GREEK
MYTHOLOGY
RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY
Essays on Ancient Greek paganism.
Were the gods really taken seriously?
One question I've often seen asked on the internet is if the Ancient Greeks and Romans actually believed in thier gods. Honestly, the fact that this question is asked as often as it is proves just how far removed we are from the actual religion that surrounded said gods. Some people even think that “mythology” is just our word for “dead religion.” Even people who know a lot about Greek mythology tend not to know as much about Greek religion — I’ve known plenty about Greek myths for most of my life, but learned everything I know about Greek religion in within last three years. That’s saying a lot. Most modern people’s perception of gods comes from myths, in which gods are often petty, cruel, and sometimes downright evil. They punish on a whim, toy with the lives of mortals, fight with each other. Myths themselves are complicated and do not always make gods look bad, but a combination of Values Dissonance, authorial bias, and latent Christianity leads modern people to wonder why anyone would worship Greek gods at all. Case in point, I recently finished playing a game called Apotheon. The art style of this game is modeled after amphorae, and it’s full of references to mythology and actual quotes from Classical texts. But despite this, its portrayal of the gods is both shallow and extremely unsympathetic. Zeus is the Big Bad who has decided to destroy humanity, and the objective of the game is literally to assassinate the Olympians and supplant them. Leaving aside that there’s no precedent for a mortal being able to literally kill and supercede gods, I’ve never felt more unsatisfied and icky after completing a boss battle in a video game. Seeing those crumbled statues shook me. This game even made stuff up to make the gods look even worse, like Apollo having imprisoned Helios in his palace and physically supplanted him as the sun god. I felt like this game was made for people who love mythology but really, really hate the Olympians. If this is the way you perceive the Greek gods, then I suppose it’s understandable why you would wonder whether the gods were sincerely worshipped or not. The myths are also so fantastical (not to mention inconsistent) that they may seem absurd. But the modern perception of Greek gods as assholes is not reflective of how ancient people perceived them. The portrayal of gods in ancient myths is also not reflective of how ancient people perceived them Of course the Ancient Greeks and Romans believed in their gods. They worshipped their gods regularly and on specific festival days. They had public temples and household shrines to their gods. They prayed to their gods, poured libations and gave offerings to their gods, sacrificed live animals to their gods, all in exchange for blessings. Why would they sacrifice live animals to something they didn’t believe in? Human relationships with gods in the Ancient World were very reciprocal — you would present an offering or sacrifice as a gift to the god, in exchange for the god’s blessing. So for example, you would pray to Demeter to bless your crops for a good harvest, pray to Apollo to protect you from disease and evil spirits, pray to Athena for victory and Ares for courage, Poseidon for safety at sea, Hermes for good business or safety while traveling, Dionysus for joy and freedom, Artemis for a successful hunt, Aphrodite for a happy love life, etc. Some people even dedicated themselves to specific gods, or were initiated into mystery cults where they would learn the secret spiritual teachings of a god. In the context of religion, gods were perceived as fundamentally benevolent and helpful to humankind, so long as they were treated with proper respect. But — and this is a big but — “belief” doesn’t exactly entail the same thing in any ancient pagan religion as it might in the modern West, which operates within an extremely Christianized framework. We in the West are so mired in Christianity that it can be hard to see all the ways it affects our understanding of how religion fundamentally works, what the purpose of it is, and how it relates to moral philosophy. To the Ancient Greeks and Romans, it was never really a question of whether or not the gods existed. There were some philosophers that questioned if the gods existed, but the average person took it for granted. Evidence of the gods was everywhere — you only needed to look up into the sky during a storm to behold the power of Zeus, Apollo was the cause of any plague or sickness, the barrenness of winter was a result of Demeter’s grief, Dionysus’ presence coursed through your veins whenever you drank wine, etc. Most Ancient Greek and Roman texts (regardless of their nature) treat the deities as though they are actual beings that exist, not archetypes or metaphors. The gods were out there. This was a no-brainer; for most, it almost wasn’t even worth considering whether the gods existed or not. Cicero’s De Natura Deorum offers various proofs for why the gods exist (including intelligent design, and that all human cultures have some idea of the divine), but there are no counter-arguments for why the gods don’t exist — that is not even a viable option. One of Cicero’s characters, Balbus, describes arguing in favor of atheism as “wicked and impious.” In fact, another character, Cotta, asks Balbus why he bothered to go on and on listing arguments for why the gods exist, when this was never in doubt in the first place. Cotta points out that to defend the existence of gods so thoroughly is to suggest that the existence of gods isn’t self-evident, which it is. The existence of the gods is so obvious, that considering arguments for their existence is just a philosophical formality. But although nearly everyone agreed that the gods existed, there were many varying beliefs about what exactly the gods are, why they exist, what they do, which stories about them (if any) are true, what aspects of the world they had direct control over, and how they relate to humanity. In De Natura Deorum, Cicero writes, "There is in fact no subject upon which so much difference of opinion exists, not only among the unlearned but also among educated men; and the views entertained are so various and so discrepant, that, while it is no doubt a possible alternative that none of them is true, it is certainly impossible that more than one should be so.” There were so many conflicting opinions about the gods, that they couldn’t possibly all be true. Cicero’s dialogue goes through a lot of these different ideas. It questions whether gods interact with humans at all (Cicero decides that they do, because if they didn’t, then religion would have no reason to exist), if everything in the world is controlled by gods, if gods created the world, if the world is a god, if crops and the weather that nourishes them are divine gifts to mortals, if the gods have always existed, whether gods have bodies or else only infinite minds, if gods can experience sensation the way humans can, if the sky and stars and celestial bodies are gods, whether human reason or intellect is divine, whether or not gods can feel negative human emotions (as they do in mythology, the works of “the poets”) or exist in eternal beatific happiness, whether or not gods are human-shaped, what substances gods are made of, whether gods really are the pinnacle of beauty and what that means, whether gods have good intentions towards humanity or not, etc. It also considers some allegorical interpretations of myths — for example, the myth of Kronos devouring his children is symbolic of Time eventually consuming and destroying all things, and his defeat by Zeus represents the constraining of Time into a cosmic order (hours, days, years, and so forth). It discusses where the line is drawn between gods and other entities; if the Olympians are gods, are their half-mortal children divine? Are the Protogenoi divine, because they spawned the Olympians? Are nymphs goddesses, because they are worshipped in temples? That would make satyrs gods, and surely satyrs aren’t divine. Are daemons divine? Are immortal monsters like Cerberus divine? Are non-Greek deities or syncretic deities divine, and if so, does that mean the gods of the barbarians are also divine? Can mortals be deified? (If you’re interested in how pagans thought about their gods, I highly recommend De Natura Deorum. It highlights just how different the conception of gods in mythology is from the conception of gods in religion and philosophy. If you’re neopagan, no matter what kind, you should definitely read it.) One of the biggest differences between paganism and Christianity is that these philosophical questions about the nature of the gods, while certainly interesting and meaningful, don’t ultimately matter. Their implications don’t shake the very bedrock of religion itself. Balbus ends his portion of the dialogue with the following paragraph, which I think perfectly summarizes the difference between mythology and religion: "Do you see therefore how from a true and valuable philosophy of nature has been evolved this imaginary and fanciful pantheon? The perversion has been a fruitful source of false beliefs, crazy errors and superstitions hardly above the level of old wives' tales. We know what the gods look like and how old they are, their dress and their equipment, and also their genealogies, marriages and relationships, and all about them is distorted into the likeness of human frailty. They are actually represented as liable to passions and emotions — we hear of their being in love, sorrowful, angry; according to the myths they even engage in wars and battles, and that not only when as in Homer two armies and contending and the gods take sides and intervene on their behalf, but they actually fought wars of their own, for instance with the Titans and with the Giants. These stories and these beliefs are utterly foolish; they are stuffed with nonsense and absurdity of all sorts. But though repudiating these myths with contempt, we shall nevertheless be able to understand the personality and the nature of the divinities pervading the substance of the several elements, Ceres permeating earth, Neptune the sea, and so on; and it is our duty to revere and worship these gods under the names which custom has bestowed upon them. But the best and also the purest, holiest and most pious way of worshipping the gods is ever to venerate them with purity, sincerity and innocence both of thought and of speech." Of course, Cicero is a learned philosopher and his perspective on the gods isn’t necessarily what the average person would have believed or considered, but, this goes to show that some ancient people took the gods seriously without taking myths seriously. Another philosophical treatise on gods, Sallustius’ On the Gods and the World, describes gods as incorporeal and eternal beings who are inherently good. According to Sallustius, myths are intended to reveal the nature of the gods to the wise or the initiated, and hide it from those who cannot understand it. “Absurdities” like adultery and the other drama that the gods get up to are all to be interpreted metaphorically. For example, he interprets the myth of the Judgement of Paris as representing the gods offering different blessings to the world (the apple), and that the “sensible” soul values beauty over power. I’m not sure if I personally agree with this interpretation (Paris is not sensible — his decision causes the Trojan War), but I understand what Sallustius is going for here. With the gods being inherently good in his model, he of course needs to address the “problem of evil”; he defines evil as the absence of goodness, as darkness is the absence of light. It’s not a created thing but the lack of a thing. Goodness connects us to the gods, while evil disconnects us from them. Very straightforward. So in short: The gods exist, but that doesn’t mean that all the entertaining stories told about them are literally true. The average person wasn’t a philosopher, and didn’t bother to meticulously dissect the exact nature of the gods. Maybe some average people in Greece or Rome did take the myths literally, or at least believed that the gods looked and acted like humans. But the myths are ultimately just stories. They’re entertaining, they might reveal some insights, but they don’t have that much bearing on worship. This leads me into my next main point: Ancient Greco-Roman religion was orthopraxic, not orthodoxic. This means that it didn’t matter what you personally believed about the gods, so long as you participated in their public worship. Piety meant doing your sacrifices and singing your hymns and attending festivals and so forth, it did not mean believing certain things. (This is why it can be hard for modern pagans to authentically reconstruct ancient religion — even with all the information, we in the twenty-first century completely lack the social infrastructure that the ancient religion depended upon.) Any slightly differing interpretation of theology was just a personal opinion on your part, which you were free to hold, and all that really mattered was that you maintained the religious traditions that you were taught. It didn’t matter whether you thought the gods were anthropomorphic or not, moral or immoral, comprehensible or ineffable. There’s no Scripture in paganism — no direct and irrefutable Word of God that forms the entire basis of your belief system and that you cannot disagree with. There’s no such thing as heresy or apostasy in paganism. You could be impious by refusing to worship the gods, you could be blasphemous by desecrating their statues and temples, but you would not be considered evil just for disagreeing about how gods work. Bottom line: There’s more to gods than their myths.
