Pending a better analysis article I have reviewed the following material collected by Claude on the role of Vortices in the formation of worlds. Combined with the role of infinity / isonomia this is a major component of Epicurean physics in explaining how worlds come into being. I recommend treating the following as a collection of citations on which to build further analysis.
The following is a collection of passages in the Epicurean texts, and in the earlier atomists whom Epicurus corrected, that use whirls, eddies or vortices to explain how worlds form and how the heavens move. It belongs with the doctrine that the atoms are infinite in number while their kinds are not, and with the principle of isonomia or equal distribution. Together they make up the Epicurean alternative to divine creation. That alternative needs a natural way for scattered atoms to sort themselves into earth, sea, air and stars. Whirling motion is one of the ways the atomists found.
What Is A Vortex?
A vortex is a body of fluid, water or air, turning around a center. We see vortices every day: the swirl of water draining from a basin, the eddy behind a rock in a stream, a whirlpool, a dust devil crossing a field, a tornado, a waterspout at sea, and on the largest scale the spiral arms of a hurricane seen from space. The Greek word was dinos or dinē, “whirl.” Lucretius uses the Latin turbo, which Bailey translates “whirl,” “eddy” or “whirlwind.”
A vortex does something more than spin. It sorts. When things of different weight and shape are caught in the same whirl, they do not stay mixed. Heavy pieces gather in one place and light ones in another. Stir a cup of tea and the leaves collect in a heap at the center of the bottom. Shake grain in a sieve and the different seeds separate. Waves wash pebbles up a beach and leave the round ones together and the flat ones together. No one arranges the pieces. The motion and the differences between the pieces are enough.
Aristotle noticed that the early natural philosophers drew their idea of world-formation from exactly this kind of everyday observation. In On the Heavens he says of their “so-called ‘whirling’ movement”:
The form of causation supposed they all borrow from observations of liquids and of air, in which the larger and heavier bodies always move to the centre of the whirl. This is thought by all those who try to generate the heavens to explain why the earth came together at the centre.
Democritus, the most important atomist before Epicurus, pointed to the same kind of sorting in a passage preserved by Sextus Empiricus:
“For animals,” he says, “flock together with animals of a like species, as doves with doves and cranes with cranes, and so too all other irrational animals.” And it is the same with things inanimate, as one may see in the case of seeds that are being winnowed and in the case of pebbles along the beaches; for in the one case, by the whirling of the sieve lentils are ranged separately with lentils, barley with barley, and wheat with wheat; and in the other case, owing to the motion of the waves, the oblong pebbles are pushed into the same place as the oblong, and the round as the round, as though the similarity in things had a certain force of attraction for them.
— Sextus Empiricus, Against the Logicians I.117-118 (tr. Bury)
The Epicurean View Of What A Vortex Is
For Epicurus a vortex is fully real, as real as the wind and water we see whirling. But it is not a third kind of thing beside body and void, and it is not a force or a power standing over the atoms. Atoms and void are the ultimate constituents of everything, and nothing exists eternally the same except atoms and void (Letter to Herodotus 39-41). That does not mean that nothing else is real. Everything else that exists, from a grain of sand to a whirlwind to a whole world, is just as real, as a compound of atoms or as a property or event of such compounds. A whirl is one of those events. It is a motion of bodies: of atoms, or of compounds such as wind and cloud, moving through the void by their own weight, striking one another, rebounding, and sometimes swerving. It has no mind and no plan. It is one of the ways that moving atoms, all of the same few properties of shape, size and weight, come to be sorted into the different bodies we see.
Three points mark the Epicurean view off from the earlier atomists:
- A whirl is not “necessity.” Democritus called the vortex necessity itself and made everything follow from it. Epicurus rejected that. Atoms can swerve at no fixed time or place, and no single motion, a whirl included, fixes what must come of it.
- A whirl alone is not enough to make a world. Epicurus wrote that it is “not merely necessary for a gathering of atoms to take place, nor indeed for a whirl and nothing more to be set in motion” (Letter to Pythocles 90). A world needs seeds of the right kind, flowing in from outside, joining and growing little by little until it is complete.
- Whirls are one explanation among several. Where the evidence does not decide between explanations, Epicurus lists every one that agrees with what we see. Whirls of air and ether appear on those lists beside other natural causes, for the motions of the stars as well as for storms on earth.
