The Mystical Hymns of Orpheus - Platonic Philosophy

OF ORPHEUS,
Hear me, 0 Goddess, when to thee I pray,
With supplicating voice both night and day,
deed, being perpetually united to each other, but at the
same time containing in themselves the causes of the union
and separation of all things.
We may also, I think, adduce another mode of solution ;
viz. that the Gods themselves are impartibly connascent
with each other, and subsist uniformly in each other, but
that their progressions into the universe, and their com-
munications are separated in their participants, become
divisible, and are thus filled with contrariety ; the objects
of their providential exertions not being able to receive in
an unmingled manner the powers proceeding from thence,
and without confusion their multiform illuminations. We
may likewise say, that the last orders which are suspended
from divine natures, as being generated remote from first
causes, and as being proximate to the subjects of their
government, which are involved in matter, participate them-
selves of all-various contrariety and separation, and parti-
bly preside over material natures, minutely dividing those
powers which presubsist uniformly and impartibly in their
first operating causes. Such, then, and so many, being
the modes according to which the mystic rumours of the-
ologists refer war to the Gods themselves :-other poets,
and those who have explained divine concerns through a
divinely inspired energy, have ascribed wars and battles
to the Gods according to the first of those modes we
related, in which the divine genera are divided conform-
ably to the first principles of wholes. For those powers
which elevate to causes are, after a manner, opposed to those
that are the sources of generation, and the connective to the
separating; those that unite to those that multiply the pro-
gression of things ; total genera to such as fabricate partihly ;
and those which are expanded above to those that preside
over partial natures : and hence fables, concealing the truth,
assert that such powers fight and war with each other.