your fellow citizens, your country-people, humankind as a whole, and the gods. His concept was based upon the way we care about our close family and how it might be expanded to include strangers as friends, friends as relatives, and so on. He was first drawn to this understanding of endearment and affinity from his own study of animals, and the way that they care for their offspring and each other. Hierocles the Stoic also wrote about how the inclusion of these different kinds of relationship with people might be acknowledged by calling strangers ‘brother or sister.’

We see similar constructs at work today in traditional, transmigratory, and indigenous societies who live at close quarters with each other: to maintain equitable relations in sometimes stressful living situations, it is common to respectfully call all elders ‘grandmother or grandfather,’ while people older than yourself called ‘uncle or aunt’, and people of your own age becoming ‘cousin’ or ‘brother and sister,’ while those younger than yourself are called ‘niece or nephew’ or ‘son or daughter.’ This custom equalizes everyone as a family member, even if they are visitors or strangers to the group.

Of course, Hierocles the Stoic’s concept of ‘the household of the earth,’ being predicated upon just human beings, is different to our own sense of the world now, because today we are adopting a more animist view, where we may think of that household as including all living beings, from rocks, plants and animals, to trees, interrelated eco-systems and habitats, with all the zones and landscapes of the earth. Science has been continuously stretching our view of the physical universe ever wider and, were Hierocles the Stoic to be living now, he would undoubtedly add to his concentric circles of affinity to include the environment, the distant stars of other galaxies, as well as to the bacterial life that was unseeable before the coming of the microscope.

This way of considering things encourages the making of relations between all beings, establishing a peaceful interaction that strengthens bonds, values affinity, and builds friendships. It is a means of welcoming everyone and everything, seeing all life as belonging, with us, to a wider family. The Greeks, positioned as they were among the many islands and polities in the Eastern Mediterranean which was home to a myriad of different cultures, sagely practiced the art of philoxenia or ‘kindness to strangers’ as a cultural law to ensure that strangers felt at home: for, when you have eaten at someone’s table and been treated as family, you are less likely to harm them.

For us today, though the population of our own locality or country has more people than we can easily relate to, we can still hold in our hearts all the world in an act of hospitality by considering how our own ‘household of the earth’ might look. This might include yourself (the person doing the considering); your family and ancestry (the people from which you derive your life); your community, group, tribe or nation (those who live in the same region as yourself or those who share your views); and lastly the wider universe and the environment of the earth itself. (All that is living upon earth, and all that is unseen in the spiritual world.)

The circling ripples of affinity that spread out around us affect everyone and everything with whom we come into contact, giving us a profound insight into the wonder and joy of having affinity and kinship with the whole of life.

§ Consider:

· What models of respect for elderhood have informed your life? How do you expect to be treated when you are older and less able? What laws or social initiatives need to be instituted or supported?

· Who stands in your own concentric circles of acquaintance? How do you affect them? How do they affect you? What effect do you each have upon the larger community and the cosmos?

· How do you stand in relationship to your near, middle and distant ancestors? What have they to teach you? How do they come alive in you or your ideas?

· In what way are the gods/a specific spiritual being your parent or relative? What do they reveal to you about the duty towards parents and relatives?

· Look at the rifts, squabbles or breakdown in your own extended family from the perspective of your own Daimon, seeing these through the Daimon’s eyes. What can mend the break, what quality or resource needs to be extended towards those who maintain the break, what kind of balance needs to arrive that can help heal the breech?

MEDITATION

In this meditation, Pythagoras not only touches upon this theme of families but upon the way ancestry provides a path, and by extension, how important it is for those who walked the path before us to have lived good lives that become models for our own. His wonderful metaphor recalls the quest for Eurydice by Orpheus, who went down even into the depths of the underworld to find her: the gratitude of the soul that comes into a body to take life is another way of looking at its mystery. Always remember, that where we cannot go ourselves, our Daimon can always look for us. I would also say, from my experience of working with people ejected or removed from their families that, when your own parent has not been the model of one, always remember that another ancestor, one who regards you with kindly eyes and a good heart, can always step into that place of respect and support for you, so that your honour can be properly received within the family line. It might be one you never met or knew, you may not know their name, but for them you are always the beloved child.

‘Pythagoras said that those responsible for birth are more honourable than their offspring. He said these things to encourage the youths to value their parents more than themselves. He said that they owed as much thanks to their parents as one deceased would owe to someone able to lead them back again to daylight. For it is right to cherish those who have done us the first and greatest service above all and to never grieve our parents. For only parents preceded birth itself with their good deeds and forebears are responsible for everything being accomplished successfully by their descendants. So, if we recognise that they are paramount in benefitting us, we cannot sin against the gods.’

- Iamblichus: The Pythagorean Life 8, 37-38

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I hope that you have had a wonderful midwinter. Yesterday was my birthday and so my parents have been much on my own mind, for I was a very late arriving baby back in 1952, to the extent that I should have arrived before Christmas 1951! In the event, I arrived rather too late to celebrate New Year. May the New Year unfold fruitfully for you as we explore the Golden Verses.