Divine Domains
Conceiving of gods and goddesses purely in terms of their domains can be an easy way of gaining a surface-level understanding of deities, but it’s only useful to a point. Understanding all gods as “the god of ___” makes gods seem a lot more clean-cut than they actually are. Assuming they come from Christian backgrounds, I think most people’s framework for understanding polytheistic gods is the Ancient Greek pantheon. The Greek pantheon is just as massively complicated as any of the others in the world, but it seems very straightforward because it’s often presented that way in children’s books and shows, which is where most people learn about them. The sheer abundance of information that we have on the Greek gods makes them some of the best-understood pagan deities in the world, which means it’s relatively easy to take all that complexity and distill it down into bite-sized pieces. Greek mythology seems deceptively simple, because it’s easy to simplify; twelve major deities, all with their clearly-defined little domains and their most significant stories. I still visualize the image of the Olympians on their thrones from the D’Aulaires’ Book of Greek Myths when I'm listing them in my head. If you were to look at an image of all the Olympians lined up, it's easy to see one god for each important thing. Zeus is the god of storms. Poseidon is the god of the sea. Aphrodite is the goddess of love. Ares is the god of war. Apollo is the god of light. Dionysus is the god of wine. etc., etc. When I was a kid, I observed that Apollo had a lot of domains in comparison to everyone else — light, music, reason, poetry, healing, and prophecy. That’s a lot of things! But it turns out they’re all like that. Every single one of them has an entire laundry list of domains and relevant associations, many of which overlap or vary depending on the context. If all you’re familiar with is this sort of simplistic depiction of the twelve Olympian gods, then it can be difficult to really understand mythology. Greek mythology is as much a twisted rabbit hole as any other mythology and religion. It’s far more than this crystallization that you see here. People misunderstand exactly what a domain is. A domain isn’t the type of superpowers a god has, and it also isn’t (usually) the thing that the god is intended to represent. A domain is exactly that — a domain. The god rules over their divine domain, exactly like a king ruling over a piece of land. That means that the god has control over the aspect of the natural world, human nature, or human culture that the domain encompasses. Domains are more a feature of cult than of myth, because humans will pray to the god for help with various areas of life. If humans pray to a god to make it rain, then the god is a god of rain, even if that isn’t the “main” thing that the god is associated with. Usually, all the domains are tied together by a common central concept, one that is difficult to define because it is something truly primordial. Zeus is power, both in the natural world and in human society. Hermes is movement and transference — of information, currency, souls, or literal travel from place to place. Athena is strategic thinking, needed for war, crafts, and invention. Dionysus is ecstasy, the experience of it and the means of obtaining it. Apollo is illumination, in the form of literal light, artistic inspiration, insight into the future, physical cleansing of the body, or elevation of mankind into civilization. I think it’s more useful to think of gods in these terms, of having a set of associations surrounding core ideas. When you try to extrapolate the simplified model of each god being the “god of” something to other cultures, you start to run into problems. For example, a lot of people notice similarities between Odin and Zeus, being the heads of their respective pantheons, and both appearing to be old men in the sky somewhere. But Zeus and Odin really don’t have that much in common. For one thing, they have very different approaches towards leadership. Zeus is very direct and obsessively concerned with maintaining his own authority. Odin is more backhanded, and will use trickery to get his way more often than force. For this and other reasons, the Romans assumed that the Germanic people worshipped Mercury (Hermes) as the head of their pantheon. I’ve been doing a series of posts to flesh out my Absolutely Massive List of Gods. So far, I’ve managed to complete my lists for the Greek, Norse, Egyptian, Celtic, Shinto, Aztec, and Mayan, pantheons, and right now I’m working on the Mesopotamian and Hindu pantheons. While forming these lists, I’ve been introducing each deity in terms of what they’re the god of, because this is an easy and simple way of understanding them. But I’ve also encountered firsthand just how difficult it is to make this work in some situations. For example, the Welsh gods — while the Irish gods have relatively well-defined domains, the Welsh gods don’t, because most of them aren’t even presented as gods in the texts they appear in (which were all written by Christians). It’d be like if you were trying to figure out what the Greek gods’ domains were, based solely on medieval translations of the Homeric epics. You’d have to do a lot of guesswork. So what are they the gods of, assuming they even are gods at all? Take the characters in “Math fab Mathonwy,” for example. What is Math fab Mathonwy the god of? I described him as the god of wealth, but I kind of pulled that out of my ass. Math’s most notable characteristic is that he has to rest his feet in the lap of a virgin, or he’ll die. That doesn’t give me a lot to go on. What about Gwydion? It’s easy to say that he’s the god of magic, becuase he’s a wizard, but we have no idea why (or indeed, if) Gwydion was worshipped. Blodeuwedd is interpreted as a goddess of initiation by modern pagans, but this is based on a specific reading of her myth. The most surface-level interpretation of her myth is that she cheated on her husband and tried to have him killed — that doesn’t make her the goddess of initiation. This is assuming she actually is a goddess at all, since her role in mythology bears similarities to mortal characters like Clytemnestra. Arianrhod is usually considered a moon goddess, but this also isn’t really based on anything except extrapolation from her name, “silver wheel.” (Sometimes, we have no choice but to extrapolate.) As for Lleu Llaw Gyffes, we have a better idea of what his “domains” might have been because he’s almost certainly the Welsh version of Lugh Lamhfada, and Lugh’s domains are better defined. A lot of ancient gods are in this similar boat of having not enough surviving source material for us to get a clear picture of why or how they were worshipped. What is Loki the god of? Mischief? Did Norse people pray to Loki when they wanted to be tricky or deceptive? We don’t know. Loki’s role in mythology is (relatively) well-understood, but his role in religion is obscure and will probably remain so. In other cases, deities seem distinct, but aren’t — Frigga and Freya may very well be the same goddess. Many goddesses in the Norse pantheon have the same exact sets of associations. Frigga, Sif, and Jord are all associated with fertility and agriculture. They may all be aspects of what is functionally the same deity. We barely know what Sif’s domains are, since the only significant story about her concerns her golden hair, and that’s kind of it, but fertility of crops is a decent guess. This gets infinitely more complicated when you start to introduce things like syncretism — gods literally becoming merged with one another when their cults overlap. What is Serapis the god of? Serapis isn’t really the god of anything, he’s a singular figure of worship for a combined Hellenistic-Egyptian community that combines all the important qualities and cultic practices of Zeus, Osiris, Apis, and probably at least one other deity like Hades or Dionysus. There’s no clean and pretty “god of” designation for that one. Sorting gods and goddesses based on what they’re the “god of” is fun, but reductive. It depends upon the god’s cultic role, which we may or may not know anything about, but also doesn’t lend itself to a very nuanced or sophisticated understanding of the god’s cultic role. Therefore, instead of perceiving the gods as extremely complex beings that are interpreted different ways in different contexts, and worshipped for different reasons by different kinds of people, the gods are shoved into convenient color-coded boxes. I don’t think it’s always wrong to do that, but if you choose to do that, I do think you should know that’s what you’re doing.
Divine Epithets
Epithets describe the different capacities in which a god is worshipped. Every god has scores of bynames, with each one highlighting a different aspect of the god’s character and worship. They may be local versions of the god in particular locales, indicate the god's domains or the ares of life they can aid mortals with, describe qualities or personality traits attributed to the gods, or reference mythological events. So for example, Zeus may be called Kronion, “Son of Kronos,” or Keraunios, “of thunder.” Demeter may be called Eukonos, “rich-haired,” or Anesidora, “she who sends forth gifts.” Apollo may be called Hekatos, “sniper,” or Paean, “healer.” Athena might be called Glaukopis, “grey-eyed” or “owl-eyed.” Dionysus may be called Eleutheros, “liberator,” or Dimorphos, “two-formed.” You can learn a lot about a god by its epithets, including its associations and the reasons it was worshipped. Some of these epithets belong to specific contexts, but many others are used interchangeably with the gods’ names. Aphrodite is often called Kytherea or Kypris, referring to the islands of Cytheria and Cyprus (both thought to be her birthplace). Athena is often called Pallas, which refers to brandishing a spear. Apollo is often called Phoebus, “bright.” Hermes is often called Argeiphontes, “slayer of Argus,” referring to the myth in which he talked Argus to death. Hades in particular was often referred to by euphemistic epithets like Plouton (“of wealth”) and Eubouleos (“of good counsel”), because the Ancient Greeks feared to invoke his name directly -- not because he’s evil, but because he is the grim Lord of the Dead and the Ancient Greeks would rather not attract his attention. Technically, gods don’t even have “personal names”; it’s epithets all the way down. Zeus simply means “sky god.” Hermes’ name refers to his capacity as a god of roadways, because it references road markers. Athena’s name refers to her capacity as the patron goddess of Athens. Ares’ name refers to war in an abstract sense, and versions of it (Areios, Aeria) are used as epithets of other gods. Dionysus means “the god of Nysa” or “Zeus of Nysa,” referring to his childhood home. Demeter’s name literally just means “earth mother.” The main thing epithets do is define which aspect of a god you’re addressing. You may be addressing Dionysos Bromios, the loud, who is raging drunk and savage and screaming. Or you may be addressing Dionysos Meilichios, the mild, who is gentle and quiet. Both are the same god, but they behave very differently and represent different stages of the winemaking process. To use a more concrete example, Orphism is a mystery cult that has its own version of mythology and style of worship, giving it a slightly different take on the gods than mainstream Greek religion. This is the Orphic Hymn to Dionysus, which is mostly just a long string of epithets. The translation I’m using is not exact, and I can’t read Ancient Greek, but I’m matching up the epithets to the best of my ability. (Translation is from Theoi.com, transliteration is from HellenicGods.org): Dionysos I call, loud-roaring [ærívromon] and divine, Primeval God [Prôtógonon], a two-fold [diphií] shape is thine: Thy various names and attributes I sing, O, twice-born, thrice begotten [trígonon], Bacchic king [ánakta]: Wild [ágrion], ineffable [árriton], two-form'd [dímorphon], obscure [krýphion], two-horn'd [dikǽrôta], With ivy crown'd [kissóvryon], howling [évion], pure [agnón]. Bull-fac'd [tavrôpón], and warlike [Aríion], bearer of the vine [votryotróphon], Endowed with counsel prudent [Eubouleos] and divine: Triennial [triætí], whom the leaves of vines adorn [ærnæsípæplon], Of Zeus and Persephone, occultly born. Immortal daemon [ámvrotæ daimon], hear my suppliant voice, Give me in blameless plenty to rejoice; And listen gracious to my mystic pray'r, Surrounded with thy choir of nurses fair. Conspicuously missing in this translation is ômádion, meaning either “flesh-eater” or “sacrificed” (or both). A startling omission, that. This one hymn uses all of these different epithets for the same god. Some are just loaded adjectives or attributes, while others define the god in a specific capacity. It would be impossible for every single one of these bynames to refer to a completely different sect, especially since they are all being addressed simultaneously. Some of them are also just a given regardless of which version of Dionysus you worship — regardless of whether you believe his mother was Persephone or Semele (or both), he’s never not going to be associated with ivy and grapes. In short, epithets contextualize worship. A god can have a theoretically infinite number of epithets depending on what, specifically, any given worshipper associates with them in different contexts.
Why Worship Gods?
I’ve been reading Karl Kerényi’s book on Dionysus, and while reading, I was suddenly struck by a revelation of why religions exist in the first place. In this section, Kerényi interprets a myth of four men entering a cave on Crete to steal honey from the bees that nest there, who were then changed into birds upon being confronted with the swaddling clothes of Zeus himself: "Before they were domesticated, bees had often been found in caves. With their sweet food they were the most natural nurses for a Divine Child who was born and then kept hidden in a cave. The archetypal situation that nature offered was taken into the Greek myth of Zeus. The bees offered men the essential sweetness of pure existence — the existence of infants in the womb. […] “Zeus” was the Greek interpretation of the Divine Child whose birth was related on Crete. For the Cretans the divine birth flared up from dark depths. It was more the bursting forth of life than the flaring up of a more spiritual, pure light. The story of the birth of Zeus was adduced to explain the event underlying the story of the honey thieves. […] The “divine blood” in the story clearly refers to the honey, the abundance of which attracted to thieves to the cave. The importance of honey in the Minoan cult is attested by texts written in the Linear B script. It was considered a possession of the gods, theft of which exposed the thieves to punishment. […] Through the story of “blood” left over after the birth of Zeus, the honey — whose presence in the cave could have been perfectly natural — was, not unnaturally, interpreted as divine amniotic fluid." —Karl Kerényi, Dionysos: Archetypal Image of Indestructible Life I don’t know whether or not Kerényi is just spitballing. I’m not familiar with all of the sources that he cites. But for once, I don’t think that’s important. I had something of an epiphany when reading this. Nature is not inherently meaningful. It has patterns, and it follows the laws of physics and biology and so forth, but even understanding how it works does not make it mean anything. A cave of bees is just a cave of bees. But humans project ideas, associations, and archetypes onto the natural world in order to make it mean something. We project names and faces and personalities and emotions onto the primordial forces that drive existence. Human imagination has the power to transform that cave of bees into a divine womb, in which the sky god was born, leaving behind a divine liquor that is the sweetest thing an ancient human could ever taste. And that is meaningful. A myth is never just a story. It’s never simple or shallow, even if it’s presented that way. A myth reveals something about nature, about humanity, about the ineffable Divine. And that something is called a Mystery. I saw lightning crack across the sky last year — not a flash in the clouds, but an actual bolt of lightning. That was sublime, scary and awesome at the same time. I remember thinking, “oh, yeah, I totally get why the Ancient Greeks believed that whichever god wields *that* thing is the one in charge.” Take that storm I saw, and give it a human shape: Storms are powerful, so the god of storms must also be the god that embodies power. Therefore, he looks like a muscular, mature man with a full beard because such men are the ones in power. He carries thunderbolts in his fists, and his bird is the eagle because eagles are the most badass birds around. Fatherhood is the most basic state of power in society, so this god embodies fatherhood, and has many children. He sleeps around because that’s what powerful men do. Kingship is the highest state of power in society, so this god embodies kingship — therefore, he also presides over all the duties of kings, like good governance and justice. Through this chain of associations and correspondences, a god is born. It only makes sense to give him a name that means, literally, ‘sky god’: Zeus. A storm is just atmospheric pressure changes and static discharge. But clouds and electricity are not human. Zeus is a human-shaped storm. And that gives the very concept of a storm meaning — psychological, social, and political relevance. Humans love stories, and stories are a lot easier to understand than hard science, so it becomes easier to describe the storm by saying Zeus is throwing his thunderbolts. Even if that isn’t literally true, it’s poetic, symbolic, meaningful. It might mean different things to different people, but it means something. Lightning does not. Lightning just is. The ancients used this kind of symbolic logic to make sense of the world, and to pull meaning out of it the same way bees make honey out of nectar. Reaching out and touching God results in what we might call the sublime — the sheer awesomeness and awfulness of the universe. It’s enough to make you fall to your knees, not in submission but in sheer overwhelm. That’s what gods are. They’re personifications of those flashes of insight. They’re primordial ideas and the associations around them. They’re whatever you see when you pull back the curtain. That sublimity is almost enough to drive one insane, and so, a god or goddess is a human shape put onto it to make it more comprehensible. Gods are made in our image; they are things much greater than us, given human shape. "Behind every image is an emotion, behind every emotion is an archetype, behind every archetype is a deity." —Michael Cornwall, “Jung’s First Dream, The Mad God Dionysus and a Madness Sanctuary called Diabasis” All religions have Mysteries. Some may lose sight of them, or choose not to focus on them. Some religions’ Mysteries are overridden by more “base” forces, like politics or the fear of death, which feel more immediate. Some religious people don’t look for the Mysteries, or don’t know to seek them. Others repeat the words of Mysteries mechanically, because that’s what they’ve been taught, without grasping what they really mean. “All humans can be liberated from death” becomes “you are a sinful person bound for hell, unless you believe everything we do.” The people repeat the same rituals, over and over and over again, perhaps without remembering why the ritual was meaningful or necessary in the first place. The specific details of stories, and whether they’re literally true or not, and whether they approve or condemn homosexuality and abortion, becomes more important than what the stories actually meant in the first place. The religions were always profound. That’s where they started. They started with ancient people staring into a cave, and being reminded of a womb, and deciding that the cave must be the Earth’s womb. The deeper meaning, the real religion, is always there. To grasp it, you have to commune directly with the divine. You have to enter the cave, and see the divine amniotic fluid for yourself. When you have an epiphany, it hits you like a freight train. It’s this wonderful moment when it feels like all the lights come on, and you suddenly understand everything in the universe. I encourage you to look at any religious story or practice that you’ve been told is important, and really think about why it’s meaningful to you personally. If you read and hear and live the story enough times, one time it might really sink in, and all of a sudden the whole world won’t look the same anymore. You’ll get it. *Really* get it. And then you’ll tell the story again, but you’ll know why. You’ll do your simple prayers and offerings, but you’ll know why. The gods will answer your prayers, and you’ll know why they bother to listen to you.
