Hail, children of Zeus! Grant lovely song and celebrate the holy race of the deathless gods who are for ever, those that were born of Earth and starry Heaven and gloomy Night and them that briny Sea did rear.
Tell how at the first gods and earth came to be, and rivers, and the boundless sea with its raging swell, and the gleaming stars, and the wide heaven above, and the gods who were born of them, givers of good things, and how they divided their wealth, and how they shared their honours amongst them, and also how at the first they took many-folded Olympus.
These things declare to me from the beginning, ye Muses who dwell in the house of Olympus, and tell me which of them first came to be.
Hesiod, Theogony (ll. 104-115)
Wandering through the Getty Villa in Los Angeles, I was reminded of how much I love the ancient stories of gods and goddesses in Greek mythology.
These all-too-human gods are so obviously reflections of us, the earthdwellers. They mirror the joys, the sorrows, and the challenges of human experience.
Who could be more humanly flawed than commitment phobic Theseus, abandoning Ariadne on the island of Naxos? Who can’t relate to Demeter cursing the earth after losing her daughter, Persephone, to the god of the underworld? Who isn’t enchanted with Orpheus, who made even the rocks and trees sway to the melody of his music?
Today, we look back on these stories and see them for what they are — human truths revealed through stories and fabrications. Yet these very stories were the religion of ancient Greece. Olympian gods and goddesses were worshipped just as fervently as our own are today. People lit candles to them, prayed for hours on end to them, devoted their lives to them. The philosopher Socrates was sentenced to death for preaching foreign gods and leading the youth of Athens astray.
This seems so preposterous to us today, when we’ve replaced all the old deities with our more modern god(s). We marvel that people actually believed these ludicrous propositions and organized their lives around them. We can scarcely believe vicious wars were fought over these beliefs.
It’s so clear to us, from a distance of 3,000 years, that these are merely stories.
The old switcharoo.
A recent dinner conversation with a friend brought Nietzsche’s words home for me: “Even the most courageous of us only rarely has the courage to face what (s)he already knows.”
Oh Friedrich, my moody Friedrich. How right you were.
I wonder what made the ancient Greeks abandon their gods. I haven’t the foggiest idea how this came about. Was it quick — an epidemic of disbelief? Was it slow and gradual? Was it Constantine? Did some stragglers obstinately hold on, despite all the evidence that their country’s greatest thinkers — masters of reason, logic and coherent rational thought — presented to them? Were there some who just wouldn’t let go? I’ll bet there were. The thought of losing their great and honorable purpose in life, the fabric of their existence, their peace of mind, the holy sparkle in their eye, Zeus their god and protector, must have been terrifying to them. An abomination.
I wonder if Sam Harris’ analagous story could have swayed them:
“Say I told you that I thought there was a diamond the size of a refrigerator buried in my backyard, and you asked me why I believed this. I say, this belief gives my life meaning, or my family draws a lot of joy from this belief, and we dig for this diamond every Sunday and we have this gigantic pit in our lawn. I would start to sound like a lunatic to you. You would say, you can’t really believe there’s a diamond in your backyard because it gives your life meaning. That’s a self-deception that nobody should want.”
Sam’s story probably wouldn’t have convinced many, because the definition of faith is a firm belief in something for which there is no proof. The ancient Greeks would have tried to convince you that proof of Athena’s existence lies in all the olive trees that grow in Greece. Didn’t Athena give us olive trees, after all? And aren’t the mountains and valleys of Epirus, and the clear streams of Macedonia, proof of Zeus’ love? Isn’t the turbulent Aegean proof of Poseidon’s wrath? Just yesterday, someone prayed to the Hyades for rain, and it rained. What more proof do you need? Can’t you feel Aphrodite’s love in your heart? The warmth of Helios’s sun on your face? Are you comparing the true god of Greece to barbaric Persian idols? Who but Zeus could have created such perfect order in the world? Don’t you know you could be condemned to the deepest pit of Hades for such a blasphemy? There’s just no convincing some people, they would say.
Say you were transported back to ancient Greece, and all around you even the most intelligent people linked arms and joined processions to the gods. Politicians and leaders based their most serious decisions (when to go to war, when not to) on the predictions of the oracle at Delphi, and the priests of Apollo forbade the eating of certain foods around the time of the great god’s birth. What would you do? Would you stand up in the Agora and shout the truth loud enough for all to hear? How many would you convince, do you suppose? Would you be sentenced to death by hemlock, like Socrates was? At the very least, you’d probably be ostracized and driven out of the city for being a heretic.
Or perhaps you’d simply make your way through the market place, like an anthropologist observing archaic rituals.
Would you go on with your day, thankful to be free of the superstition and mysticism that holds so many? Embracing truth and the fragile, ephemeral beauty of life, would you be hopeful that someday the legacy of replacing one deity with another would come to an end, and the sun would set on all these gods, so that mankind could run headlong into a future brighter than anything the ancients could have imagined?
From a distance of three thousand years, everything is so beautifully clear.
© 2010 – 2011, Ithaka Bound. All rights reserved.
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