The Great Wizards of Antiquity by Guy Ogilvy

Author:Guy Ogilvy
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: great wizards;wizards of history;the wizards of history;guy ogilvy;guy ogilvie;history of magic;history of magick;the history of magic;magical history;western magic;history of western magic;history of western magick
Publisher: Llewellyn Worldwide, LTD.
Published: 2019-02-21T16:11:14+00:00

Empedocles Alexanemos, the Chaser of Winds

My friends, who dwell in the great city by tawny Acragas,

Which crowns the citadel, busied with goodly works, all hail!

I go about among you an immortal god, no more a mortal,

Rightly honoured by all, crowned with holy diadems and flowery garlands.

In every flourishing city I visit, I am praised by men and women,

And accompanied by thousands, who thirst for deliverance;

Some ask for prophecies, and some beg

for remedies against all kinds of disease.162

The colourful vision of Empedocles that history presents to us, mostly painted by his own words, as quoted above, is of a man processing regally through the streets with his entourage, dressed in flowing purple robes bound with a golden girdle, crowned with a Delphic laurel wreath or golden diadem and shod in bronze sandals, declaring himself a transcended master, an immortal god, while dispensing words of salvation for the soul and remedies for the body to the beseeching crowds that flock around him.

He sounds a bit suspect; so, who was this extraordinary character? Empedocles has been variously presented as the founder of rhetoric, a proto-Darwinian, cosmologist, biologist, physicist, poet, miracle-worker, prophet, healer, magician, charlatan, and statesman. Amongst the early mystic Sufis of Islam, he was considered a great Gnostic teacher, an illuminated Sheikh and the godfather of alchemy. He was born around 490 BC in the Greek city of Acragas in Sicily and descended from an ancient aristocratic family; his father and grandfather are celebrated for winning the wrestling and the horse race respectively at the 71st Olympiad. Empedocles himself is said to have been an Olympic champion, although probably for poetic rather than athletic prowess, and to have caused a scene by substituting the traditional sacrifice of a bull to Zeus, followed by a banquet, with a model of a bull made from frankincense, myrrh, and sacred spices. This reflected his (Pythagorean) vegetarianism and abhorrence of blood sacrifice.

Despite his social status, Empedocles appears to have been a champion of democracy. His father was said to have been instrumental in overthrowing the tyrant Thrasydaeus and Empedocles himself is said to have upbraided two of his fellow citizens for displaying tyrannical tendencies in their mistreatment of foreigners. He is further credited with single-handedly dissolving the aristocratic oligarchy—called “the Thousand,” 163 which replaced the tyrant—through the power of his rhetoric.164 Indeed his eloquence and powers of persuasion were so esteemed that Aristotle dubbed him the father of rhetoric. He certainly had a way with words and he was the last of the so-called pre-Socratic philosophers to have written entirely in verse. Aristotle dubbed him “Homeric,” praising his “diction,” use of metaphor, and master of all other poetical devices, noting that he wrote, like Homer, in hexameters. Although his works bear no other relation to the legendary Greek writer, one colourful story of Empedocles tells how he saved a hot-headed young man from murdering his host by leaping up and reciting a verse from Homer that had the extraordinary effect of completely disarming the young man

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