What Epicurus kept from the earlier atomists is the main idea: like goes with like by natural motion, without a designer. Lucretius describes the first stage of our world as “a sort of fresh-formed storm” of every kind of atom, out of which “like things” began “to unite with like, and so to unfold a world” (V.432-448). The heavy atoms of earth crowd to the middle; the smaller, smoother and rounder atoms of sea, air, sun and stars are squeezed out and rise (V.449-470). The layers settle by weight, earth at the bottom, then sea, then air, and the fiery ether above all (V.495-508). This is the same sorting that the whirl of the sieve and the motion of the waves produce.
David Sedley states the consequence in Creationism and Its Critics in Antiquity (2007), p. 164: “vast collections of atoms have a propensity to organize themselves mechanically into certain patterns of motion, and thus in many cases to take on at least the outline structure of a world automatically.” Joined to the infinite number of atoms and the limited number of their kinds, natural sorting of this kind means that worlds like ours form, and form again, without any maker.
The Atomists Before Epicurus: Leucippus And Democritus
Leucippus
Diogenes Laertius gives the earliest atomist account of how a world forms, and the vortex is at its center:
That many bodies, of various kinds and shapes, are borne by amputation from the infinite, into a vast vacuum; and then, they being collected together, produce one vortex; according to which they, dashing against one another, and whirling about in every direction, are separated in such a way that like attaches itself to like.
But as they are all of equal weight, when by reason of their number they are no longer able to whirl about, the thin ones depart into the outer vacuum, as if they bounded through, and the others remain behind, and becoming entangled with one another, run together, and produce a sort of spherical shaped figure.
This subsists as a kind of membrane; containing within itself bodies of every kind; and as these are whirled about so as to revolve according to the resistance of the centre, the circumambient membrane becomes thin, since bodies are without ceasing, uniting according to the impulse given by the vortex; and in this way the earth is produced, since these bodies which have once been brought to the centre remain there.
On the other side, there is produced another enveloping membrane, which increases incessantly by the accretion of exterior bodies; and which, as it is itself animated by a circular movement, drags with it, and adds to itself, everything it meets with; some of these bodies thus enveloped re-unite again and form compounds, which are at first moist and clayey, but soon becoming dry, and being drawn on in the universal movement of the circular vortex, they catch fire, and constitute the substance of the stars.
Democritus
Democritus made the vortex the cause of everything and called it necessity. In R. D. Hicks’s translation of Diogenes Laertius, the atoms “are borne along in the whole universe in a vortex,” and “All things happen by virtue of necessity, the vortex being the cause of the creation of all things, and this he calls necessity.” Diogenes Laertius, Lives IX.44-45, Democritus (tr. Hicks) — Perseus Digital Library
Aristotle’s Complaint
Aristotle objected that the atomists left the most orderly thing in nature, the heavens, to chance:
There are some too who ascribe this heavenly sphere and all the worlds to spontaneity. They say that the vortex arose spontaneously, i.e. the motion that separated and arranged in its present order all that exists.
The Epicurean answer is that the vortex needs no cause outside nature. It is what atoms do when enough of them, of the right kinds, meet in a place with room to move.
Epicurus: How Worlds Form
Letter to Herodotus 73-74
Every world is “separated off” from a particular gathering of matter, and no world is formed by necessity in one fixed pattern:
And in addition to what we have already said we must believe that worlds, and indeed every limited compound body which continuously exhibits a similar appearance to the things we see, were created from the infinite, and that all such things, greater and less alike, were separated off from individual agglomerations of matter; and that all are again dissolved, some more quickly, some more slowly, some suffering from one set of causes, others from another.
And further we must believe that these worlds were neither created all of necessity with one configuration nor yet with every kind of shape.
Letter to Pythocles 88-90
This is the central passage. Epicurus defines a world, says how one comes into being, and rejects the idea that a whirl “and nothing more,” set going “by necessity,” is enough. He then says that the sun, moon and stars grew “by the aggregations and whirlings” of fine bodies.
A world is a circumscribed portion of sky, containing heavenly bodies and an earth and all the heavenly phenomena, whose dissolution will cause all within it to fall into confusion: it is a piece cut off from the infinite and ends in a boundary either rare or dense, either revolving or stationary: its outline may be spherical or three-cornered, or any kind of shape.
