Ananke (mythology)

Ananke ( Greek  Ἀνάγκη “need”, “inevitability”) was the personification of impersonal fate in Greek mythology , in contrast to the personal (just) fate assigned by the Moiren and to Tyche , which was for both luck and unhappiness blind coincidence. In tragedy poetry she appears as the supreme power to which even the gods obey.

According to Schreckenberg, the word Ananke goes back to the Semitic Chanak ("yoke", in particular the yoke imposed on slaves or prisoners), from where it was adopted into the Ionian and is already used by Homer in a transposed form. The original meaning was still present in later times, e.g. As several times in the Prometheus Bound of Aeschylus .

In the Orphic theogony , where she is also equated with Adrasteia , she is a goddess of the primeval beginning, who, in serpentine embrace with Chronos , creates the trinity of Aither , Chaos and Erebos , or the Aither and Phanes . She is also considered the wife of the demiurge and mother of the Heimarmene .

With Plato she is the mother of the Moiren and one of the original powers of creation. In later times, Ananke played a role in hermetics . According to Pausanias, there was a sanctuary of Ananke on the Acropolis of Corinth . In Roman mythology it was given the name Necessitas .

Ananke also appears as the subject of a poem by Goethe , the fourth in his Urworte, Orphic cycle :

ΑΝΑΓΚΗ, coercion

There it is again, as the stars wanted:

Condition and law; and all will

Is just wanting because we should

And arbitrariness is silent before the will;

The dearest is scolded away from the heart

Will und Grille relies on hard must.

So we are free of bills because after some years

Just closer than we were at the beginning.

Even Victor Hugo leads the preface of the novel The Hunchback of Notre-Dame ΑΝΑΓΚΗ as a leitmotif of the book one: " Just about this word is vorliegendes book was written. "

literature

• Heinz Schreckenberg: Ananke. Studies on the history of word use Zetemata Vol. 36.Beck, Munich 1964
• Wilhelm Gundel : Contributions to the development history of the terms Ananke and Heimarmene. Habilitation thesis, Giessen 1914
• Wolfgang Fauth: Thank you. In: The Little Pauly (KlP). Volume 2, Stuttgart 1967, Col. 332.
• Konrad Wernicke : Ananke . In: Paulys Realencyclopadie der classischen Antiquity Science (RE). Volume I, 2, Stuttgart 1894, Col. 2057 f.

Web links

• Ananke on Theoi.com (Engl.)

Individual evidence

1. ↑ See verses 103ff, 217ff, 510ff.
2. ↑ Frg. 54 in: Orphicorum Fragmenta. Edited by Otto Kern.
3. ↑ Argonautika 12ff.
4. ↑ Frg. 162 in: Orphicorum Fragmenta.
5. ↑ Politeia 617c
6. ↑ Symposium 195c, 197b
7. ^ Proclus commentary on Plato's Politeia 2.344f. See also Kroll: The Teachings of Hermes Trismegistus . 1914. pp. 212f.
8. ↑ Pausania's description of Greece 2.4.6
9. ↑ Goethe. Berlin edition. Vol. 1. S. 550. The second in this cycle of 5 poems appears Tyche, the accidental .
10. ↑ Victor Hugo: The Hunchback of Notre-Dame. European Literature Publishing House , Berlin 2015, ISBN 9783959090308 .