Ananke

Ananke
Personification of Necessity and Inevitability
Member of the Primordial Gods
Ananke as represented by a modern illustration of Plato's Republic.
Other names Adrastea
Abode The cosmos
Planet Ananke
Symbol Torch, Spindle
Personal information
Consort Chronos
Offspring
Parents Kaos
Siblings
Roman equivalent Necessitas

In ancient Greek religion, Ananke (/əˈnæŋki/; Greek: Ἀνάγκη, from the common noun ἀνάγκη, "force, constraint, necessity"), is a personification of inevitability, compulsion and necessity. She is often depicted as holding a spindle. One of the Greek primordial deities, Ananke marks the beginning of the cosmos, along with her father and consort, Chronos (the personification of Time, not the child-eating Titan Cronus). She was seen as the most powerful dictator of all fate and circumstance which meant that mortals, as well as the Gods, respected her and paid homage. Considered as the mother of the Fates according to one version, she is the only one to have control over their decisions[1] (according to some sources, except Zeus also).

According to the ancient Greek traveller Pausanias, there was a temple in ancient Corinth where the goddesses Ananke and Bia (meaning violence or violent haste) were worshiped together in the same shrine. Ananke who represents Fate or Necessity or Force is frequently identified or associated with Aphrodite, especially Aphrodite Ourania who represents celestial Love, as the two are considered two sides of the same power that dictates life.[2][3][4] Her Roman counterpart is Necessitas ("necessity").[5]

Etymology

"Ananke" is derived from the common Ancient Greek noun ἀνάγκη (Ionic: ἀναγκαίη anankaiē), meaning "force, constraint or necessity." The common noun itself is of uncertain etymology.[6] Homer refers to her being as necessity, often abstracted in modern translation (ἀναγκαίη πολεμίζειν, "ιt is necessary to fight") or force (ἐξ ἀνάγκης, "by force").[7] In Ancient Greek literature the word is also used meaning "fate" or "destiny" (ἀνάγκη δαιμόνων, "fate by the daemons or by the gods"), and by extension "compulsion or torture by a superior."[8] She appears often in poetry, as Simonides does: "Even the gods don’t fight against ananke".[9]

The pre-modern is carried over and translated (by reduction) into a more modern philosophical sense as "necessity", "logical necessity"[10] or "laws of nature".[11]

Mythology

Ananke, by Gilbert Bayes.[12]

In Orphic mythology, Ananke is a self-formed being who emerged at the dawn of creation with an incorporeal, serpentine form, her outstretched arms encompassing the cosmos. Ananke and Chronos are mates, mingling together in serpent form as a tie around the universe. Together they have crushed the primal egg of creation of which constituent parts became earth, heaven and sea to form the ordered universe.[13] Ananke was the mother (or another identity) of Adrasteia, the distributor of rewards and punishments.[14]

Mother of the Moirai

The Greek philosopher, Plato in his Republic discussed the parentage of the Moirai or the Fates in the following lines:[15]

And there were another three who sat round about at equal intervals, each one on her throne, the Moirai (Moirae, Fates), daughters of Ananke, clad in white vestments with filleted heads, Lakhesis (Lachesis), and Klotho (Clotho), and Atropos (Atropus), who sang in unison with the music of the Seirenes, Lakhesis singing the things that were, Klotho the things that are, and Atropos the things that are to be . . . Lakhesis, the maiden daughter of Ananke (Necessity).

Ananke the personification of Necessity, above the Moirai, the Fates.

