Chôra

CHÔRA

Raffaello Sanzio, The School of Athens (1483–1520)

The invention process in electracy uses the ideas behind the Greek word chôra.  Chôra is related to the term “nous” in the previous post.  It's meaning helps to think about how the world of becoming (the image of the real world) comes together with Being.  Chôra means the “place, space, reason within which things interact” (class notes).  Marian Hiller contrasts Philo of Alexandria’s notion of chôra with Plato’s, whose notion of the form of space is that "it never departs at all from its own character" whereas Philo argued that "its pattern [is] an eternal idea in the divine mind," in the following passage:

Philo . . . [states] that the creation of the world was after the pattern of an intelligible world (Gen. 1:17) which served as its model. During the first day God created Ideas or Forms of heaven, earth, air (= darkness), empty space  (= abyss), water, pneuma (= mind), light, the intelligible pattern of the sun and the stars (Op. 29). There are, however, differences between Philo and Plato: according to Plato, there is no Form of space (chora). In Plato space is not apprehended by reason; rather it had its own special status in the world. Also pneuma as a Form of soul does not exist in the system of Plato. Plato designates this primordial unorganized state of matter a self-existing Receptacle; it is most stable and a permanent constituent: ‘It must be called always the same, for it never departs at all from its own character’ (Plato, Timaeus 50b-c). Philo, being a strict monist could not allow even for a self-existing void so he makes its pattern an eternal idea in the divine mind. Before Philo there was no explicit theory of creation ex nihilo ever postulated in Jewish or Greek traditions. Both Philo and Plato do not explain how the reflections (eidola) of Forms are made in the world of senses. They do not attribute them to God or the Demiurge because it would be contrary to their conception of God as ‘good’ and “desiring that all things should come as near as possible to being like himself.’  God could not create the copies of the Forms which should be ‘disordered.’ It seems then that the primordial unorganized matter was spontaneously produced on the pattern of the Ideas. The Logos would shape the elements from this preexistent matter, first into heavy (or dense) and light (or rare) elements which were differentiated properly into water and earth, and air and fire (Her. 134-140; 143). (Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

Chôra is not the world of being or the world of forms; it is the interaction between the two.  This idea has a clear relationship with how we are dealing the instructions we derive from the CATTt slots.  Electracy’s principle of conduction mandates that decision-making and the associations involved in comprehending the world around us involves making associations between things like a person would in a dream.  Professor Ulmer, in Heuretics, writes that “[a]n important aspect of chorography is learning how to write an intuition” (37).

Frederic Leighton, The Return of Persephone (1891)

The secretive cult-like aspects of the Eleusinian mysteries are an example of Chôra (class notes).  The mysteries are associated with an Athenian festival held in the town of Eleusis that honoured the goddess Demeter.  The festival derived from the story of Demeter and Persephone, after Hades abducts her and takes her down into the underworld.  Demeter’s neglect of her duties as a goddess of the grain, harvest, and fertility in her search for Persephone, lets the world’s fields go barren.  When Persephone’s whereabouts are known, Hades tricks her into eating a Pomegranate which obligates her to return to the underworld for part of the year.  Ron Leadbetter explains that this “symbolic death and rebirth is the time the seed lies in the earth and then comes to life, reborn, as was Persephone. This was the basis of the cult, a fulfilling and happy afterlife” (Enclopedia Mythica, par. 2).

The ceremony started in Athens, following as set of prescribed rituals (including sacrifices) and ended in Eleusis.  Along the way, when the procession reached “Kerameikos (the ancient cemetery of Athens),” new initiates joined the procession.  The name “Eleusinian mysteries” was in fact derived from this stage of the procession.  Leadbetter explains that the “'Mysteries’ were given this name (in Greek musteriai, from mustes, (‘an initiate’)” (Enclopedia Mythica, par. 3):

When the procession reached Eleusis they would rest and make ready for the next day, which was a day of fasting (Demeter did this when in mourning for Persephone). Once this part of the ceremony was over, the initiates drank a special brew of barley water mixed with penny-royal called, kykeon (a creeping mint cultivated for its supposed medicinal properties). The climax of the ceremony took place in the "Telesterion" (initiation hall). During the 5th century BCE, "Ictinos" designed a huge hall which would hold several thousand people. In this hall, the secret and sacred objects were shown to the initiated, and also the priestesses would reveal the vision of the holy night, which is thought to have been a fire symbolizing life after death. These rituals were kept secret, shown only to the initiated, and it was totally forbidden to speak of them publicly.

In the Hellenistic age (300-150 BCE), the cult was taken over and run by the state, and two aristocratic families from Eleusis officiated (the Eumolpidae and Kerykes). In this age, mystery cults were becoming very popular, unlike classical Greece (400s BCE) when the Eleusinian mysteries were a rare form of worship. The annual Eleusinian mysteries attracted thousands of people from all over the Greek world, and the only initial requirement to become a mystes (initiate) was to be without blood guilt nor a barbarian ( in other words, if you spoke Greek). It was open to both men and women, and remarkably, slaves were also allowed into the cult. The mysteries existed from Mycenaean times (circa 1600-1200 BCE), thought to have been established in the 1500s BCE and held annually for two thousand years. The Roman emperor Theodosius closed the sanctuary in CE 392, and finally it was abandoned when Alaric, king of the Goths, invaded Greece in CE 396. This brought Christianity to the region, and all cult worship was forbidden.

In the context of electracy, the image-based commodity culture that surrounds us is to be thought of as the space (in a choric sense) of the thing when we ask the question of how the world of becoming (the real world that we perceive around us--the image of it, the forms) and our Being interact.  Professor Ulmer writes:

[I]n commodity or consumer culture human relationships have been displaced into things, then these same things, taken up into the details of a diegesis, becomes the places of passage linking otherwise unrelated discourses (D. Miller). Conductive (electronic) logic, that is, supplements the established movements of inference between things and ideas (abduction, deduction, induction) with a movement directly between things (unconscious thought). (Heuretics 127)