Are the Gods Evil?
The Greek gods were part of a religion first, mythology second. It’s easy to forget this, because most modern people were exposed to Greek mythology as stories. I’ve loved Greek mythology since I was about seven, but everything I’ve learned about Ancient Greek religion has been in the past two years. The Ancient Greeks did not worship the figures in the stories, they told stories about the figures they already worshipped. That is a very important distinction. This means that gods were not necessarily interpreted by their worshippers in the same ways that they are portrayed in myth. In myth, the gods are very humanized, but even myth itself is extremely complicated. Each myth that has survived is one interpretation from one point in time, a “fossilized” snapshot of the gods it depicts. It belies the depth, complexity, and contradiction surrounding any individual deity, and the sheer magnitude of cultural context. There is no one definitive version of any myths. Mythology is an oral tradition, and the same stories would have been told in many different places all over Greece, over hundreds of years. There are bound to be some variations. The next town over may have a completely different version of any given myth from the one that you tell. In short, mythology is not consistent. To say “the gods were douchebags” is to ignore all of that surrounding context. Authorial bias also factors in. Many of the most famous versions of myths come from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, which he wrote in 8 CE. Ovid was a Roman, not a Greek, so he was already writing his own interpretation of an oral tradition that had existed for thousands of years by that point. Ovid had an anti-authoritarian bent, so some of his interpretations of myths make gods look much worse than they do in other contexts. The story about Athena cursing the beautiful Medusa to be a monster, and the story of Athena turning Arachne into a spider after losing a weaving contest, both come only from Ovid. They both make Athena look really bad, and a bit out-of-character in comparison to her other portrayals. In Greek versions of Medusa’s story, she was a monster to begin with, the daughter of Phorkys and Keto. Athena is much more justified in wanting her dead, and aiding Perseus is an example of her kindness and patronage of heroes. The Ancient Greeks would not necessarily have interpreted Athena the way Ovid portrays her. Part of the reason why the gods are so often interpreted as jerkasses in modern media is because Ovid’s portrayal of them is so famous. But, even Ovid doesn’t always portray gods this way. He’s also our main source for the story of the golden touch, and in that story, Dionysus is portrayed more sympathetically. He rewards Midas for being kind, and when the golden touch proves to be a curse, he takes it back without issue. Ovid even remarks, “How patient are the gods!” [1]And indeed, for every myth of a god acting like a jerk, you can find another one about the same god being kind. Apollo gave humans music, poetry, logic, and medicine, and bestowed the gift of prophecy on human oracles. He was once forced to spend a year as a herdsman for a mortal king, Admetus, and was so smitten with Admetus that he doted on him and helped him win a princess in a chariot race. Dionysus taught humans how to make wine, and spent a long while living among them and partying alongside them. Athena gave humans wonderful gifts and inventions, like the plough, the loom, the bridle, and the olive tree. Demeter taught humans how to grow their own food and store it for the long winters while she grieved. Aphrodite granted Pygmalion’s wish for Galatea to become a real woman, helped Hippomenes beat Atalanta in a footrace, and became the protectress of Rome. Zeus and Hermes blessed an old couple for their wonderful hospitality (a moral value in Ancient Greece) by turning them into trees once they died, so they would forever stand entwined together over their lake. Even Hera favored Jason, and helped him in his quest. Another major reason why the gods might come off as jerks to us today is because of plain Values Dissonance. The Ancient Greeks did not have the same values and morals that we do now. Divine punishments for hubris or inhospitality, which may seem barbaric to us now, may have seemed justified to them. Niobe insulted a goddess, and if she’s going to denigrate Leto’s children because there’s only two of them, she deserves to lose all of hers. That’s unfair from a modern perspective because the children didn’t do anything and don’t deserve to die, but within the cultural framework of Greek mythology, it makes sense. Apollo sends a plague to weaken Agamemnon’s troops because his priest was treated badly — the other soldiers didn’t do anything, but in context it makes sense for the god to feel slighted. The gods are fickle, explaining the apparently random cruelty of nature, but they also work according to a particular logic. I’ve also realized that myths tend to blow things out of proportion — in most cases, you have to screw up on a literally mythic scale for a god to be really pissed off at you. Yes, there are some times when mortals are genuinely screwed over by gods, like poor Hippolytus drawing Aphrodite’s ire just for being asexual, or all the times Hera made someone’s life miserable. But those who are eternally punished in the pits of Tartarus are almost always there because they fucked up on the most colossal scale. Sisyphus attempted to escape death more than once, imprisoning Hades (or Thanatos) and then tricking his way out of the Underworld, before he finally died naturally and was given a punishment that really drove home the concept of inevitability. Tantalus fed Zeus (his father) and the other gods the flesh of his own child. Ixion tried to rape Hera. I think that all speaks for itself, doesn’t it? And even those who don’t end up in Tartarus but suffer violent deaths aren’t necessarily in everyday situations — you aren’t going to try to drive the sun, or catch a goddess while bathing, or try to fly to the palace of the gods and demand to be let in, are you? And then on top of all that, myths are not meant to be taken literally! Even the most clean-cut of morality plays may have some deeper spiritual metaphor embedded in it. Pentheus’ death in The Bacchae is disturbing — from an Ancient Greek perspective, he deserves it because of his impiety, but his dismemberment is also loaded with spiritual significance within the Dionysian mystery tradition. Because he dies as Dionysus himself died, he acts as a stand-in for the god himself, implying a spiritual rebirth. Pentheus’ punishment doesn’t only carry the basic message of “don’t insult a god,” it also demonstrates that old and repressive ways of thinking must be destroyed to make way for new ones; if that transition cannot happen peacefully, then it will happen violently. I wouldn’t be surprised if most of the stories of divine punishment carried similar metaphors. Zeus is an excellent example of Values Dissonance in play. Zeus has a lot of sexual encounters with women throughout Greek mythology, and many of them are not consensual. This is disturbing to modern people for obvious reasons, but in Ancient Greece it didn’t seem that way. The Ancient Greeks were a rigidly patriarchal society, and Zeus is the archetypal divine patriarch. That means he behaves in myth as men in power are expected to, and that means acquiring “conquests.” Zeus’ womanizing tendencies are an expression of his power over all of Greece, because many of these mythological women are symbolic representations of the parts of Greece that they come from. Some of them may have been local goddesses, so, Zeus’ having sex with local goddesses represents his power over them and the lands they rule.. The Ancient Greeks also made no distinction, not even in artwork, between rape and marriage. Both were depicted as kidnapping. Because the Ancient Greeks didn’t recognize that this is abhorrent, it did not factor into their interpretation of Zeus. In Greek mythology, Zeus may seem tyrannical, but in Greek religion, he was the embodiment of benevolent rulership. To the Ancient Greeks, Zeus represented good governance, protected foreigners, and was an arbiter of moral goodness. Yes, really. None of this excuses fictional rape, but ultimately, it is fictional. Zeus may have been interpreted as a rapist in Ancient Greece, but we do not have to interpret him that way now. Some modern worshippers of Zeus[2] have chosen to interpret the god in this more abstract context. What is important about Zeus is that he is a personification of power. What matters is his association with storms, one of the most powerful things in nature, and his association with governance and leadership among humans. The stories about Zeus are just that — stories. They are a product of their time, which was several millennia ago, and no longer reflect the values of modern people. They do not need to be taken literally or at face value. If the core of his nature is that of power and good governance, what does that look like now? In what ways does that matter now? Zeus protects immigrants, upholding the law of xenia (sacred hospitality) so that they will feel welcomed. He avenges those who have been wronged by justice systems. He teaches mankind how and why good leadership is important. One more factor here is that many of us in the West are used to Abrahamic conceptions of what a god is and what a god does, most of which do not apply here. The Greek gods never claim to be omnipotent or omnibenevolent. The following quote is often attributed to Epicurius: “Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent. Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil? Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God?” This argument first appears in early Christian writings, and of course it does. If some version of it did originate with Epicurius, it probably was not phrased this way, because nothing about it makes sense in the context of Ancient Greek theology. There is no “problem of evil” in Ancient Greek theology because the gods are not necessarily benevolent, but not necessarily malevolent either. Nor are they all-powerful — their powers are limited to their domains and relevant associations. And they are not supposed to be omnipotent or omnibenevolent. They’re gods because they encapsulate the essence of the ineffable in nature and in humans. They’re gods, because they give a human shape to things that are much bigger and much older than humans, to make those ancient things more comprehensible. The reason why the Abrahamic God is full of so many contradictions is because the Old Testament version of God behaves like any other polytheistic deity, but this is inconsistent with his later characterization. Gods waging war or assisting their favorites or being jealous is normal, but if the God that is supposed to know everything and love everyone acts like that, it comes across as hypocritical and unsettling. The Greek gods make no secret of the fact that they are flawed and complex beings, like humans. And that’s a good thing, because that makes them easier to relate to. In many ways, despite their seemingly-human emotions and impulses, they’re less cruel: They do not care who you are or where you’ve come from, they do not care about your race or gender or sexual orientation, they do not police your thoughts for signs of sin or demand you hold yourself to an unrealistic standard of morality, or use the afterlife to cajole or threaten you. All they want is a bit of meat and incense, and for you to not insult them. In Ancient Greece, gods are allowed to be inconsistent. Gods are wildly inconsistent! This goes back to what I was saying before about different locales interpreting gods in different ways. This results in something called epithets — bynames that describe the capacity in which a god is worshipped. All the major gods have epithets. Some describe the version of the god from a particular part of Greece: The epithet Kypris describes Aphrodite, referencing her birthplace on the island of Cyprus. Kythereia represents her cult center on Cythera. Sometimes they represent different domains of the god: Aphrodite Ourania is the goddess of “celestial,” divine love. Aphrodite Pandemos is the goddess of sexual love. Aphrodite Areia is a war goddess. Sometimes they reference particular deeds of the god: Argeiphontes, “slayer of Argus,” is an epithet of Hermes. Sometimes they describe a god’s attributes — the epithet Daphnaeus describes Apollo as the god of the laurel tree, and Phoebus describes him as physically bright and shining. Sometimes they describe something a god does for mortals; many of Athena’s epithets describe her as a protector of people and of cities. Some of them represent syncretism — Hecate Eileithyia is a syncretism of Hecate and Eileithyia, the goddess of childbirth. Hermes Trismegistus is a syncretism of Hermes and Thoth. Zeus Ammon is a syncretism of Zeus and the Egyptian god Ammon. Some epithets describe the god’s fundamental nature or personality: Dionysos Bromios (“the loud”) is boisterous and crazy and the life of the party, representing the summer when wine is opened and enjoyed. Dionysos Meilichios (“the mild”) is dark, gentle, and quiet, representing the winter when wine ferments in caves. Dionysos Eleutheros (“freeing”) liberates mankind from their inhibitions and gives them a safe space to enjoy themselves. Dionysos Omaphagos (“eater of raw flesh”) is savage and maddened, roaming the wilderness and tearing wild animals to shreds with his bare hands. Gods can be all of these contradictory things at the same time. In the context of religion, the gods’ relationships with mortals are complicated. Yes, the gods are fickle, and their temper tantrums are a way of explaining the harsh unpredictability of the natural world. If there’s a plague, Apollo is angry. If there’s an earthquake or a tsunami, Poseidon is angry. If there’s a famine, Demeter is angry. If there’s a hurricane, Zeus is angry. But it’s not as simple as “pacify the gods, or they’ll kill you.” In real life, worshippers of the Greek gods prayed to them and gave them offerings in exchange for favors from them. The Homeric Hymns[3] are a great example of the types of things that Ancient Greeks would pray to their gods for. In the Homeric Hymn 8 to Ares, the speaker prays that the god will give him strength and fortitude and other soldier’s virtues, and also that the god will help him restrain his bloodlust so that he can live peacefully. Homeric Hymn 10 to Athena praises her for protecting soldiers so that they will return home, and prays for happiness and good fortune. 18 to Hermes describes the god as a “giver of grace, guide, and giver of good things.” 22 to Poseidon prays that the god will protect sailors. On a small day-to-day scale, this is how the ancients thought of their gods. If you gave the gods gifts and devotion, they would shower you with blessings. That’s a much more transactional relationship than many modern people are familiar with, especially those from Abrahamic religions, but it makes sense. If you want a friend to do something for you, you do something for them in return. The hymns are sung with the expectation that the god will give good things in response. They are not a desperate plea for the god to choose not to hurt you today. The Ancient Greeks were not stupid or primitive. They didn’t live their whole lives in fear of an incomprehensible cosmos and its angry gods. So, why worship the Greek gods? Pray to Apollo to heal you and prevent disease. Pray to Poseidon to keep you safe at sea, and from natural disasters. Pray to Zeus when you are a stranger in a strange land, or when your government is corrupt and unjust. Pray to Demeter for a good harvest, and thank her for your bread. Pray to Hermes to keep you safe while travelling, and to help your business flourish. Pray to Athena when you need to strategize or are unsure of what choice you should make. Pray to Artemis for good hunting, and to protect young women from sexual assault. Pray to Aphrodite when you need help in your love life. Pray to Ares to conquer your fears and survive your battles. Pray to Hera for empowerment and to fulfill your ambitions. Pray to Hephaestus for success and prosperity, and for technology to work. Pray to Dionysus when you need more joy in your life, or are struggling with your mental health. They’ll be nice to you, I promise. They’re so thrilled to get the attention.
