Plato: The Winged Chariot Myth

“How is the soul, would require a long and divine explanation; but to say what it looks like is already a human matter and, of course, shorter. We could then say that it resembles a force that, as if they were born together, brings together a winged team and its charioteer. Well, the gods’ horses and coachmen are all good, and their caste is good, that of the others is mixed. As far as we are concerned, there is, first, a driver who guides a team of horses and, later, these horses of which one is good and beautiful, and is made of the same elements, and the other of everything. The opposite, as well as its origin. Necessarily, then, it will be difficult and hard for us to handle it.

And now, precisely, we must try to say where the name of mortal and immortal comes from to the living being. Everything that is soul is in charge of the inanimate, and it travels the entire sky, sometimes taking one form and another. If it is perfect and winged, it soars the heights, and governs the whole Cosmos. But the one that has lost its wings goes adrift, until it clings to something solid, where it settles down and becomes a terrestrial body that seems to move itself by virtue of its force. This compound, crystallization of soul and body, is called a living being, and is nicknamed mortal. The name of immortal cannot be reasoned with any word; but having neither seen nor intuited it satisfactorily, we imagine the divinity, as an immortal living being, who has a soul, who has a body, both united naturally, for all eternity. But, in the end, may it be as the divinity pleases, and may these be our words.

Let us consider the cause of the loss of the wings, and why they detach from the soul. It is something like what follows.

The natural power of the wing is to lift the heavy, carrying it upwards, towards where the line of the gods dwells. In a certain way, of everything that has to do with the body, it is what is most united to the divine. And the divine is beautiful, wise, good and other things like that. On this it feeds and with this grows, above all, the plumage of the soul; but with the clumsy and the bad and everything that is contrary to it, it is consumed and ends. By the way, Zeus, the mighty lord of the skies, driving his winged chariot, goes ahead, ordering everything and taking care of everything. It is followed by a herd of gods and daemons arranged in eleven rows. For Hestia (the Earth) remains in the abode of the gods, alone, while all the others, who have been placed in number of twelve, as chief gods, go to the front of the orders to each assigned. There are many, by the way, the beatific visions offered by the intimacy of the heavenly paths, walked by the lineage of the happy gods, each one doing what he has to do, and followed by those who, in any case, want and can. The envy of the divine choirs is far away. And yet, when they go to celebrate their banquets, they march towards the steep peaks, at the top of the arch that supports the sky, where precisely the chariots of the gods, with the gentle rocking of their firm reins, advance easily, but the others have a hard time. Because the horse mixed with evil gravitates and pulls towards the ground, forcing the charioteer who has not tamed it with care. There the soul meets its hard and tiring trial. For those who are called immortal, when they have reached the top, going out, rise on the back of the sky, and when they rise they are carried by the circular movement in their orbit, and they contemplate what is on the other side of the sky.

This super celestial place has not been sung by a poet from here below, nor will he ever sing it as it deserves. But it is something like this — since you have to have the courage to tell the truth, and especially when it is about it that you are talking about-: because, colorless, shapeless, intangible that essence whose being is really being, seen only by understanding, the pilot of the soul, and around which true knowledge grows, it occupies precisely such a place. As the mind of the divine feeds on uncontaminated understanding and knowledge, just as every soul that is determined to receive what is convenient for it, seeing, after time, the being, is filled with contentment, and in the contemplation of the truth, it finds its nourishment and well-being, until the movement, in its round, returns it to its place. In this turn, he has justice itself before his sight, he has wisdom before his sight, he has science before his sight, and not that to which genesis is proper, nor that which, in some way, is another being in another — like that other that we call entities -, but that science that is what it truly is to be. And having seen, in the same way, all the other beings that they really are, and nourished by them, it sinks back into the sky, and returns to its home. Once he has arrived, the coachman stops the horses in front of the manger, Add feed, ambrosia, and drink them with nectar.

Such, then, is the life of the gods. Of the other souls, the one that has best followed the god and most resembles him, raises the head of the charioteer towards the outer place, following, in its turn, the celestial movement, but, stirred up by the horses, he barely manages to see the beings. There is some that, at times, rises, at times sinks and, forced by horses, sees some things and others not. There are those who, all eager for heights, keep going, but they don’t succeed and end up immersing themselves in that movement that drags them, kicking and piling up, trying to be some more than others. Confusion, then, and stubbornness and supreme fatigue where, due to the clumsiness of the charioteers, many remain limping, and many others have many wings split. All, in short, after so much hardship, have to leave without having been able to reach the vision of being; and, once they are gone, they only have their opinion for food. The reason for this effort to see where the plain of Truth is, is due to the fact that the right grass for the best part of the soul is that which comes from the meadow there, and that which the nature of the wing, which makes light the soul is nourished by it.

Now here is the law of Adrastea: Every soul that, in the retinue of some god, has glimpsed something of the true, will be unscathed until the next turn and, provided that it does the same, it will be free from harm. But, when, due to not being able to follow him, he has not seen him, and due to any random event, he gravitates full of forgetfulness and neglect, due to this ballast, he loses his wings and falls to the ground.

Then it is the law that such a soul is not implanted in any animal nature, in the first generation, but that it is the one that has seen the most that reaches the genes of a man who will be a friend of knowledge, beauty or the Muses perhaps, and of love; the second, that it is for a king born of laws or a warrior and man of government; the third, for a politician or an administrator or a businessman; the fourth, for someone who likes body effort, for a gymnast, or for someone who is dedicated to taking care of bodies; the fifth will have to be for a life dedicated to divinatory art or initiation rites; with the sixth a poet will be coupled, one of those who is given for imitation; let it be the seventh for a craftsman or a peasant, and the ninth for a tyrant. Among all these cases, the one who has led a just life is part of a better destiny, and the one who has lived unjustly, a worse one. Because right there from where it started, no soul returns before ten thousand years — since it does not grow wings before that time -, except in the case of one who has philosophized without deception, or has loved young people with philosophy. These, in the third period of thousand years, if they have chosen the same life three times, they regain their wings and, with them, they move away when they complete those three thousand years. The rest, however, when their first life ended, are called to trial and, once tried, end up in underground prisons, where they expiate their penalty; and there are others who, elevated by justice to some heavenly place, lead a life as dignified as the one they lived when they were human. When the millennium arrives, having both of them to circumvent and choose the second existence, they are free to choose the one they want. It can then happen that a human soul comes to live an animal, and the one that was once man passes, again from animal to man.

Because never the soul that has not seen the truth can take a human figure.

Indeed, it is convenient for man to understand according to what is called an “idea”, going from many sensations to a single thing understood by reasoning. This is, by the way, the reminiscence of what our soul saw, in another time, when it was on the way with the divinity, looking down on what we now say it is, and raising its head to what it really is. That is why it is fair that only the philosopher’s mind is winged, since in his memory and as far as possible, he finds that which always is and that makes the god divine by having it in front of him. The man, then, who makes proper use of such reminders, initiated into such perfect ceremonies, only he will be perfect. Thus separated from human needs and turned to the divine, he is branded by the common people as disturbed, without realizing that what he is, is “excited”, possessed by a god”.