Commentary X

Daimonic Patriarchs

Moses by E. M. Lilien

I have written a few posts where I reinterpret biblical myths in a polytheist and generally platonic light. I haven’t had the head space to continue, but I haven’t stopped thinking about it. What comes to mind about the Hebrew Bible and/or the Old Testament (they aren’t exactly the same thing) is the status of the history of the Patriarchs. As with all myths, a Platonist should see them as divine activity whose ideality is expressed in its “non-identical repetition” – to borrow a phrase from Gerard Loughlin[1] – in the lives of its participants, their (re)production of these worlds[2]. However, these myths are heavy on lesser (perhaps divine) figures and light on full Gods. One wonders how to read them theologically. Thankfully there are categories for entities that are not exactly Gods, but are divine: Daimons. I am assuming the definition that covers the “angeloi” (angels or malakim) and “heroes”, among others. Ancient Near Eastern religious systems don’t necessarily fit the Greek conception of the divine things, so the term “daimonic” has to remain necessarily vague and flexible enough to cover as many of these entities as possible. In this case the idea is simple, given the mythical nature of many of the Biblical Patriarchs – most of which never existed historically or whose historical existence is embellished – to take them seriously as revelations and revelators in myths would require me to see them as daimons. If I can go further, some among them can even be daimonic Gods in their own right, rather than simple daimons. Since a daimon is the soul of some communal multiplicity, one can say that these Patriarchs are the Soul of the various Israelite communities that take their myths as formative (and it should be noted that there were many versions of these myths in their earliest ancient settings).

This is particularly clear in Noah’s case. Temporality in myth can be made vertical, hence Noah’s priority to Abraham, etc. can be seen as Noah having a higher primary hypostasis than Abraham. Noah seems to bring a perspective on the embodiment and dissolution of a social cosmos. He leads the “beasts” and repentant humans to an ark that saves them from a cosmos-ending deluge. The “beasts”, I believe, should not be understood in the sense of the confusion of flesh, but in the sense of the angelic “beasts,” you see so often in the rest of the bible. They are the stoichea, the agents of stoichea, that hold a world together, along with “human” souls (and we should keep in mind that in Jewish tradition, there is a centrality of the human form that gets pronounced with time). Basically, Noah is disintegrating the cosmos himself, since the creatures left are agents of disorder. The deluge is a consequence. The divine action YHWH himself is the divine perspective on a many-sided phenomenon.

Since myths are eternal acts, how can I understand this myth in YHWH’s world constitution project?

To start, I’d see Noah’s reversion on the ark – as well as his instigation of reversals from the beasts and men – as his anchoring the material cosmos, where “material” is simply the aspect of entities that is subject to “passion”, “manipulation”, “alternative possibility”, etc; the periphery of an intellectual perspective. His salvation is eidetic here. To revert on the Ark, the man at the centre of it, is to become a “virtual species” (to borrow from Butler[3]), and to hold together more than just one’s self.

Noah (in a lower hypostasis perhaps) is the one who plants the vine, whose drunken “nakedness” tests mortal souls. Only those who cover him gain the blessing, since all truths are covered lies, and all lies clothes truths. Those who expose him, who are overly “literal” are “enslaved” by the stoichiea, pulled apart by them.

The death of the Nephilim and their embodiment are two sides of the same event. They are the daimons that flesh out (pun intended) the material qua material. They are not “evil” in a moral sense, but their (good) role is opposed to the good of the soul. So the Nephilim and Noah are opposed, but these are resolved in the will of YHWH, who is the one who sends them to embodiment and also sends Noah. Not a monist reconciliation in an ontological sense, but a reconciliation in a henological sense, since divine will (and will in general) has no “form” or monad.

One might read Moses’ myths in a similar way. In fact, Moses is just as perfect a Daimonic God as Noah, one being cosmological, the other cosmopolitical; or, Noah is a God of the cosmos qua politiea, Moses is a God of the politiea qua cosmological. This can go on to and for the many biblical myths. A similar methodology might be adaptable to the Islamic category of “Prophet” as it applies to these figures and others. In fact, if YHWH’s primary hypostasis is displaceable from the position of primary demiurge (to a higher position perhaps), then these entities can be far higher up a family tree (or deeper in the familial forest) one might discover.

All of this is not a seamless whole, I should state. This will not all fit into a system. Gods cannot be contained, and the nature of individuality is itself enough to prove this. This is an ever-expanding family of cosmoi that not even canonization of people, daimons, or books can contain. As Petter would say:

“The idea that each "people" has an "ontology" or "world" is not just fascist, it's bad. Each culture has an infinity of "proper names" (of its Gods and ancestors) from which an infinite number of "worlds" with universal potential can be extracted.”

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[1] John Milbank and Catherine Pickstock, Radical Orthodoxy, Philosophy, 1999

[2] “Endymions_bower | Soteriology (from Twitter),” accessed March 3, 2023, https://endymions-bower.dreamwidth.org/45167.html.

[3] “Endymions_bower | Soteriology (from Twitter).”