Xenia
Xenia is an ancient virtue that I think needs to make a comeback. It’s usually described as “sacred hospitality,” and at its most basic level, it is the idea that guests and strangers deserve to be treated well. Actually, let me rephrase that — it is a moral imperative that you treat guests and strangers with kindness and generosity. Part of xenia was just a practical need to accommodate travelers. Inns didn’t really exist, so people travelling in foreign lands (or other city-states) depended upon the hospitality and generosity of the residents. Xenia mandated that strangers be washed, fed, and warmed at minimum before you even asked their name. Xenia was an unwritten social code — if you are a host, it is your responsibility to treat a guest well, and if you are a guest, it is your responsibility to be courteous of your host and not take advantage of their generosity. This social code was maintained by the gods themselves. Strangers and foreigners were believed to be under the protection of Zeus Xenios, who upheld the law of xenia by periodically approaching humans disguised as a mortal to see how he would be treated: "Here once came Jupiter [Zeus], in mortal guise, and with his father herald Atlantiades [Hermes], his wings now laid aside. A thousand homes they came to seeking rest; a thousand homes were barred against them; yet one welcomed them, tiny indeed, and thatched with reeds and straw; but in that cottage Baucis, old and good, and old Philemon (he as hold as she) had joined their lives in youth, grown old together, and eased their poverty by bearing it contentedly and thinking it no shame. It was vain to seek master and servant there; they two were all the household, to obey and to command. So when the heavenly ones reached their small home and, stooping, entered in at the low door, the old man placed a bench and bade them sit and rest their weary limbs, and Baucis spread on it a simple rug in busy haste, and from the hearth removed the ash still warm, and fanned yesterday's embers and fed them leaves and bark, and coaxed a flame with her old breath; then from the rafters took split billets and dry twigs and broke them small, and on them placed a little copper pan; then trimmed a cabbage which her spouse had brought in from the stream-fed garden. He reached down with a forked stick from the black beam a chine of smoke-cured pork, and from the long-kept meat cut a small piece and put it in to boil. Meanwhile their talk beguiles the passing hour and time glides unperceived. A beachwood bowl hung by its curving handle from a peg; they fill it with warm water and their guests bathe in the welcome balm their weary feet. […] Meanwhile they saw, when the wine-bowl was drained, each time it filled itself, and wine welled up all of its own accord within the bowl. In fear and wonder Baucis and Philemon, with hands upturned, joined in a timid prayer and pardon sought for the crude graceless meal. There was one goose, the trusty guardian of their minute domain and they, the hosts, would sacrifice him for the Gods, their guests. But he, swift-winged, wore out their slow old bones and long escaped them, till at last he seemed to flee for sanctuary to the Gods themselves. The deities forbade. ‘We two are gods,’ they said; ‘This wicked neighbourhood shall pay just punishment; but to you there shall be given exemption from this evil. Leave your home, accompany our steps and climb with us the mountain slopes.’ The two old folk obey and slowly struggle up the long ascent, propped on their sticks. A bowshot from the top they turn their eyes and see the land below all flooded marshes now except their house; and while they wonder and in tears bewail their lost possessions, that old cottage home, small even for two owners, is transformed into a temple; columns stand beneath the rafters, and the thatch, turned yellow, gleams a roof of gold; and fine doors richly carved they see, and the bare earth with marble paved. Then Saturnius [Zeus] in gentle tones addressed them : ‘Tell us, you good old man, and you, good dame, his worthy consort, what you most desire.’ Philemon briefly spoke with Baucis, then declared their joint decision to the Gods : ‘We ask to be your priests and guard your shrine; and, since in concord we have spent our years, grant that the selfsame hour may take us both, that I my consort's tomb may never see nor may it fall to her to bury me.’ Their prayer was granted. Guardians of the shrine they were while life was left, until one day, undone by years and age, standing before the sacred steps and talking of old times, Philemon saw old Baucis sprouting leaves and green with leaves she saw Philemon too, and as the foliage o'er their faces formed they said, while still they might, in mutual words ‘Goodbye, dear love’ together, and together the hiding bark covered their lips. Today the peasants in those parts point out with pride two trees From one twin trunk grown side by side. This tale I heard from staid old men who had no reason to deceive. I saw myself wreaths on the boughs and hung a fresh one there, and said: ‘They now are gods, who served the Gods; to them who worship gave is worship given.’" —Ovid, Metamorphoses. From Theoi The moral of the story is basically “treat everyone who comes to your door with kindness, because you never know when it might be a god.” Because sometimes you have to threaten people with divine wrath to get them to treat others with basic human decency. This concept was not unique to Ancient Greece. It also appears in Norse mythology — for example, in the story of Utgard-Loki, Thor and Loki spend the night with a family of peasants, and the whole first section of the moral poem Hávamal concerns Odin’s edicts on hospitality. So much of pagan religions and cultures centered on reciprocity that xenia could be considered an inherently pagan value, but it’s not unique to paganism either. The concept of xenia is in the Bible, as well. You may have already thought of the line about entertaining angels unaware. Jesus’ speech about “whatever you have done for the least of your brothers and sisters, you have done for me” also concerns xenia. Failure to honor xenia was the reason Sodom and Gomorrah were destroyed — not anything having to do with homosexuality. Like Zeus and Hermes in the story recounted above, the Abrahamic God razes entire cities for being cruel to strangers. Like Philemon and Baukis, Lot is spared because he shows the angels good hospitality. I would argue that American culture actively devalues xenia. American individualism declares that every person goes it alone, that no person is entitled to any help or generosity (let alone time, space, and resources) from anyone else, and that to infringe upon another’s privacy or property is a grave social sin. “Handouts” are condemned. Children are taught “stranger danger” as soon as they can comprehend the concept, even though that’s more of a moral panic than anything else. And I’m not even going to address the way this country treats immigrants. People who are foreign, unfamiliar, or inherently different could not possibly be more distrusted. For various reasons that are too complicated to cover here, xenophobia is baked into American culture, and xenophobia is basically a sin in Hellenism. Now, I’m not saying that one should just open their door to anyone who stops by. It’s not a sin to be concerned for one’s safety, or protective of one’s property. Xenia shouldn’t go unchecked, but we’ve swung so far in the opposite direction that we could use a lot more of it to balance us out. Modern Hellenists have expanded the idea of xenia to encompass more than just literal hospitality. (After all, it’s unlikely that random people will ask to stay overnight at your house, unless you run a B&B or something.) Modern-day xenia is the moral value of showing kindness and acceptance to those who are different. It’s anti-bigotry and anti-discrimination (and anti-folkist). It’s choosing to assume the best of individuals, until they give you a reason not to. It’s treating people with courtesy, in-person and online. It’s believing that all people have a right to be treated well, to be welcomed, to have their basic needs met.
Is Zeus better than his myths suggest?
According to Plato, the Zeus's myths are slanderous: “Neither, then,” said I, “must we believe this or suffer it to be said, that Theseus, the son of Poseidon, and Peirithous, the son of Zeus, attempted such dreadful rapes, nor that any other child of a god and hero would have brought himself to accomplish the terrible and impious deeds that they now falsely relate of him. But we must constrain the poets either to deny that these are their deeds or that they are the children of gods, but not to make both statements or attempt to persuade our youth that the gods are the begetters of evil, and that heroes are no better than men. For, as we were saying, such utterances are both impious and false. For we proved, I take it, that for evil to arise from gods is an impossibility.” “Certainly.” “And they are furthermore harmful to those that hear them. For every man will be very lenient with his own misdeeds if he is convinced that such are and were the actions of [gods]…” —The Republic, book 3. (Translation from Perseus.tufts.edu) Myths are entertaining stories in which gods are heavily anthropomorphized. They don’t necessarily reflect the average person’s perceptions of a god. The Ancient Greeks viewed Zeus as fundamentally benevolent, a divine example of good governance. Zeus is essentially the personification of power, and so, he looks and behaves the way powerful men in this extremely patriarchal society were expected to. He’s the King of Gods, so he does what kings do. (The Ancient Greeks literally did not distinguish between marriage and rape in their artwork, which says a lot.) There’s another interesting angle to this. The D’Aulaires’ Book of Greek Myths, which was my introduction to most of Greek mythology, explained Zeus’s dalliances with his “wives” thusly: "Zeus loved Hera dearly, but he was also very fond of rocky Greece. He often sneaked down to earth in disguise to marry mortal girls. The more wives he had, the more children he would have, and all the better for Greece! All his children would inherit some of his greatness and become great heroes and rulers. But Hera in her jealous rage tormented his other wives and children, and even Zeus was powerless to stop her. She knew how tricky Zeus could be and kept very close watch over him." I didn’t question this as a child, though I didn’t quite get the logic. Later, I looked back at this and found it laughably euphemistic. But now, my understanding of Zeus’ behavior has looped right back around to this. Zeus’ philandering actually does have a lot to do with Greece itself. The various women were likely local goddesses at one point or another, who represented their respective lands. Zeus’s “conquering” of them represents his dominion over that particular part of Greece. It also justified the existence of demigod progeny, whom actual kings and tribes could claim descent from. Speaking as a neopagan, what actually matters from a spiritual perspective is not how Zeus is portrayed in myth, but how his worshippers interpreted him. Zeus’s spiritual core is power in its most idealized form, so his worshippers interpreted him as a benevolent and wise ruler. If his behavior in Greek myths is not reflective of an ideal authority figure in modern times, then it is not truly reflective of Zeus. It makes sense for modern people to interpret Zeus according to modern values, and modern ideals about what proper use of power looks like.