And that such worlds are infinite in number we can be sure, and also that such a world may come into being both inside another world and in an interworld, by which we mean a space between worlds; it will be in a place with much void, and not in a large empty space quite void, as some say: this occurs when seeds of the right kind have rushed in from a single world or interworld, or from several: little by little they make junctions and articulations, and cause changes of position to another place, as it may happen, and produce irrigations of the appropriate matter until the period of completion and stability, which lasts as long as the underlying foundations are capable of receiving additions.
For it is not merely necessary for a gathering of atoms to take place, nor indeed for a whirl and nothing more to be set in motion, as is supposed, by necessity, in an empty space in which it is possible for a world to come into being, nor can the world go on increasing until it collides with another world, as one of the so-called physical philosophers says. For this is a contradiction of phenomena.
Sun and moon and the other stars were not created by themselves and subsequently taken in by the world, but were fashioned in it from the first and gradually grew in size by the aggregations and whirlings of bodies of minute parts, either windy or fiery or both, for this is what our sensation suggests.
The Greek word Bailey translates “whirl” in the first sentence of section 90 is dinos, the same word the earlier atomists used for the vortex. Epicurus does not deny that whirls happen. He denies that a whirl by itself, working by necessity in empty space, explains a world.
Lucretius: How Our World Formed
Not By Design: Every Kind Of Meeting And Motion
But by what means that gathering together of matter established earth and sky and the depths of ocean, and the courses of sun and moon, I will set forth, in order. For in very truth not by design did the first-beginnings of things place themselves each in their order with foreseeing mind, nor indeed did they make compact what movements each should start; but because many first-beginnings of things in many ways, driven on by blows from time everlasting until now, and moved by their own weight, have been wont to be borne on, and to unite in every way and essay everything that they might create, meeting one with another, therefore it comes to pass that scattered abroad through a great age, as they try meetings and motions of every kind, at last those come together, which, suddenly cast together, become often the beginnings of great things, of earth, sea and sky, and the race of living things.
A Storm Of Atoms, And Like Uniting With Like
Then, when things were so, neither could the sun’s orb be seen, flying on high with its bounteous light, nor the stars of the great world, nor sea nor sky, nay nor earth nor air, nor anything at all like to the things we know, but only a sort of fresh-formed storm, a mass gathered together of first-beginnings of every kind, whose discord was waging war and confounding interspaces, paths, inter-lacings, weights, blows, meetings, and motions, because owing to their unlike forms and diverse shapes, all things were unable to remain in union, as they do now, and to give and receive harmonious motions. From this mass parts began to fly off hither and thither, and like things to unite with like, and so to unfold a world, and to sunder its members and dispose its great parts, that is, to mark off the high heaven from the earth, and the sea by itself, so that it might spread out with its moisture kept apart, and likewise the fires of the sky by themselves, unmixed and kept apart.
The Heavy Sink To The Middle, The Light Are Squeezed Out
Yea, verily, first of all the several bodies of earth, because they were heavy and interlaced, met together in the middle, and all took up the lowest places; and the more they met and interlaced, the more did they squeeze out those which were to make sea, stars, sun, and moon, and the walls of the great world. For all these are of smoother and rounder seeds, and of much smaller particles than earth. And so, bursting out from the quarter of the earth through its loose-knit openings, first of all the fiery ether rose up and, being so light, carried off with it many fires, in not far different wise than often we see now, when first the golden morning light of the radiant sun reddens over the grass bejewelled with dew, and the pools and ever-running streams give off a mist, yea, even as the earth from time to time is seen to steam: and when all these are gathered together as they move upwards, clouds with body now formed weave a web beneath the sky on high. Thus then at that time the light and spreading ether, with body now formed, was set all around and curved on every side, and spreading wide towards every part on all sides, thus fenced in all else in its greedy embrace.
The Layers Settle By Weight
So then the weight of earth, with body now formed, sank to its place, and, as it were, all the slime of the world slid heavily to the bottom, and sank right down like dregs; then the sea and then the air and then the fiery ether itself were all left unmixed with their liquid bodies; they are lighter each than the next beneath, and ether, most liquid and lightest of all, floats above the breezes of air, nor does it mingle its liquid body with the boisterous breezes of air; it suffers all our air below to be churned by headstrong hurricanes, it suffers it to brawl with shifting storms, but itself bears on its fires as it glides in changeless advance.
