Speech by Giacomo Maria Prati at the European Conference on Multipolarity

Multipolarity as an imperial and mythogonic necessity

I apologise for my poor pronunciation as I do not master the English language. However, I undertake for the next meetings to study French, a language I am fascinated by.

Multipolarity as a new vital world trend in geopolitical and international relations and as a new cooperative and participatory mentality has its deepest reasons for being in a necessity that is as much logical as mythogonic, which pertains to the very structure of reality as well as to the structure of the imperial dimension of power.

By 'mythogonic' (a term I invented a few years ago when my book Mitogonia was published) I mean the dynamic and performative essence of Myth, that is, its vital and timeless irradiation. The term derives from the mingling of the word myth with that which indicates combat, struggle, challenge (needle, agoghè). 'Needle' also means to celebrate, to party, to drive, to excite, to lift. If Myth does not do this, it is only a study of Myth, an ethno-historical attempt and no further. Not 'mythogony' from ghignomai, as descent but as a profound capacity to act, to affect. A movement rising from within, from the abyss. Until a few years ago, talking about 'empires' evoked distant boyhood studies, the memory of the Babylonians and Assyrians and at most a few vestiges of ancient Rome. Nothing could be older, outdated and almost ridiculous.

Today, faced with the need to realistically accept an increasingly complex, heterogeneous, multi-layered and contradictory socio-existential situation between forward-looking technological futuristic thrusts and an ever more widespread desire for a more organic and even more archaic and natural life, a new nostalgic love for the 'small homelands' emerges in unison with the recognition of the need for an imperial dimension as the only cultural form capable of managing such complexity and governing it in a harmonious and balanced manner. Multipolarity thus appears to us today as the timeless intrinsic essence of every imperial reality, both as an internal, federal, self-governing projection and as an authoritative external projection.

Almost every true empire is federal internally and multiform also in its capacity for external projection. Italian feudalism was, from the emperor Constantine onwards and for fifteen centuries, the greatest and most vital expression of cultural and social biodiversity, superior to the same internal and relational differentiation proper to the Roman Empire. Maritime republics, free cities, imperial communes, Signorìe, the millenary Republic of Venice, the leopard-spot dominations of the Catholic Church, private latifundia, small peasant estates, city commons (woods, pastures of common use) demonstrate a vital differentiation that radiated both horizontally and vertically in a social sense: professional guilds, confraternities, associations, city militias, religious convents, differentiated and multiform magistracies. Here is the natural ancient multipolarity as a set of relational bodies that expresses a profound balance between order and chaos, between differentiation and hierarchy, between community and heroic and authoritative direction.

Today, therefore, we are called upon to think of multipolarity in all its possible perspectives and especially in its mental position of centrality that radiates in multiple forms as from within a Platonic solid. It is no coincidence that the complex Platonic forms designed by Leonardo for Luca Pacioli were, in the best of Italian Neo-Platonic humanism, true talismans and emblems of wisdom revealing the dynamics and charisms of nature. Shapes that not only synthesised the elements of nature but also represented visions tending towards the sphere and at the same time holding together more than one geometric form. Even when they are formed by repeating only triangles or pentagons as in the dodecahedron and icosahedron, their position is articulated as in a spiralling dance or in a sequence reminiscent of DNA.

Multipolarity stabilises and represents the most natural and normal condition for ensuring true progress as the irradiation and development of all the capacities of a community and a territory or set of communities and territories. Multipolarity as a relational dimension mutually implies a central position and through. Mediation between future and past, high and low, unifying verticalisation and participatory sharing.

The wisdom of Greek myth reminds us of the timeless character of multipolarity. Ancient Greece, like the long epoch of Western Christendom (later interrupted by an industrial revolution imposed ideologically and managed elitistically), experienced a living, non-ideological multipolarity that was spiritual and geo-anthropological before being political and formal. A relational multipolarity that also performed both vertically and horizontally. The vertical axis was visualised in the solstitial journey of Apollo from Delphi to the land of the Hyperboreans and of Zeus from Olympus to the red Ethiopia of Myth. Without forgetting the sacred extremes of the cosmos defined by the East of Colchis, the lands of the Scythians and Persians, and the West of the happy islands of Circe, Calypso, Thule, the Phaeacians and Atlantis. Horizontally, this archetypal and profound spiritual multipolarity was realised in a series of living polarities founding the Greek self-consciousness itself: the Games of Olympia, the rites of Eleusis and Samothrace, the great sanctuaries, first and foremost that of Delphi.