Hermes as a God of Magic
Syncretism doesn’t always make sense. In fact, it often doesn’t (the Greeks associated Bastet with Artemis, of all goddesses. Because a solar, domestic fertility goddess has so much in common with the lunar, virgin goddess of the wilderness…). But in the case of Hermes/Thoth/Odin, their syncretism actually does make some sense. Like them, Hermes is a god of knowledge and magic. Thoth and Odin both are associated with writing, having invented their respective writing systems (hieroglyphs and Futhark runes). Hermes did not invent the Greek alphabet (Athena did), but he is especially associated with language and writing. This is because Hermes is a god of all forms of communication, including oration, correspondence, and deception. Hermes’ status as a god of communication is obviously present in his messenger aspect, but it’s also present in his merchant aspect — he’s a silver-tongued smooth-talker who can strike an unfair bargain with anybody. He can literally talk you to death. He can charm the skirt off a Vestal Virgin. His status as a trickster god means that he often lies or exaggerates, and he’s a master of rhetoric. Pseudo-Hygenius blames him for the existence of languages. Hermes grants better memories and easier learning to those who pray to him. Hermes is the god of discourse because discourse is the exchange of ideas, the same way goods and services are exchanged, and the same way people physically move from place to place when they travel. Hermes’ base characterization as messenger god is based around this same concept, the exchange of information between people. Thoth is self-begotten — he literally willed himself into existence. He decided that he existed, and so he did. In addition to magic, he is also the god of writing, books, record-keeping, and wisdom. I suspect the Greeks looked at Djehuty, a god of language, writing, and learning, and assumed he was an aspect of Hermes. Odin and Hermes actually have more in common than Hermes and Thoth. Like Hermes, he is a traveler. He frequently walks among mortals disguised as an old man, wearing a wide-brimmed traveler’s hat and holding a walking stick, similar to Hermes’ winged cap and caduceus. Thoth is not a trickster god, but Odin absolutely is. Odin is every bit as sly as Hermes, and he has a bite that Hermes doesn’t. Hermes is one of the most harmless trickster gods, because he more often helps humans than harms them. Odin, however, is also a war god, and has been known to incite violence just for the hell of it. (Loki gets a bad rap, but the reason Odin wanted Loki as a blood-brother in the first place is because he saw a kindred spirit in Loki.) Odin discovered the Norse writing system by hanging himself on the World Tree, Yggdrasil, and observing the patterns of its fallen branches. Through this act of self-sacrifice, he received the knowledge of runes, which can be used both to write and to cast spells. The line between speech, writing, and magic is slim. Language and writing is an example of the ability to create consciously, which is one of the things that makes us human. If to think is to exist — “I think therefore I am” — then to speak is to cause things to exist, because speech is more powerful than thought. Words can boost someone’s mental health and self-image, or destroy them. They can change the course of lives and of history. Writing is even more powerful than speech, because it lasts. Many spells involve speaking or singing things into existence, which is why so many words describing magic (like incantation or enchant) come from the Latin word for “to sing.” This same concept exists in Christianity: The first thing to exist is the Word, and God spoke the world into existence. “Let there be light.” This is why Thoth, Odin, and Hermes are all gods of magic. Hermes is also associated with divination, specifically “rustic” or “lesser” forms of divination — augury, oneiromancy, and cleromancy (as opposed to Apollo’s formal oracular system of divination). After being syncretised with Thoth, Hermes’ magical associations expanded considerably. As Hermes Trismegistus, Hermes/Thoth became the god of alchemy, and Hermes gave his name to the magical tradition of Hermeticism. Hermeticism mainly concerns theurgy, divination, and alchemy. Medieval alchemists used Hermes as a symbol of the Philosopher’s Stone and the entire alchemical process, because he acted as a mediator between humans and the Divine. This may seem like a stretch, but that’s how gods gain their domains. Domains are sets of associations, which are interpreted or applied differently in different cultural contexts. If Hermes wasn’t a god of magic before, he definitely is now.
The Mysteries
The most famous secret society of Ancient Greece was the Eleusinian Mysteries, which was a mystery cult centered in the city of Eleusis. The Mysteries centered mainly on Demeter and Persephone, and their yearly cycle. Demeter and Persephone’s worship is ancient even by the standards of Ancient Greece, and it’s highly likely that they are the “Wanassoi,” the two queens, worshipped by the Mycenaeans. Because the rites were secret, we don’t actually know that much about the Eleusinian Mysteries, despite how well-attested they are. We know that they were centered around the cycle of the seasons and the afterlife. Initiates would reenact Demeter’s anguish at losing her daughter, likely experience some kind of underworldly trial, and celebrate Persephone’s return from Hades in the spring and her reunion with her mother. They probably believed that they too could return from death in some capacity. Associated with the Eleusinian Mysteries is a type of drink called the kykeon, mainly made of barley. There’s a lot of theories that the kykeon was hallucinogenic, that it contained ergot or something similar, and that this is why initiates were able to have such profound mystical experiences. Scholars dispute this theory because there’s no concrete evidence for it. It’s pretty common for hallucinogens to be used as an aid for mystical experiences, but speaking from experience, drugs are not a necessary component of a mystical experience. Anyone who insists that divine encounters are only possible through drug use has clearly never had a mystical experience. The other famous secret society in Ancient Greece is the Orphic Mysteries, a mystery cult supposedly founded by Orpheus. It placed particular emphasis on figures who descended into the Underworld and returned, and venerated Dionysus as its central deity. Dionysus has multiple myths that involve death and resurrection in some capacity. Like the Eleusinian Mysteries, the Orphic Mysteries were secret, so there’s little we know about them; some of the sources we have, like the Orphic Hymns and the Zagreus story, were written later and might not be authentically “Orphic.” What we know is that the Orphic Mysteries were similarly concerned with the afterlife, and the initiates believed that they could obtain a better afterlife for themselves by receiving the Mysteries. Here’s the text of two gold tablets, each buried with a dead person, that provided instructions for how to obtain this better afterlife: You will find a spring on the left of the halls of Hades, and beside it a white cypress growing. Do not even go near this spring. And you will find another, from the Lake of Memory, flowing forth with cold water. In front of it are guards. You must say, ‘I am the child of Ge and starry Ouranos; this you yourselves also know. I am dry with thirst and am perishing. Come, give me at once cold water flowing forth from the Lake of Memory.’ And they themselves will give you to drink from the divine spring, and then thereafter you will reign with the other heroes. A: I come from the pure, o Pure Queen of the earthly ones [Persephone], Eukles [Hades?], Eubouleus [Dionysus], and You other Immortal Gods! I too claim to be of your blessed race, but Fate and other Immortal Gods conquered me, the star-smiting thunder. And I flew out from the hard and deeply-grievous circle, and stepped onto the crown with my swift feet, and slipped into the bosom of the Mistress (Kore), the Queen of the Underworld [Persephone]. And I stepped out from the crown with my swift feet. B: Happy and blessed one! You shall be a god instead of a mortal. A: I have fallen as a kid into milk. These tablets reveal that the Initiates believed that, after death, they would be given a drink from the spring of Memnosyne instead of the spring of Lethe, and get to live in Elysium alongside the heroes. The initiate claims, “I am a child of Earth and starry Heaven,” indicating that the initiate believes in their own divine origin. The gods then grant the initiate apotheosis, ascension to godhood. I’ve written about my own interpretation of Dionysian Mysteries in other answers. In my amateur opinion, influenced in no small part by my own faith, I’m guessing that the Eleusinian and Orphic Mysteries had very similar revelations. Their focus was different, and they had different traditions around them, but the actual Mysteries themselves are probably very similar: There is life beyond death, and you — yes, you! — can obtain it if you can shift the way you think to receive divine revelation. "For there was a feeling as if taking hold of the god and of clearly perceiving that he himself had come, of being midway between sleeping and waking, of wanting to look, of struggling against his departure too soon; of having applied one’s ears and hearing some things as in a dream, some waking; hair stood straight, tears flowed in joy; the burden of understanding seemed light. What man is able to put these things into words? Yet if he is one of those who have undergone initiation, he knows and is familiar with them." -Aelius Aristides, Oration 48.32
Good and Evil in Hellenism
This is a complicated subject, so I’ll try to summarize it best I can. Whether Hellenism is even concerned with good and evil depends on which version of Hellenism you’re talking about. Some Hellenists try to reconstruct the religion as an average Ancient Greek would have practiced it, while others take a Neoplatonic perspective. The “normal” (non-Neoplatonic) version of Hellenism is not particularly concerned with good and evil as concepts. The gods were understood to be good, or at least benevolent, meaning that they were invested in the wellbeing of humanity and would respond to humans who call upon them for aid. Gods could get angry, and gods could be fickle — natural disasters like plagues, storms, and famines were signs of a god’s anger — but there’s no Hellenic equivalent of Satan. Nowhere is there an entity that represents evil as a concept; evil does not exist as a metaphysical entity or force in its own right. The non-Neoplatonic Hellenic theory of evil is basically “shit happens”. In the Iliad, Zeus is described as an arbiter of Good and Evil: "There are two urns (pithoi) that stand on the door-sill of Zeus. They are unlike for the gifts they bestow: an urn of evils (kakoi), an urn of blessings (dôroi). If Zeus who delights in thunder mingles these and bestows them on man, he shifts, and moves now in evil, again in good fortune. But when Zeus bestows from the urn of sorrows, he makes a failure of man, and the evil hunger drives him over the shining earth, and he wanders respected neither of gods nor mortals." —The Iliad, book 24. translation by Richard Lattimore “Evil” in this context is better understood as misfortune, rather than wickedness. Zeus doles out blessings and sorrows to humans as he sees fit, and some people are luckier than others. There’s no war between good gods and evil demons. Gods are the source of both good and evil, or rather, both fortune or misfortune. Evil is also presented as misfortune in the myth of Pandora’s Box, in which Zeus tricks Pandora into releasing the various abstract ills that plague mankind. "For ere this the tribes of men lived on earth remote and free from ills and hard toil and heavy sickness which bring the Fates upon men; for in misery men grow old quickly. But the woman took off the great lid of the jar with her hands and scattered all these and her thought caused sorrow and mischief to men. Only Hope remained there in an unbreakable home within under the rim of the great jar, and did not fly out at the door; for ere that, the lid of the jar stopped her, by the will of Aegis-holding Zeus who gathers the clouds. But the rest, countless plagues, wander amongst men; for earth is full of evils and the sea is full. Of themselves diseases come upon men continually by day and by night, bringing mischief to mortals silently; for wise Zeus took away speech from them. So is there no way to escape the will of Zeus." —Hesiod, Works and Days. Translation from Theoi. In both the Iliad and Works and Days, the pithos of evil things is meant to explain why life is hard. Life used to be easy, but then Pandora came along with her pithos and caused sorrow and mischief, i.e. things that make life hard. That’s why the only remaining thing in the jar is Hope, the thing that gives you the inner strength to deal with all the crap that life throws your way. An additional aspect of this myth comes from Aesop, who describes that Zeus actively prevents blessings from reaching mortals as often as misfortune does: "The Good Things were too weak to defend themselves from the Bad Things, so the Bad Things drove them off to heaven. The Good Things then asked Zeus how they could reach mankind. Zeus told them that they should not go together all at once, only one at a time. This is why people are constantly besieged by Bad Things, since they are nearby, while Good Things come more rarely, since they must descend to us from heaven one by one." —Aesop, Fables. Translation from Theoi. This is more similar to the two jars from the Iliad, in that Zeus is the one deciding when mortals get fortune vs. misfortune. Misfortune was credited to kakodaimones (“evil spirits”; the children of Eris, the goddess of strife) or else to Tyche, the personification of luck. And even then, Tyche is more associated with good luck than with bad luck: "Tykhe (Tyche, Fortune), beginning and end for mankind, you sit in Sophia's (Wisdom's) seat and give honour to mortal deeds; from you comes more good than evil, grace shines about your gold wing, and what the scale of your balance gives is the happiest; you see a way out of the impasse in troubles, and you bring bright light in darkness, you most excellent of gods." —Anonymous lyric. Translation from Theoi. The favor of Tyche gives you more luck, which makes your life happier, so Tyche is worth worshipping for her favor rather than for fear of her wrath. But that’s true of all the gods. Getting their blessings will make your life happier and easier in the fields that they rule, and worship of them has far more to do with gaining their favor than “appeasing” them. As I’ve written before, mythology misrepresents the gods’ attitudes towards mortals in the same way that modern media makes the world seem far scarier than it really is. Stories of the gods wrathful retribution against foolish mortals are far more entertaining than stories of mortals praying for blessings and then getting them. In the context of religion, the assumption was that the gods would give you what you want if you worshipped them properly. And that brings me to Platonism and Neoplatonism. Neoplatonists believe that the gods are wholly good and only ever a source of good, and that they exist in a state of permanent beatific happiness. Plato goes so far as to say that the evil actions attributed to gods (like Zeus’ rapes) not only didn’t happen, they’re malicious slander on the part of the mythographers. Gods are not only good, they are incapable of not being good. They are entirely good. To Plato, gods are defined by goodness. They have to be, because the gods must act as a model of behavior to young people. If the gods aren’t good, then humans will take the license to do evil by pointing to the gods as justification. Plato takes potshots at Homer specifically in The Republic, addressing the lines from the Iliad about Zeus and the two urns, suggesting that no such myths should be allowed into the theoretical city of The Republic: “[Homer and Hesiod], methinks, composed false stories which they told and still tell to mankind.” “Of what sort?” he said; “and what in them do you find fault?” “With that,” I said, “which one ought first and chiefly to blame, especially if the lie is not a pretty one.” “What is that?” “When anyone images badly in his speech the true nature of gods and heroes, like a painter whose portraits bear no resemblance to his models. […] Even if [the myths] were true I should not think that they ought to be thus lightly told to thoughtless young persons. But the best way would be to bury them in silence, and if there were some necessity for relating them, that only a very small audience should be admitted under pledge of secrecy and after sacrificing, not a pig, but some huge and unprocurable victim, to the end that as few as possible should have heard these tales. […] “Neither must we admit at all,” said I, “that gods war with gods and plot against one another and contend — for it is not true either […] For the young are not able to distinguish what is and what is not allegory, but whatever opinions are taken into the mind at that age are wont to prove indelible and unalterable. For which reason, maybe, we should do our utmost that the first stories that they hear should be so composed as to bring the fairest lessons of virtue to their ears.” —Plato, Republic 377–78. Translation from Perseus. To me, this all sounds a little bit like the Hayes code. In my experience as a writer, people learn more from and better appreciate stories that portray moral nuance. This includes children — if you don’t believe me, watch the new Puss in Boots movie. Even if Plato’s theoretical city did exist and excluded all myths of gods behaving badly, give the citizens five minutes and they’ll start telling brand new stories of gods behaving badly because that’s what people relate to. One could easily argue that gods, beings far beyond the scope of humanity, have no reason to be relatable. Speaking as a Hellenist, my gods have never behaved toward me in a way that could be described as “evil” or even petty, but their dark sides are part of the reason I love them! I’ve learned some profound stuff about myself and about the universe at large by examining them at their worst (see my analysis of The Bacchae and my analysis of Zeus’ rape myths). All of that is far more interesting to me than generic beatific happiness, and I think it distinguishes the gods as individuals. Whatever they’re like up their