From the Beginning to Plato

FROM THE BEGINNING TO PLATO 85
that human practices have must be parasitic or derivative from the sacred
practices that belong to the divine custom or logos and are expressed in shared
human customs; yet it becomes unclear then why the secular practices should
develop a different way of doing things, since, as Heraclitus says in B114, all
human customs are nourished by the one divine way of doing things. 24 It
therefore seems more appropriate to read fragment B78 with fragment B5, as
saying that neither the sacred nor the secular is a privileged context: both are
equally good reflections of the one underlying rationale that makes sense of all
things, but an action only makes sense within its own context. What we must not
do is forget the difference, and judge an action in the terms of the wrong ethos.
Fragment B15 is an observation about the rites held in honour of Dionysus, a
divinity associated with an exuberant style of religious experience:
If it were not Dionysus for whom they held the procession and sang the
hymn to the shameful parts, they would be performing the most shameless
deeds… 25
The festivals of Dionysus included a number of rituals that might be considered
shocking. Heraclitus mentions particularly the procession of the phallus and the
associated hymn, though the rest of the fragment also mentions the Dionysiac
frenzy. But here it is not that such action would be shocking in a secular context
but that the propriety of the actions is restricted, even within the religious sphere,
to the honour of a particular deity: what is appropriate for Dionysus would not be
done for Hades, god of the dead. Hence the context in which the same action is
shameful or shameless is given not by whether we do it in a religious context but
whether it is the right religious context.
In fact, however, Heraclitus goes on to say that Hades and Dionysus are one
and the same:
But Hades is the same as the Dionysus for whom they rave and celebrate
Lenaia. 26
Now we cannot infer that one kind of rite suits one god and another another. The
two gods in this case are one and the same. So is Heraclitus objecting to the
variety of rituals? I think not, for elsewhere Heraclitus tells us that two things are
‘one and the same’: 27 not only the road up and the road down, 28 but also day and
night 29 and the beginning and the end of a circle. 30 In none of these cases do we
have to suppose that because two things are ‘one and the same’ they must
demand the same response. We approach the uphill struggle differently from the
same road taken as a downhill stroll, and what we do at night differs from what
we do in the day, however much it simply depends on whether the sun is in our
part of the sky whether the same hours are night or day. 31 Heraclitus’ point is
rather that, as he claims in B51, 32 things can differ while agreeing with
themselves: something that is fundamentally the same is viewed under different