Some migrated to Miletus and Phocaea, on the coast of Asia Minor. From Miletus was born science—the eye of Anaximander was brilliant. From the sea people Phocaeans, migrated to Sicily, Naples Marseilles, came the poetic philosophy of Parmenides and Empedocles. And those two—they seem to be saying two things at once, an outer teaching and an inner teaching. They seem to me to be passing on 700 year old letters from the Abyss, on dealing with the great Fear—maybe, I hope, the whys… but the Athenian tradition of cold clear logic transmitted fragmentary records of Parmenides & Empedocles. The Egyptian and Persian traditions have been… avoided… despite the living tradition lasting much longer there.
Then it becomes… murky shrouded.
There’s the Turba Philosophorum (I really have to buy an Ouroboros Press edition) but what I’d really love to have my hands on is Djabir ibn Hayyān’s A Gathering of Philosophers. The great gibbering alchemist… was brilliant. In his gibber chemistry was born—and he had the libraries discarded from the Hellenistic empires to draw on.
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