The same account appears in brief at I.1021-1028: “not by design did the first-beginnings of things place themselves each in their order with foreseeing mind … but because many of them shifting in many ways throughout the world are harried and buffeted by blows from limitless time, by trying movements and unions of every kind, at last they fall into such dispositions as those, whereby our world of things is created and holds together.”
Whirls In The Heavens Today
Once a world has formed, the motions begun at its formation go on. Epicurus and Lucretius name whirls and currents of air and ether among the possible causes of the motions of the sun, moon and stars, always as one explanation among several.
Letter to Pythocles 92-93
Their motions may not impossibly be due to the revolution of the whole heaven, or else it may remain stationary, and they may revolve owing to the natural impulse towards the east, which was produced at the beginning of the world … . . by an excessive heat owing to a spreading of the fire which is always moving on to the regions nearest in succession.
The tropics of sun and moon may be caused owing to an obliquity of the whole heaven, which is constrained into this position in the successive seasons; or equally well by an outward impulsion of a current of air, or because the appropriate material successively catches fire, as the former fails; or again, from the beginning this particular form of revolution may have been assigned to these stars, so that they move in a kind of spiral.
Letter to Pythocles 112-113: A Whirl Of Air Around The Pole
Some stars ‘revolve in their place’ (as Homer says), which comes to pass not only because this part of the world is stationary and round it the rest revolves, as some say, but also because a whirl of air is formed in a ring round it, which prevents their moving about as do the other stars: or else it is because there is not a succession of appropriate fuel for them, but only in this place in which they are seen fixed.
That some of the stars should wander in their course, if indeed it is the case that their movements are such, while others do not move in this manner, may be due to the reason that from the first as they moved in their circles they were so constrained by necessity that some of them move along the same regular orbit, and others along one which is associated with certain irregularities: or it may be that among the regions to which they are carried in some places there are regular tracts of air which urge them on successively in the same direction and provide flame for them regularly, while in other places the tracts are irregular, so that the aberrations which we observe result.
Lucretius V.509-533: Currents Of Air And Ether
Now let us sing what is the cause of the motions of the stars. First of all, if the great globe of the sky turns round, we must say that the air presses on the pole at either end, and holds it outside and closes it in at both ends; and that then another current of air flows above, straining on to the same goal, towards which the twinkling stars of the everlasting world roll on; or else that there is another current beneath, to drive up the sphere reversely, as we see streams moving round wheels with their scoops.
It may be also that the whole sky can abide in its place, while yet the shining signs are carried on; either because swift currents of ether are shut within them, and seeking a way out are turned round and round, and so roll on the fires this way and that through the nightly quarters of the sky; or else an air streaming from some other quarter without turns and drives the fires; or else they can themselves creep on, whither its own food invites and summons each as they move on, feeding their flaming bodies everywhere throughout the sky.
For it is hard to declare for certain which of these causes it is in this world; but what can happen and does happen through the universe in the diverse worlds, fashioned on diverse plans, that is what I teach, and go on to set forth many causes for the motions of the stars, which may exist throughout the universe; and of these it must needs be one which in our world too gives strength to the motions of the heavenly signs; but to affirm which of them it is, is in no wise the task of one treading forward step by step.
The last paragraph ties the whirls of the heavens back to the infinity of worlds. Whatever can happen does happen somewhere “in the diverse worlds, fashioned on diverse plans.”
Lucretius V.621-636: Democritus’s “Whirl Of Heaven”
Lucretius accepts Democritus’s whirl as a possible explanation of why the sun and moon fall behind the stars:
For, first and foremost, it is clear that it may come to pass, as the judgement of the holy man, Democritus, sets before us, that the nearer the several stars are to earth, the less can they be borne on with the whirl of heaven. For its swift keen strength passes away and is lessened beneath, and so little by little the sun is left behind with the hindmost signs, because it is much lower than the burning signs. And even more the moon: the lower her course, the further it is from the sky and nearer to earth, the less can she strain on her course level with the signs. Moreover the weaker the whirl with which she is borne along, being lower than the sun, the more do all the signs catch her up all around and pass her. Therefore, it comes to pass that she seems to turn back more speedily to each several sign, because the signs come back to her.
He follows it at once with a second explanation, alternating currents of air from opposite quarters (V.637-649), in keeping with the method of multiple explanations.