The Greeks existed as a confederation of peoples, as a koinè only around these multiple polarities. The Greeks were never an empire before Constantinople, but thanks to their multipolarity they defeated two empires that were not so multipolar: first the Trojan and then the Persian. Also incorrect is the cliché that sees the ancient Greeks as racists who considered all other non-Greek populations as barbarians and inferior peoples. Even before Alexander the Great, who absorbed the universal idea of empire from the Persians for the first time, ancient Greece had always had admiration for non-Greek peoples such as the Nordic Hyperboreans, the Scythian peoples and glorious Egypt.

The historian Herodotus devotes ample space in his writings to the Scythian peoples who occupied the great Sarmatian plain stretching from the Black Sea to the Caspian Sea and were distinguished by their skill in working with gold and other metals as well as their great warrior abilities. Lucian dedicates one of his books to the Scythian sage Anacarsi, considered by many to be one of the Seven Sages of archaic Greece, and historic Athens itself, Aristotle and Aristophanes remind us, entrusted its defence to Scythian archers. Herodotus again expresses his great admiration for Egypt, seen as a land of wisdom of glorious and great antiquity, in comparison to which the Greeks seem like mere children. The Greek gods themselves in the Myth when the immense monster and giant Typhon son of Gaea defeats Zeus and conquers Olympus they all flee to Egypt, transforming themselves into animals. The fifty Danaids come from Egypt and Cadmus from Phoenicia, the one who teaches the alphabet to the Greeks.

The neo-classical vision of ancient Greece is an ideological, erroneous and falsifying vision. Archaic Greece was a shamanic and multi-polar Greece both internally and in external relations. A Greece that did not live enclosed in its Aegean or confined to southern Italy but mingled with Scythian peoples in the Black Sea, with Egyptians in the Nile Delta in the port of Canopus, with Hittite peoples in Asia Minor, with Thracian peoples along the Danube and with Celts in the west. Homer tells us of the Macedonians as allies of the Trojan Empire, along with the Ethiopians and the Persians of Susa. In fact, Ilio is the greatest testimony to what an Eurasian Empire is. A complete empire: both land and sea and one that held peoples in unity along both axes: north-south and east-west directly controlling only a small region as it based its power on the stability of confederal and federal alliances that even reached the Asian Amazons.

The Spartans maintained friendly relations for centuries with the Persian Empire with which they shared similar titanic cults such as horse sacrifice and sun worship. It is no coincidence that Sparta did not follow Alexander the Great against Persia and the Persian gold was the only one to enter Laconia, and it is no coincidence that Helen of Sparta stopped in Egypt and Phenica and Cyprus before reaching Troy: on the outward journey with Paris and on the return journey with Menelaus. Greek Myth, the spiritual, sacred and timeless heart of all of Ellas, teaches and reminds us of this multi-millennial fact: how Ellas was multipolar and EurAsia was a living, normal reality. Every great Greek hero is a traveller and explorer and is called upon to undertake great feats that are as much in the far north of the Hyperboreans (Perseus and Heracles according to Apollodorus' account) as they are in the east of Asia: Jason in his quest for the Golden Fleece, Heracles at the Amazons and in the Garden of the Hesperides, Bellerophon in Asia Minor against the Chimera, Dionysus on his triumphal journey to India via the Caucasus, as recalled in his poem Grandfather of Panopolis. Without the Asian plains and Arctic snows, the great Greek heroes would not have become great heroes. Artemis and Apollo are Asian divinities worshipped by the Scythians and the peoples of Asia Minor, and only after the Trojan War is their cult spread more widely in Hellas, especially in Sparta. Iphigenia becomes priestess of Artemis in Tauride (in the Crimea) and Medea, sister of Circe and daughter of the Sun, is a wise and holy woman from Cappadocia.

The geography of the Myth turns out to be extremely concrete and precise: Tanai, Thermodon and the Amazon River correspond to the Don, the Dnepr and the Volga. Even Achilles is not buried in Greece but in the Black Sea, on the Island of Snakes. A multi-polarity that is also enriched by social aspects in recalling the marriage between Theseus and Hippolyta the Queen of the Amazons and the greater freedom enjoyed by Spartan women, a heritage that is certainly Asiatic-oriental as the theme of the women of the Isle of Lemnos confirms. The human being is multipolar: heart and mind, soul-body-spirit, praxis and thought, memory and vision.