While Aeschylus, the famous tragedian gave us an account in his Prometheus Bound where the Moirai were called the helmsman of the goddess Ananke along with the three Erinyes:[16]

Prometheus: Not in this way is Moira (Fate), who brings all to fulfillment, destined to complete this course. Only when I have been bent by pangs and tortures infinite am I to escape my bondage. Skill is weaker by far than Ananke (Necessity).
Chorus: Who then is the helmsman of Ananke (Necessity)?
Prometheus: The three-shaped (trimorphoi) Moirai (Moirae, Fates) and mindful (mnêmones) Erinyes (Furies).
Chorus: Can it be that Zeus has less power than they do?
Prometheus: Yes, in that even he cannot escape what is foretold.
Chorus: Why, what is fated for Zeus except to hold eternal sway?
Prometheus: This you must not learn yet; do not be over-eager.
Chorus: It is some solemn secret, surely, that you enshroud in mystery.
[N.B. Prometheus has knowledge of a secret prophecy that any son born of Zeus and Thetis would depose the god.]

In philosophical thinking

In the Timaeus, Plato has the speaker Timaeus (and not Socrates) argue that in the creation of the universe, there is a uniting of opposing elements, intellect (nous) and necessity (ananke), as elsewhere Plato blends abstraction with his own myth making: "For this ordered world (cosmos) is of a mixed birth: it is the offspring of a union of Necessity and Intellect. Intellect prevailing over Necessity by persuading (from Peitho, goddess of persuasion) it to direct most of the things that come to be toward what is best, and the result of this subjugation of Necessity to wise persuasion was the initial formation of the universe" (48a, trans. John M. Cooper).

The word "Ananke" is featured in Victor Hugo's novel Notre-Dame of Paris, written upon a wall of Notre-Dame by the hand of Dom Claude Frollo. In his Toute la Lyre, Hugo also mentions Ananke as a symbol of love. Here is what Hugo had to write about it in 1866.

Religion, society, nature; these are the three struggles of man. These three conflicts are, at the same time, his three needs: it is necessary for him to believe, hence the temple; it is necessary for him to create, hence the city; it is necessary for him to live, hence the plow and the ship. But these three solutions contain three conflicts. The mysterious difficulty of life springs from all three. Man has to deal with obstacles under the form of superstition, under the form of prejudice, and under the form of the elements. A triple "ananke" (necessity) weighs upon us, the "ananke" of dogmas, the "ananke" of laws, and the "ananke" of things. In Notre Dame de Paris the author has denounced the first; in Les Misérables he has pointed out the second; in this book (Toilers of the Sea) he indicates the third. With these three fatalities which envelop man is mingled the interior fatality, that supreme ananke, the human heart.

Hauteville House, March, 1866. Victor Hugo, Toilers of the Sea, 1866, p. 5[17]

The painting Terror Antiquus by Léon Bakst (1908)

Sigmund Freud in Civilization and Its Discontents (W. W. Norton, New York: 1961, p. 140) said: "We can only be satisfied, therefore, if we assert that the process of civilization is a modification which the vital process experiences under the influence of a task that is set it by Eros and instigated by Ananke — by the exigencies of reality; and that this task is one of uniting separate individuals into a community bound together by libidinal ties."

In "Ancient Terror", an essay that Robert Bird[18] considered (although "ostensibly a commentary on Léon Bakst's painting Terror Antiquus) " a highly synthetic picture of the evolution of Greek religion, which he traces to an original belief in a single, supreme goddess", Vyacheslav Ivanov suggests that the ancients viewed all that is human and all that was revered as divine as relative and transient, "Only Fate (Eimarmene), or universal necessity (Ananke), the inevitable "Adrasteia," the faceless countenance and hollow sound of unknown Destiny, was absolute." Before the goddess, who possesses both the indestructible Force of Love-Live Giver and the absolute law of Fate the Destroyer, Fate-Death, as well as incorporating Mnemosyne-Memory and Gaia-Mother Earth, masculine daring and warring are powerless and transient, thus the order based on masculine element established by Zeus and other Olympian Gods is artificial.[19]

Wallace Stevens, in one poem of the 1930s, addresses the figure of Ananke: "The sense of the serpent in you, Ananke, / And your averted stride / Add nothing to the horror of the frost / That glistens on your face and hair." [20] This connects more generally with Stevens's sense of necessity, or fate, in his later work, especially in the collection The Auroras of Autumn.