Diogenes of Oinoanda, Fragment 13
The inscription of Diogenes of Oinoanda is damaged at the start of this fragment, and the words in square brackets are restorations by the editor, not text read on the stone:
[The heavenly bodies, when the whirls of air] cause [such strong movement], are all [violently] tossed about, but some meet one another, while others do not; and some pursue a straight course up to a certain point, others, like the sun and moon, an oblique one, while others revolve in the same place, like the Bear; moreover, some move in a high orbit, others however in a low one.
He goes on to state the Epicurean rule for such questions: “if one is investigating things that are not directly perceptible, and if one sees that several explanations are possible, it is reckless to make a dogmatic pronouncement concerning any single one; such a procedure is characteristic of a seer rather than a wise man.”
Whirls On Earth: The Evidence We Can See
Epicurus reasoned about the heavens from what we can watch happening on earth: “we can obtain indications of what happens above from some of the phenomena on earth” (Letter to Pythocles 87). Whirlwinds, waterspouts and eddies are the visible cases from which the invisible ones are understood.
Lucretius I.271-297: Eddies Of Wind Prove That Unseen Bodies Act
Thus then the blasts of wind too must needs be borne on; and when like some strong stream they have swooped towards any side, they push things and dash them on with constant assault; sometimes in eddying whirl they seize them up and bear them away in swiftly swirling hurricane. Wherefore again and again there are unseen bodies of wind, inasmuch as in their deeds and ways they are found to rival mighty streams, whose body all may see.
Letter to Pythocles 103-105: Thunderbolts, Cyclones And Waterspouts
Thunderbolts may occur because there are frequent gatherings of wind, which whirls about and is fanned into a fierce flame, and then a portion of it breaks off and rushes violently on the places beneath …
And thunderbolts may be produced in other ways too. Only superstition must be excluded, as it will, if one successfully follows the lead of seen phenomena to gain indications about the invisible.
Cyclones may be produced either by the driving down of a cloud into the regions below in the form of a pillar, because it is pushed by the wind gathered inside it and is driven on by the violence of the wind, while at the same time the wind outside impels it sideways; or by wind forming into circular motion, while mist is simultaneously thrust down from above; or when a great rush of wind takes place and cannot pass through sideways owing to the surrounding condensation of the atmosphere.
And when the spout is let down on to the land, whirlwinds are produced in all the various ways in which their creation may occur owing to the movement of the wind, but if it reaches the sea it produces waterspouts.
Lucretius VI.423-450: The Prester, Or Waterspout
For a whirling eddy descends and brings down along with it that cloud of pliant body; and as soon as it has forced it down pregnant on to the levels of ocean, the eddy on a sudden plunges its whole self into the water, and stirs up all the sea with a great roar, constraining it to seethe.
It comes to pass also that an eddy of wind by itself wraps itself in clouds, gathering together seeds of cloud from the air and, as it were, imitates the prester let down from the sky. When this eddy has let itself down to earth and broken up, it vomits forth a furious force of whirlwind and storm. But because this happens but rarely at all, and mountains must needs bar it on land, it is seen more often on a wide prospect of sea, and in an open stretch of sky.
Lucretius also uses whirling winds in his account of thunder and lightning: a gathered storm of wind “twisted its way into the clouds, and, shut up there with its whirling eddy, constrains the cloud more and more on all sides to hollow itself out” (VI.121-131), and in the forging of the thunderbolt “an eddy finds its way in there and whirls round in a narrow space and sharpens the thunderbolt in the hot furnaces within” (VI.269-294).
Why This Matters
The creationist argument from design, in Plato’s Timaeus and in the Stoics, says that order cannot come from disorder without a mind to arrange it. The vortex is the atomists’ plainest answer. Anyone can watch a whirl of water or air sort a jumble of different things into layers and heaps with no one directing it. Epicurus took that observation, removed the idea that the whirl works by necessity, and set it inside his larger account: infinite atoms of a limited number of kinds, spread evenly through infinite space and endless time, always moving, colliding, swerving and sorting. Given that, worlds like ours do not need a maker. They form wherever the right seeds meet in a place with room to move, and they form again and again.
Epicurus did not claim to know the exact pattern of motion that formed our own world or that drives the stars today. He listed whirls of air and ether beside other natural causes and held that every explanation agreeing with the evidence deserves a place until the evidence rules it out. What he did claim, with confidence, is that every one of these explanations is natural. As he wrote of thunderbolts, and as holds for every question about the heavens: “Only superstition must be excluded.”