in their world (and I recognize that is a philosophical rabbit hole in and of itself), I prefer to understand them through a more dynamic human filter. (Plato also says in The Republic that God is not a “wizard,” that gods do not change their shapes, because gods are the “best state of nature,” so they will necessarily be the least altered. Plato defines perfection as unchangeability, so if the gods are perfect, they cannot be changed. God is “the best possible state,” so it does not take many forms. To explain why I disagree with this would require an entirely separate answer.) If the gods are entirely good by nature, then gods cannot also be the source of evil. Something that is inherently good can only produce good: “And is not God of course good in reality and always to be spoken of as such?” “Certainly.” “But further, no good thing is harmful, is it?” “I think not.” “Can what is not harmful harm?” “By no means.” “Can that which does not harm do any evil?” “Not that either.” “But that which does no evil would not be cause of any evil either?” “How could it?” “Once more, is the good beneficent?” “Yes.” “It is the cause, then, of welfare?” “Yes.” “Then the good is not the cause of all things, but of things that are well it the cause—of things that are ill it is blameless.” “Entirely so,” he said. “Neither, then, could God,” said I, “since he is good, be, as the multitude say, the cause of all things, but for mankind he is the cause of few things, but of many things not the cause. For good things are far fewer with us than evil, and for the good we must assume no other cause than God, but the cause of evil we must look for in other things and not in God.” —Plato, Republic 379 Neoplatonism is therefore more dualistic than “normal” Hellenism. If the gods are good by their very nature, then something else must be the cause of evil. And because life is hard, that cause of evil must be the cause of most things that happen to humans. Does that mean that the cause of evil is more powerful than the gods? It can’t be, so why does it exist? I’m sure Plato answers this question somewhere, but researching Platonic philosophy is making my brain hurt, so I will instead provide Sallustius’ simple and elegant solution to the Problem of Evil: "The Gods being good and making all things, how do evils exist in the world? Or perhaps it is better first to state the fact that, the Gods being good and making all things, there is no positive evil, it only comes by absence of good; just as darkness itself does not exist, but only comes about by absence of light. […] Suppose it is said that there are evil spirits: - if they have their power from the Gods, they cannot be evil; if from elsewhere, the Gods do not make all things. If they do not make all things, then either they wish to or cannot, or they can and do not wish; neither of which is consistent with the idea of god. We may see, therefore, from these arguments, that there is no positive evil in the world." —Sallustius, On the Gods and the World Honestly, I can get on board with this. Evil is not a thing that exists in and of itself, and it is not a metaphysical entity that exists independently of gods or mortals. Rather, evil is the lack of goodness, or perhaps the condition of being disconnected from the Divine. Evil may not exist as a metaphysical entity, but Neoplatonic Hellenists definitely believe in a metaphysical concept of goodness. Plato’s Theory of Forms gives us the concept of “The Good,” which is not a god, but a philosophical standard of perfection to compare against: "…as the Good is in the intelligible region to reason and the objects of reason, so is [the Sun] in the visible world to vision and the objects of vision. […] When [the soul] is firmly fixed on the domain where truth and reality shine resplendent it apprehends and knows them and appears to possess reason; but when it inclines to that region which is mingled with darkness, the world of becoming and passing away, it opines only and its edge is blunted, and it shifts its opinions hither and thither, and again seems as if it lacked reason. […] This reality, then, that gives their truth to the objects of knowledge and the power of knowing to the knower, you must say is the idea of Good, and you must conceive it as being the cause of knowledge, and of truth in so far as known." —Plato, Republic 508–509 So, basically, we can only understand what Truth and Justice are if our idea of what “truth” is and our idea of what “justice” is comes from somewhere. There has to be an objective standard of goodness or rightness in order for those concepts to make sense. If there’s no universally-agreed-upon baseline for what is true and good, then anyone can decide what “Truth” is, which would effectively mean that “Truth” does not exist at all. Neoplatonic Hellenists interpret The Good as an objective divine standard of virtue, as well as the source of being, as described by Sallustius: "If the first cause were soul, all things would possess soul. If it were mind, all things would possess mind. If it were being, all things would partake of being. And seeing this quality in all things, some men have thought that it was being. Now if things simply were, without being good, this argument would be true, but if things that are are because of their goodness, and partake in the good, the first thing must needs be both beyond-being and good. It is strong evidence of this that noble souls despise being for the sake of the good, when they face death for their country or friends or for the sake of virtue. - After this inexpressible country or friends or for the sake of virtue. - After this inexpressible power come the orders of the Gods." —Sallustius, On the Gods and the World This combines Plato’s idea of “The Good” as the ultimate source of truth and knowledge with the idea of the Absolute, the ultimate source of being and existence. It assigns a moral value to the Absolute, and to the universe at large. I believe in the pantheistic or Hermetic Absolute, but I do not believe in The Good. I don’t think that there is an objective standard of morality, or at least, I do not think that humans should attempt to define one. I had one Neoplatonist on Reddit ask me why I bothered to worship the gods at all if I didn’t believe in objective moral goodness. I don’t fully understand the logic behind that question. There’s plenty I get out of my relationships with the gods: mundane blessings, emotional support, mystical knowledge. None of that depends upon the gods being paragons. A Neoplatonist who asks me how I can worship the gods without an objective moral standard sounds a lot like the Christian who asks atheists how it’s possible for them to be moral without believing in God. My guess is that many Hellenic Neoplatonists understand religion in terms of a good vs. evil framework because they were raised that way. Without that framework, they can’t understand why religion exists at all. So, they latch onto Neoplatonism to maintain that framework. That’s no coincidence, since many modern pagans are ex-Christians, and Neoplatonism had a huge influence on early Christianity (early Christian philosophers tried to claim Plato for themselves by interpreting him as a monotheist, which is such bullshit). Hellenism, to my mind, is not about morality. Christianity is about morality. It has moral doctrine that instructs humans on how to behave, most of Jesus’ teachings concern moral behavior, and being moral gives you a blessed afterlife. My own sense of morality is very Christian, since I was raised in a Christian society and instilled with Christian values (like compassion and selflessness), and I have not abandoned those values. Despite that, I really can’t stand the amount of emphasis Christianity places on morality, how that easily becomes hypocrisy and self-righteousness, how many Christians define morality as obedience to God, how they demonize normal things like sexuality, etc. That’s the topic of another answer, but suffice to say, I am done with that. I prefer to perceive morality as being a combination of a cultural standard used to keep us living peacefully together, and an internal sense of rightness and wrongness. I don’t need the gods to tell me how to behave. I don’t think that most of them concern themselves with human morality at all, and that their own sense of right and wrong is alien. Perhaps one of them mandates or mantians human morality, like maybe Themis, but then that’s one of them rather than all of them. Evil, meanwhile, is more a matter of human behavior than anything metaphysical.
On Hybris
Hubris is one of the most misunderstood concepts in Ancient Greek mythology and religion, and that starts to become a real problem when Hellenic pagans start throwing the word “hubris” at people. One of the things we all learned in Mythology 101 is that hubris is the greatest sin against the gods, and it usually consists of saying that you’re better than a god at a certain thing (like Arachne claiming she’s better at weaving than Athena, Marsayas claiming to be a better musician than Apollo, Niobe mocking Leto for having only two children instead of fourteen, and Cassiopeia for saying she was prettier than the sea nymphs). The god will promptly throw a hissy fit, cause a lot of damage, and maybe torture you for all eternity in Tartarus. Right? No. As is typical of concepts in Greek mythology, it’s more nuanced than that. In English, the word “hubris” means “excessive pride or self-confidence.” Under that definition, it seems intuitive that hubris would describe “being so arrogant that you compare yourself to the gods.” But that’s not actually what hubris is. Or… it is, but pride alone is not the reason why it’s hubris. In Greek, ῠ̔́βρις or hybris has a specifically violent connotation. There’s no exact translation for it. Hybris is a deliberate, spiteful, audacious act of violence, often motivated by one’s own arrogance and the desire to dishonor someone else. In Rhetoric, Aristotle defines hybris as “…a form of slighting, since it consists in doing and saying things that cause shame to the victim, not in order that anything may happen to yourself, or because anything has happened to yourself, but simply for the pleasure involved.” In short, hybris is being an asshole to someone else for the sake of your own satisfaction. It’s not a momentary lapse in judgement, it’s not a result of “passion” (strong emotion), it’s not simply arrogance, and it’s not perfectly analogous to blasphemy. Hybris is: 1. A deliberate action. Hybris only describes something you do, a slight or a crime that you have committed. In general, Ancient Greeks placed a much heavier emphasis on actions over beliefs or thoughts. Thoughts are only bad insofar as they turn into actions. 2. Intended to shame another. This is the “pride” aspect of it. The motivation behind hybris is tearing someone else down for the sake of your own ego. Hybris is intended to dishonor someone else, for example, destroying their reputation for the sake of clout. Adultery was considered hybris because it brought shame upon everyone involved. 3. Cruel. Hybris is spiteful, and often petty. Hybris is bullying, kicking someone else while they’re down. Defending yourself from an affront against you, however violently, is not hybris (which is why Odysseus is in the right for murdering all the suitors). 4. A violation of the natural order. Hybris doesn’t always involve the gods. In fact, it often doesn’t — it was a legitimate accusation in Ancient Greek court cases. But when it does involve the gods, it’s usually characterized by an affront to the natural order, which is why the gods are insulted by it. So, all three (well, four) of the named mortal souls who are punished in Tartarus were guilty of hybris of the highest order. One of them (Sisyphus) tried to escape death, which is self-explanatory. Two of them (Pirithous and Ixion) tried to rape goddesses — it takes a special kind of arrogance to attempt to violently drag a divine being down to the level of a social inferior. The last one (Tantalus) either tried to steal immortality (self-explanatory) or fed his own son to the Olympians in an attempt to make a fool of them (yikes). I think it’s unlikely that a modern person in real life would be guilty of any of those things. Bellerophon often gets brought up as the go-to example of hubris, and while his downfall is a good example, it also leads to misunderstandings about what exactly hubris is in the context of Ancient Greece. Bellerophon is guilty of hybris not just because he’s proud, but because he tries to personally lay siege to the gods’ palace until they let him in. It’s a violation of the natural order, and a result of that special kind of arrogance, to think you are entitled to a place among the gods. Heroes can achieve apotheosis and end up on Olympus, but that only happens through having been granted immortality by the gods themselves. By jumping the gun, Bellerophon ruined his chance of that ever happening. There’s a big difference between coming to someone’s house because you’ve been invited, and breaking down the door claiming that you deserve to be there. The example of hybris that I was given in a class on Greek drama was that of the House of Atreus. Atreus and his brother Thyestes murdered their own brother, Khrysippos, usually out of petty jealousy for his beauty or a succession-related dispute. Kinslaying is considered a special kind of evil in Ancient Greece, and killing Khrysippos for the sake of their own power makes this an act of hybris. Atreus’ entire line is cursed as a result of this. (Poor Khrysippos was also kidnapped and raped by Laius — yes, that one — making him the unwitting cause of more than one family curse.) In some stories, Atreus repeats the act of hybris that sent his grandfather Tantalus to Tartarus by killing Thyestes’ sons and then serving them to him. Atreus’ son, Agamemnon, commits an act of hybris against Achilles by denying him his due honors at the beginning of the Iliad. He takes Bresias just because he can, for the express purpose of slighting Achilles. Achilles is justafiably pissed off about this, but Athena stops Achilles from murdering Agamemnon outright. After the war, Agamemnon is literally stabbed in the back by his wife Clytemnestra, and Clytemnestra is killed in retribution by her son Orestes. Orestes finally breaks this vicious cycle by submitting to the will of the gods in The Oresteia. So you see, hybris is usually violent, always motivated by spite or cruelty in addition to pride, and it’s kind of hard to commit by accident. The particular type of pride that it concerns also isn’t genuine confidence, or legitimate pride in one’s achievements. It’s believing that you are above consequences. That’s why the gods themselves so often have to intervene to punish those who are guilty of hybris. Such a person deserves divine retribution for having the audacity to think they can get away with their act of violence or dishonor. The way “hubris” is treated among modern Hellenic pagans is often analogous to the Christian concept of blasphemy, or even heresy. “Hubris” gets thrown at people with different theological interpretations, people who don’t show an “appropriate” amount of reverence and/or submissiveness towards the gods, people who relate to the gods on their own terms instead of using traditional methods, sometimes even people who are proud of their own accomplishments. Because pride is a particularly grievous sin in Christianity, and most neopagans come from Christian backgrounds, the “pride” aspect of hybris gets emphasized over the aspects relating to violence or degradation. In some Hellenic pagan spaces, witchcraft is lambasted as hubristic, because it treats gods as “pools of energy” and steals their power for yourself. I think that witchcraft certainly can be hubristic, especially in the Ancient World — one PGM spell literally threatens Aphrodite with torture of her loved one, and in Lucan’s Pharsalia, the witch Erichtho threatens the gods with the Ancient Greek equivalent of Cthulhu. Threats against the gods are hubris, but simply doing magic is not hubris, especially if one does so in partnership with the gods. r/Hellenism draws a hard line between goetia (ancient magic, which was often unethical for multiple reasons) and modern witchcraft, which mostly falls into the category of theurgy. But sometimes, “hubris” is used to define any Wiccan or Wiccan-adjacent perspective on the gods — for example, using the term “working with” instead of “worship,” because the former implies an equal relationship with the gods while the latter is more hierarchical. (Personally, I consider “working with” and “worship” to be two different things that one can do simultaneously.) Considering oneself equal to the gods, or viewing the gods as archetypes rather than as individuals, might have been hybris from the perspective of an Ancient Greek. But I completely understand that some people, especially people who have experienced religious trauma related to Christianity, need to distance themselves from the idea of the Divine being superior to oneself in order to have any interaction with them at all. The gods haven’t blamed me for my need to paint myself as their equal when I was a teenager, because that was my adolescent rebelliousness talking and not a personal slight against them. (Also, looking back, I’ve always had a great deal of reverence for the gods since I was very little, which is why inaccurate or unflattering portrayals of them in media anger me so much. I loved The Song of Achilles, but I do not plan on reading Circe.) It’s a simple fact that different people relate to the gods in different ways, and whether or not the gods are insulted by any particular approach is ultimately their call. Shaming a person for hubris might be an act of hybris itself, if you’re motivated by a need to feel superior to them. To avoid hybris, all one needs to do is be cognizant of one’s place in the world, not in the sense of “know your place, slave!” but in the sense of acknowledging your relationship to other people and to the wider Kosmos. You are part of and connected to everything, so acting like you are somehow inherently better than or categorically separate from the rest of humanity (let alone the gods) is an affront, and enables acts of violence. A person who’s hubristic is too arrogant to genuinely learn anything or improve as a person. Realizing that you are but a small human, no different from anyone else, is an important step towards genuinely and healthily recognizing one’s own divinity. If you want to know more about this subject, Aliakai just released a video on it that I found very useful in composing this answer.
