Creation in the Poimandres and in Other Creation Stories
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Fritz Graf
Abstract
My paper develops from the observation that the cosmogonies in Ovid’s Metamorphoses and the Hermetic Poimandres are related to each other. After an analysis of Ovid’s text as an example of a diakrisis cosmogony in which the world is created by the sorting out of its originally confused elements, I give a short overview of the history of this type of cosmogony before Ovid. I then analyze the respective cosmogony in the Poimandres as another example of the same typology. A look at the use of diakrisis cosmogonies in late antiquity, including in the first ‘Moral Poem’ of Gregory of Nazianzus, closes the paper and demonstrates the attraction of this cosmogonical model in the Imperial epoch.
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Articles in the same Issue
- Titelseiten
- Titelseiten
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- Introduction
- Magic and Ritual
- Magic and Ritual
- Überlegungen zu einigen griechischen Wetterritualen
- And You Will Be Amazed: The Rhetoric of Authority in the Greek Magical Papyri
- Lawsuits with Headless Foes: A Greek Incantation Motif
- A Syntactic Approach to the Orphic Gold Leaves
- Materiality and Ancient Religion
- Materiality and Ancient Religion
- Accumulation, authority, and the cultural lives of objects: materiality and ancient religion
- Familiarity and Phenomenology in Greece: Accumulated Votives as Group-made Monuments
- The Cultural Biography of a Pilgrimage Token: From Hagiographical to Archaeological Evidence
- More than text: Approaching ritual papyri from Oxyrhynchus as inscribed objects
- Rethinking Orphic ‘Bookishness’: Text and Performance in Classical Mystery Religion
- Divine Names
- Divine Names
- “Noms de dieux!” Gods at the borders
- Nommer les dieux hittites : au sujet de quelques épithètes divines
- Le culte de Zeus Brontôn : l’espace et la morphologie du dieu de l’orage dans la Phrygie d’époque romaine
- Séquences onomastiques divines à Ostie-Portus
- Myths of Origin
- Myths of Origin
- Ex arches: Looking Back at Greek Myths of Origin
- Typhoeus or Cosmic Regression (Theogony 821 – 880)
- Herakles and the Order of Zeus in Hesiod’s Theogony
- The Politics of Beginnings: Hesiod and the Assyrian Ideological Appropriation of Enuma Eliš
- Our Co(s)mic Origins: Theogonies in Greek Comedy
- At the Origins of Dionysus and Wine: Myths, Miracles, and Festivals
- Creation in the Poimandres and in Other Creation Stories
- The God Aion in a Mosaic from Nea Paphos (Cyprus) and Graeco-Phoenician Cosmogonies in the Roman East
- Ἀρχή and δῖνος: Vortices as Cosmogonic Powers and Cosmic Regulators. Study Case: The Whirling Lightning Bolt of Zeus
Articles in the same Issue
- Titelseiten
- Titelseiten
- Articles
- Introduction
- Magic and Ritual
- Magic and Ritual
- Überlegungen zu einigen griechischen Wetterritualen
- And You Will Be Amazed: The Rhetoric of Authority in the Greek Magical Papyri
- Lawsuits with Headless Foes: A Greek Incantation Motif
- A Syntactic Approach to the Orphic Gold Leaves
- Materiality and Ancient Religion
- Materiality and Ancient Religion
- Accumulation, authority, and the cultural lives of objects: materiality and ancient religion
- Familiarity and Phenomenology in Greece: Accumulated Votives as Group-made Monuments
- The Cultural Biography of a Pilgrimage Token: From Hagiographical to Archaeological Evidence
- More than text: Approaching ritual papyri from Oxyrhynchus as inscribed objects
- Rethinking Orphic ‘Bookishness’: Text and Performance in Classical Mystery Religion
- Divine Names
- Divine Names
- “Noms de dieux!” Gods at the borders
- Nommer les dieux hittites : au sujet de quelques épithètes divines
- Le culte de Zeus Brontôn : l’espace et la morphologie du dieu de l’orage dans la Phrygie d’époque romaine
- Séquences onomastiques divines à Ostie-Portus
- Myths of Origin
- Myths of Origin
- Ex arches: Looking Back at Greek Myths of Origin
- Typhoeus or Cosmic Regression (Theogony 821 – 880)
- Herakles and the Order of Zeus in Hesiod’s Theogony
- The Politics of Beginnings: Hesiod and the Assyrian Ideological Appropriation of Enuma Eliš
- Our Co(s)mic Origins: Theogonies in Greek Comedy
- At the Origins of Dionysus and Wine: Myths, Miracles, and Festivals
- Creation in the Poimandres and in Other Creation Stories
- The God Aion in a Mosaic from Nea Paphos (Cyprus) and Graeco-Phoenician Cosmogonies in the Roman East
- Ἀρχή and δῖνος: Vortices as Cosmogonic Powers and Cosmic Regulators. Study Case: The Whirling Lightning Bolt of Zeus
