Book Description

F.W.J. Schelling (1775-1854) believed he had found, in the ancient initiation rites performed on the Greek island of Samothrace, the information lost to modernity with which to decode the "the original system of belief" celebrated and preserved in the Sacred Mysteries of the ancient Greeks, that is: the Dionysian, the Eleusinian, the Orphic, and the Samo-Thracian. The Sacred Mysteries revered the cosmos as the revelation of divinities communicating through nature. This origin-al revelation illuminates the mystery of the unified spiritual system of nature in which human reality participates. "On the Divinities of Samothrace" (1815) was originally an address delivered to the Bavarian Academy of Sciences, and is counted by scholars as the beginning of the final "existential" phase of Schelling's philosophy. For, the philosophical ground of the sacred teachings is that we exist (ex-sistare) by "standing-out-of" the primal eternally-cyclical nature of the cosmos and into chronological time: a teaching not completely unlike the Amor Fati of Nietzsche's Eternal Return. Thus, this essay invokes the nature of indeterminate pre-history as more original than rational characterizations of time. And, yet, despite the philosophical depth into which Schelling thinks, his essay is strikingly lucid and concise. This publication includes a new translation of Schelling's essay, along with its exposition and discussion, by Frank Scalambrino (2019).