On Fate
Every Classics student has to answer this question concerning the Iliad or Oedipus Tyrannus or something like that, because the tension between fate and free will is an important theme in a lot of Ancient Greek literature. What a lot of Classics students miss, however, is that fate and free will are not mutually exclusive. We’ve got this idea… I don’t know if this is an American thing, or if it’s a Christian thing, or what, but we’ve got this idea that fate and free will are diametrically opposed. If everything is predetermined, then you can never decide the path of your own life. If you have the ability to choose, then that must mean that nothing is predetermined. Like most opposites, fate and free will are not actually so incompatible. They can coexist, and even reconcile. Christianity doesn’t really have a proper analogue to the pagan concept of fate. Predestination is similar, but not exactly the same: it is the idea that God makes all the decisions about you and your life before you exist, so you can never decide anything for yourself. The pagan idea of fate is a little less “all of your choices are made for you” and a little more “all of your choices will lead you here,” i.e. destiny is not where you’re going, destiny is where you end up. That’s a small but important distinction. Pagan gods are not omniscient, and usually have destinies of their own, though it can work a little differently for them than it does for humans. Only the gods who personify Fate can control it. The rest may be able to know the fate of all things, but they have limited ability to mess with it (either because they literally can’t, or because it will screw up the natural order). What they definitely don’t do is “mind-control” humans. They do not force humans to do anything, or make all their decisions for them. Even the Fates don’t do this — they know what choices you will make, but they don’t make those choices for you. The best explanation I’ve ever seen about how this works is from Blood of Zeus of all things. There’s an episode in which the protagonist goes to visit the Moirai, who explain this to him with the metaphor of a baby crawling across a table. You, the adult watching, know that the baby will fall when it reaches the end of the table. But the baby still has free will to move forward or not. Oedipus Tyrannus puts you in the position of the adult watching the baby on the table, a position similar to that of the gods — you know who’s responsible for Thebes’ trouble and why, but you have to watch the train wreck that ensues as Oedipus figures it out. The big question of Oedipus Tyrannus is to what extent Oedipus’ downfall is his own fault. It’s kind of ironic that there’s so much conflicting discourse over this question, because it’s literally answered in the play: "And all these curses I — no one but I brought down these piling curses on myself!" —906–7 Yes, Oedipus’ downfall is his own fault, and he blames himself. But how can that be, when he is predestined to kill his father and marry his mother? When Oedipus initially consulted the oracle of Delphi, Apollo rebuked him as though he was already tainted with miasma for a crime he hasn’t committed yet, and tells Oedipus that he will kill his father and marry his mother. If he’d never heard the prophecy about that, Oedipus would never have left Corinth, and none of the events leading up to the play would have happened. Therefore, it seems as though Apollo’s demand to remove the source of miasma at the start of the play is a catch-22: Apollo punishes Oedipus for something he never could have avoided in the first place, something that Apollo himself directed Oedipus towards with the prophecy. Oedipus even acknowledges that Apollo is the ultimate source of his suffering: "Apollo, friends, Apollo — he ordained my agonies — these, my pains on pains!" —1467–68 So why isn’t it Apollo’s fault that Oedipus killed his father and married his mother? Because it was Oedipus’ own decision to respond to the prophecy by leaving Corinth. He never considered that the King and Queen of Corinth weren’t his real parents, so, deliberately distancing himself from his adoptive parents brought him closer to his real parents (too close, in fact). It was also his reckless decision to kill Laius on the road. Oedipus could have taken the more reasonable option, but he didn’t, and the gods already knew that he wouldn’t. Oedipus’ own choices would lead him to kill his father and marry his mother, irregardless. The prophecy didn’t make him do those things. The prophecy did not make him do anything. A prophecy is essentially a historical account of something that has not happened yet. Like any account, it describes what happens. Gods don’t distinguish between the past, the present, and the future, so fate is simply what happens, and prophecies describe what happens. But we humans, with our concept of linear time, think of everything in terms of cause and effect, so we assume that fate causes us to make certain decisions or that our decisions cause particular outcomes. It’s actually neither, and both. The last time I read Oedipus Tyrannus and thought through all of this, I asked Apollo what fate was. The first response I got was a non-answer. When I get non-answers, it’s usually because the actual answer is too complicated to express in a way that I would understand. I pressed, and after getting the sense that I was being asked, “You really wanna know?”, I was shown a vision. It was of a massive interconnected web, sort of like a nervous system, with “electrical” pulses travelling along each of the “neurons.” The first thing I thought of was the Dark Dimension from Doctor Strange. It also looked sort of like visual maps of the internet. This web was that of Fate, and the electrical pulses represented all the causes and effects in the universe, or perhaps the multiverse. Every decision that anyone makes, every time a random or uncontrollable event influences a hundred others, how the actions and intentions of every being in existence interact with everything else that exists. It was overwhelming. I understood immediately that I could never possibly be able to “read” this map. I could never understand all of the ways that everything affects everything else. And I also felt a sense of relief that it wasn’t my responsibility to figure all that out. Gods can make sense of all of that because they’re gods. Accepting that I can never understand Fate has given me a greater understanding of it. It is so much more complicated than cause and effect. That’s all my own personal beliefs. It doesn’t say anything about what the Ancient Greeks believed. But in their case, it is still more complicated than the dichotomy of “free will” and “mind control.” It is inaccurate to perceive the Greek gods either as cruel or as justified. They are neither. They do not work purely in the interests of humanity, but they also do not toy with human lives for sport. They simply are, and humans worship them in order to gain their favor, blessings in exchange for sacrifices and devotion. Fate is the divine order of the universe, and it is truly impossible for a human mind to comprehend, so the best that humans can do is worship the gods respectfully. "Destiny guide me always Destiny find me filled with reverence pure in word and deed." —954–56
Neoplatonism and Occultism
Most of the cosmological ideas that underlie Western esotericism have their roots in Neoplatonism and/or Hermeticism. One of the most common ideas among Western occultists is that one’s spiritual goal should be to attain henosis, the reunification of one’s soul with the great Divine. A lot of schools of Western occultism and mysticism attempt to accomplish this using different methods. Both Neoplatonism and the Jewish mystery tradition called Kabbalah are based on the idea that God expresses itself through a series of descending “spheres” that emanate from it, culminating in the physical world, which is the lowest and most impure of these spheres because it is the most distanced from God. With proper training, the mystic can ascend upward through these spheres like a ladder, to reconnect with God: "[The Neoplatonists] conceived of reality as spiritual activity or states of consciousness and regarded the human soul as a voyager, fallen and encumbered by bodily existence but perfectible by a path of ascent to its divine origins. […] Neoplatonic thought is characterized by the idea that there exists a plurality of spheres of being, arranged in a descending hierarchy of degrees of being. The last and lowest sphere of being comprises the universe existing in time and space perceptible to the human senses. Each sphere of being derives from its superior by a process of “emenation,” by which it reflects and expresses its previous degree. At the same time, these degrees of being are also degrees of unity, whereby each subsequent sphere generates more multiplicity, differentiation, and limitation, tending toward the minimal unity of our material world." —Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, The Western Esoteric Tradition: A Historical Introduction If that sounds familiar, well… that’s because Neoplatonism also influenced early Kabbalistic philosophers. It’s no coincidence that both Neoplatonism and Kabbalah attempt to chart a “path” up through the emanations of the Divine to reach their Source. Most Western occultists believe some version of this — that we are subtle beings temporarily incarnated in physical bodies, and that we can somehow make our way back up to reunify with the Divine. Most occultists seek to overcome or bypass the limitations of the physical bodies into which we are incarnated. I don’t personally view my body as a prison or a punishment, but I am acutely aware of the difficulty of having a body. In my personal opinion, one of the things that distinguishes occultism from “normal” religion is that occultism puts you in an active position concerning your relationship with the spiritual and material worlds. I would go so far as to claim that the idea that one can deliberately “climb back up” the ladder of emanations to reach the Divine is an inherently occult idea. That’s not to say that all occultists adopt this system or versions of it, but that actively pursuing unification with the divine is an inherently mystical process, and mysticism falls under the occult umbrella. Why wait for God to come down to you, when you can go up to it? Hermeticism, a different but related system of Hellenistic philosophy, was already considered occult in Antiquity. It was attributed to the legendary magician Hermes Trismegistus, who is supposed to be a syncretic incarnation of the gods Hermes and Thoth. From Hermeticism, Western occultists get a lot of other core philosophies, including “as above, so below” (the idea that the spiritual and material world reflect and react to each other), that all human beings contain (or have the potential to contain) a piece of the Divine, that we can understand God by observing the material world, and that we can refine the “base” and “impure” material world into a “higher” and more spiritualized version of itself. These are some of the theoretical concepts behind alchemy (especially that last one). Western occultism as we know it was so heavily influenced by Ancient Greek philosophy that certain aspects of each become interchangeable. Then again, so much of religion as we know it in the West has been influenced by Neoplatonism that it may be redundant to emphasize its relationship to occultism specifically.