In Philip K. Dick's novel VALIS, Ananke is mentioned as "blind necessity or blind chance, according to some experts...blind chance: chaos, in other words". Described alongside the term 'Noos' as the overwhelming chaos which reason, Noos, tries to constrain.

There is reference to Ananke early in John Banville's novel The Infinities. In explaining how the gods fashioned humans so that they would procreate, the narrator (Hermes) says that the gods gave humans lust, "Eros and Ananke working hand in hand".

Norbert Wiener, in his book Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine, presents Ananke as the personification of scientific determinism, contrasted with Tyche as the personification of quantum indeterminacy, in the often-quoted sentence: "The chance of the quantum theoretician is not the ethical freedom of the Augustinian, and Tyche is as relentless a mistress as Ananke."

References

  1. ↑ Abril Cultural, ed. (1973). Dicionário de Mitologia Greco-Romana (in Portuguese). Editora Victor Civita. p. 134. OCLC 45781956.
  2. ↑ Ivanov, Vi͡acheslav Ivanovich; Bird, Robert; Wachtel, Michael (2001). Selected Essays. Northwestern University Press. p. 154. ISBN 9780810115224.
  3. ↑ Portmann, Adolf; Ritsema, Rudolf (Jan 1, 1977). Avenir Et Devenir Des Normes. Brill Archive. p. 100. ISBN 9789004048805.
  4. ↑ Stroud, Ronald (Sep 30, 2013). The Sanctuary of Demeter and Kore: The Inscriptions XVIII.6. American School of Classical Studies at Athens. p. 84. ISBN 9781621390138.
  5. ↑ Wikisource Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). "Necessitas". Encyclopædia Britannica (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press.
  6. ↑ Beekes, R. S. P.. (2009). Etymological Dictionary of Greek, p. 97. Brill.
  7. ↑ Iliad 4.300, Odyssey 4.557: Lidell, Scott: A Greek English Lexicon: ἀνάγκη
  8. ↑ E.Ph.1000, Xenophon, Hiero 9.4
  9. ↑ Simonides Fr. 4.20 Diehl: C. M. Bowra (1958), The Greek Experience. W. P. Publishing company, Cleveland and New York, p. 61
  10. ↑ Aristotle, Metaph.1026.b28, 1064.b33: Lidell, Scott: A Greek English Lexicon: ἀνάγκη
  11. ↑ Xenophon, Memorabilia 1.11.1: Lidell, Scott: A Greek English Lexicon: ἀνάγκη
  12. ↑ Holme, Charles (1893). Studio international Vol.72 No.295. London, Cory, Adams & Mackay. p. 112. Retrieved 3 December 2017.
  13. ↑ The Uroboric Serpent: Water and Being and the Mythos Unthought in Metaphysics. ProQuest. 2008. ISBN 9780549685210.
  14. ↑ Jonte-Pace, Diane; Parsons, Jr., William B.; Gómez, Luis O. (2002). Religion and Psychology: Mapping the Terrain. Routledge. p. 220. ISBN 9781134625352.
  15. ↑ Plato, Republic 617c (trans. Shorey) (Greek philosopher C4th B.C.):
  16. ↑ Aeschylus, Prometheus Bound 510 ff
  17. ↑ Victor Hugo, Toilers of the Sea, 1866, p. 5
  18. ↑ Bird, Robert (2007). The Russian Prospero: The Creative Universe of Viacheslav Ivanov. Univ of Wisconsin Press. p. 154. ISBN 9780299218331.
  19. ↑ Ivanov, Vi͡acheslav Ivanovich; Bird, Robert; Wachtel, Michael (2001). Selected Essays. Northwestern University Press. pp. 153–159. ISBN 9780810115224.
  20. ↑ Stevens, Wallace (1990). Collected Poems. Alfred A. Knopf. p. 152. ISBN 9780679726692.
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