Emanation, Part 2: Creation
I’m kind of fascinated by the emphasis on creation in Christianity. I was raised Christian, but either my denomination didn’t emphasize creation as much, or I just never internalized it. There were a lot of Christian ideas that I needed to work through and deconstruct when I became pagan, but this was not one of them. So, when I learned on Quora that a lot of Christians believe that the reason why God is worthy of worship is because he created everything, I was a bit nonplussed. Why? Why is creation so important, and why is it intertwined with divinity? Why can’t a non-creator be divine? Paganism mostly does not place a huge emphasis on creator gods. It’s far more common for the significant gods to be the children or grandchildren of the first gods to exist. There’s multiple Greek creation myths, but in the standard one, the first set of gods (the Protogenoi) passively emanate from a primordial void called Khaos. Khaos is often interpreted as a deity in her own right, but she is not actively responsible for creation. The Protogenoi also are mostly irrelevant to Ancient Greek religion. The most prominent one is Gaia, the Earth, who is also partly responsible for “creation” in that she is the mother of most kinds of life, as well as the first generation of gods (their father is Ouranos, the sky). The gods that actually matter are three or four generations down. The current Lord of the Universe, Zeus, is Gaia’s grandson, and Gaia herself is an antagonistic force under his rule. In Norse mythology, the brothers Odin, Vili, and Ve shaped the world out of the body of the giant Ymir, who arose from the primordial void, Ginnungagap; Odin is the chief god, but his importance is not tied to his role in creating the world, and his brothers completely lose relevance after that one myth (as far as we know). The Babylonian creation myth is similar; the first gods emerge from primordial water, and after a great battle, the god Marduk slays the primordial goddess Tiamat and makes the world from her body. Egypt also has a whole bunch of conflicting creation myths, but most involve the Sun or some other god arising from primordial waters or void. In one of the best-known Egyptian creation myths, the first really significant set of gods (apart from the Sun) are born from the Sky and the Earth. I don’t know what Hinduism’s exact theology is around creation, but I do know that the creator god, Brahma, is worshipped far less often than the other two aspects of the supreme being (Vishnu and Shiva) and considerably less often than many other “lesser” divinities in the pantheon. In most of these religions’ creation myths, there are a couple of recurring ideas: One, the idea of primordial water or void, from which everything else emanates. (The Abrahamic creation myth implicitly has this as well, since the Earth exists in a dark void when God creates it, but God already exists. There’s never any specification of where God came from, leading to an endless chain of ontological debates. But that’s unusual.) The first gods just sort of arise or coalesce out of the prima materia. Two, the gods immediately set about making more of themselves. They mate with whatever other beings happen to be there or, if there aren’t any, they… improvise. One of the Egyptian creator gods, Atum, masturbates to produce the first set of gods, Shu and Tefnut. And really, why not? That kind of makes sense when you think about it. Shu and Tefnut (both gods of air) have sex and produce Nut and Geb, the Sky and the Earth, who have sex and produce the first set of gods that’s actually important — Isis Osiris, Nephthys, and Set — who also immediately pair up and then it goes from there. It’s the same in other mythologies. Tiamat and Apsu, each representing primordial waters, have sex and produce two other sets of gods that represent fundamental male/female principles, who have sex and start spawning the gods that actually matter. In some versions of the Greek creation myth, the primordial gods Nyx and Erebos (Night and Darkness) spawn a whole brood of other gods that represent different fundamental aspects of existence — Day, Ether, Death, Sleep, Dreams, Discord, Fate, Friendship, Misery, Old Age, Vengeance, etc. In the Orphic creation myth, Kronos and Ananke are the parents of the cosmic egg, out of which hatches Phanes, the closest thing to a true creator deity that Greece has (excepting Platonism; we’ll get there). Phanes is a personification of progenation, the force of creation itself that drives things to come into being. “Phanes” means “to bring to light” or “to make appear,” but in Hesiod this being is called Eros — literally, a personification of the drive to have sex. Sex is an act of creation. That’s true in a literal sense. So gods create the world by spawning other gods that each make up a piece of the world as we know it. The Sky and the Earth are born, rather than made, because they are gods and they are alive. If they’re alive, then, like you, they had parents. If we’re going to interpret this from a mystical standpoint, then of course, sex is a metaphor. It’s how we make more of ourselves, so we speak of the gods as “having sex” to describe how they make more of themselves. And because gods all represent and/or rule over fundamental aspects of reality, they create more of reality by creating more of themselves. Certainly not all pagan creation myths follow this format, though. Another Egyptian creation myth, the one concerning Ptah, is a lot more like the Abrahamic one. Ptah creates the world by conceptualizing it with his thoughts and then speaking it into existence. Another big exception is the Platonic Demiurge, but again, we’ll get there. The third thing that these myths all have in common is that the later generation of gods is usually the more important one. Most of the primordial gods become irrelevant after the creation story is over. The later generation of gods is usually more anthropomorphic, more immediate, more relevant. Most of the myths are about them, and most cults are dedicated to them and not to the primordial gods. I don’t have a definitive or scholarly answer on precisely why this is, but I have a few guesses. Growing up with Christianity instills you with certain ideas about what religion is and how it works. You probably feel like the point of religion is to develop a personal relationship with God, and thus better understand God and perhaps earn your way into a better afterlife through your understanding of God. If that’s the way you feel, congratulations! You’re a mystic! I’m a mystic, too, and I still care very deeply about fostering a personal relationship with and understanding of the Divine. I don’t know if that’s because I was raised Christian or if it’s because I’m naturally inclined towards mysticism, or both, but regardless, that was not the main goal of ancient pagans. For ancient pagans, the main purpose of worshipping the gods was to get their help with solving immediate, mundane problems that fall within their little spheres of influence. The great Mystery of Creation therefore isn’t that relevant to the lives of most pagans. It’s not important. What is important is what the local rain god thinks of your sacrifice, because if it is satisfied, it will water your crops for you and bless you with abundance so that you can survive the coming winter. This god could be the lowest on the totem pole of gods, with the smallest sphere of influence, and no worshippers apart from you and your local community, but none of that matters if your survival is tied to its approval. You worship it anyway. When people’s religious needs are more immediate, then it’s more useful to have a god that is easily comprehensible, anthropomorphic, and present over one that is incomprehensible, transcendental, and abstract. Pagans also tend to believe that everything in nature is worthy of worship in its own right. The distinction between polytheism and animism is actually arbitrary; most forms of polytheism have just as many small gods, nature spirits, household spirits, fairies, daimones, genii, etc. as they do big-name gods. Sometimes the smaller gods are actually more important because — again — they’re more relevant to the average person’s life on a regular basis. Everything is alive, everything has a consciousness, everything can be called upon or petitioned. Everything deserves reverence. The idea that you shouldn’t worship any of these smaller spirits because they were created by something else is absurd. Why does it make a difference whether the spirit had parents or not? It’s simply advantageous to befriend as many spirits as possible, so you can have their allegiance or even affection when push comes to shove. These structures of venerating or petitioning smaller spirits still exist in a lot of traditions of Christianity, mostly through the worship of saints, although some have other folkloric concepts of nature spirits that deserve some kind of homage or tithe (like the aformentioned fey folk). Not Protestantism, though, or at least not the kinds that are prominent in America. Angels exist in almost all Christian traditions, but are generally assumed to be beyond the reach of the average person. Some Christians will interpret any attempt to call upon an angel as an act of hubris; God chooses when to send an angel to you, and you cannot request the aid of one for any reason. If you don’t believe in saints or nature spirits, and you can’t call upon angels, that leaves you completely bereft of options when you need something smaller and more accessible than the Great Trancendent I AM to help you solve a little mundane problem. The ultimate, transcendental version of God is frankly too big to take notice of you. And that leads me to another relevant concept that I’ve so far avoided bringing up — that of the Platonic chain of emanation. It’s a complicated concept, but here’s the short version: There is a Great Divine or ultimate Source of all existence, which is an absolute philosophical standard of perfection, truth, and goodness. From this entity emanates all of existence, descending through a sequence of “spheres” from the most abstract to the most material. This is a very common idea in mystical systems, including Abrahamic ones, such as Jewish Kabbalah. Mysticism involves “climbing back up” the ladder of emanation to reach the Divine. Interpreted in this context, the pattern of abstract vs. anthropomorphic gods takes on another layer of meaning. Metaphorically, the anthropomorphic gods could be taken as a more humanized variant of the same concept as the primordial gods. For example, Ouranos and Gaia are the most abstract version of the Sky and the Earth, followed by their children Kronos and Rhea who are a little more concrete, followed by their children Zeus and Demeter who are fully anthropomorphic. These are all just different ways of expressing the same concept. In Orphism, there’s a series of Lords of the Universe who proceed in a line of succession: Phanes, the aformentioned personification of generative force, then Nyx, then Ouranos, Kronos, Zeus (the current one), and finally Dionysus. Zeus, Phanes, and Dionysus are all frequently identified with each other in Orphic sources. One Orphic source even tells the story of how Zeus swallowed Phanes in order to subsume him and gain his powers as Demiurge: "Zeus when, from his father the prophecy having heard, strength in his hands he took, and the glorious daimon [Phanes], the reverend one, he swallowed, who first sprang forth into the Aither. […] And with him all the immortals became one, the blessed gods and goddesses and rivers and lovely springs and everything else that then existed: he became the only one." --Orphica, Theogonies Fragment (from the Derveni Papyrus). Translation from Theoi. This makes Zeus an evolution of Phanes. He’s the same Supreme Being, but less abstract. He’s more understandable — the King of the Gods, with plenty of colorful stories about a humanlike version of him to offset the more transcendental interpretations. But even at his most anthropomorphic, he’s still up there in the sky somewhere, at a distance. Dionysus is Zeus’s son (and, in Orphism, explicitly his heir), but even more immediate. In many of his myths, he lives on earth among humans, and he is directly accessible at any time — all you need to do is drink wine. Dionysus is the same Supreme Being at its most present, most carnal, and most human, therefore the easiest to reach out and touch. It’s not much of a stretch to consider the six Orphic Kings to all be the same being at different levels of emanation, from the most transcendental (Phanes), down to the most earthly (Dionysus). Plato’s creation myth, detailed in the Timaeus, describes a single deity, the Demiurge, who created the world and all of the other gods. He makes the younger gods eternal, and charges them with the creation of everything else: "When the Father who begat the world saw the image which he had made of the Eternal Gods moving and living, he rejoiced; and in his joy resolved, since the archetype was eternal, to make the creature eternal as far as this was possible. […] When all of them, both those who show themselves in the sky, and those who retire from view, had come into being, the Creator addressed them thus:—‘Gods, sons of gods, my works, if I will, are indissoluble. That which is bound may be dissolved, but only an evil being would dissolve that which is harmonious and happy. And although you are not immortal you shall not die, for I will hold you together. Hear me, then:—Three tribes of mortal beings have still to be created, but if created by me they would be like gods. Do ye therefore make them; I will implant in them the seed of immortality, and you shall weave together the mortal and immortal, and provide food for them, and receive them again in death.’ Thus he spake, and poured the remains of the elements into the cup in which he had mingled the soul of the universe. They were no longer pure as before, but diluted; and the mixture he distributed into souls equal in number to the stars, and assigned each to a star—then having mounted them, as in a chariot, he showed them the nature of the universe, and told them of their future birth and human lot. They were to be sown in the planets, and out of them was to come forth the most religious of animals, which would hereafter be called man. […] Having given this law to his creatures, that he might be guiltless of their future evil, he sowed them, some in the earth, some in the moon, and some in the other planets; and he ordered the younger gods to frame human bodies for them and to make the necessary additions to them, and to avert from them all but self-inflicted evil." —Plato, Timaeus So, we’ve got a clear dividing line separating the transcendental God from the more “mundane” gods. The Demiurge is responsible for the spiritual plane, while the “mundane” gods are responsible for the material plane. But nowhere does Plato suggest that these other gods shouldn’t be worshipped just because they came later. They are still infused with divinity because the Demiurge made them in the form of perfect spheres, and gifted them with the ability to create and preside over lesser beings. "The Demiurgus therefore, as I began to say, by whom all things were produced, generated them [the gods] consubsistent with himself, and assimilated, and perfected, and converted them to himself; their order not being confounded by the at once collected evolution, as it were, of all things into light, but being in a much greater degree guarded and connected." — Proclus’ Commentary on Timaeus (Isn’t it great that both this weird philosophical text and a commentary breaking it down survived?). Translation: The gods are divine because they are made of the same sort of stuff and do the same sort of things as the Demiurge, but on a smaller scale. Now, you might have noticed that the Abrahamic God also creates humans in his own image and commands them to preside over lesser beings. Does that mean that humans are divine? And to that I say, yes. Humans are divine, but on an even smaller scale, and with more mundane “stuff” attached to us and weighing us down. Freeing yourself from the mundane world and climbing your way back up the ladder of emanation to reach God is the goal of a lot of mystical systems. So why does Christianity care about creation? Christianity is a mystery tradition. Creation is one of the big Mysteries, and part of the aim of Christianity is to interact with the Divine on that level. It skips over all of the more present/immediate/mundane versions of divinity — actively shuns them, even — and reaches straight for God at its most ultimate and transcendental. I’m of the opinion that this is admirable but not practical. One of the reasons I left Christianity is because it didn’t work for me, and worshipping Dionysus definitely did. And I also like being a polytheist. I like not being limited in who I can worship. I like making friends with all the gods, big ones and the little guys. I like the versatility. Despite being a mystic, I’m not that interested in creation. I don’t know why. Maybe it’s because I’m a writer and I spend a lot of time creating my own worlds. I think I know a thing or two about the process of creation. Some of it is active choices on my part, but some of it is passive… it just sort of emanates from me, and then evolves on its own. I get to discover my own world as I build it. Maybe God’s relationship with its world is similar. I created all my characters — does that mean that they should worship me? (hint: yes)
