The Greeks: Gods, Religion and Mysteries
This post is part of an evolving series of reviews on Mircea Eliade's A History of Religious Ideas Vol. 1 which carries on from the following background posts:
- Book Report: A History of Religious Ideas Vol. 1 by Mircea Eliade - Ch 5-9
- Book Report: A History of Religious Ideas Vol. 1 by Mircea Eliade - Ch 1-4
These three chapters were very, very fascinating and easily my favorite so far. It was an unplanned, but deeply significant experience to read these chapters side by side with the beginning of Meditations by Marcus Aurelius and the introduction to Stoic cosmology with the Stoic Book Club. The obnoxious length of this review is mostly due to the appreciation I cultivated through studying the Greek development of religious ideas and I must pay my respect by capturing my subjective interpretation to the standard the book deserves, as much as possible.
Origin Myth of the Pantheon
The origin story of the Olympic pantheon is a violent one and rife with daddy issues. Gaia, the primordial Earth and great creation Goddess, begets Uranus, a cosmocreator sky god, by herself. He sires children with Gaia, but hating them, imprisons his kids away deep in the earth. Gaia is understandably pissed and conspires with her children to "punish the criminal revenge of a father." Her son Cronos is up to the task and castrates his Uranus, assumes the role of universal sovereign, and marries his sister to produce the next generation of deities. However, children tend to emulate their parents and Chronos started swallowing up his own children to protect himself from a similar fate. Enraged, Rhea, the consort of Chronos, finally responds by tricking him and hiding Zeus away. Zeus overthrows his father, frees his siblings and assumes supremacy.
While Uranus, Chronos and Zeus share in the identity of sky gods with other neighboring religious cultures, including the Canaanites and the Vedic creator Dyaus, a new motif of generational conflict and the increasing orderliness in the way the Greek gods behave suggests some new ideas are emerging. Unlike the earlier primordial sky gods, Zeus is not the creator of the cosmos, but a participant in it. The many love affairs and dramatic infighting of the divine family begin to take on a more relatable, human element. As humans become more proficient with agriculture perhaps they were becoming more comfortable in the world. The hostile, chaotic state of the prehistoric world of wild beasts is less dangerous as Man masters his surroundings, and as such, his conceptions of divinity become less chaotic and more ordered.
Cosmic Organization and the Sacrifice of Prometheus
Greek mythology organizes the history of Man into five generational ages, those of Gold, Silver, Bronze, Heroes and Iron. Like the biblical story, Man was at first very close to the gods, but this time of golden age paradise ended when Zeus killed Chronos. Eventually, Zeus killed the silver age of men because of their sins and that "they would not sacrifice". As generations drift father away from identification with the Gods due to genocidal violence, eventually Men begin to repair that relationship by offering the first sacrifice. The sacrifice is an ox and the ritual of dividing it into two portions echos that of the prehistoric hunters. To me, it reiterates a central question Man is grappling with as it discovers sacrifice, which is, "how much and what part for me, and how much and what part for the gods?" Prometheus takes the side of men and gets involved by tricking Zeus to accept the worse portion of the sacrifice, and Zeus responds by removing access to fire from man. Prometheus is famous for stealing fire back from the Gods and giving it to mankind, and then in punishment from Zeus, being chained to a rock to have his liver eaten away each day eternally. Zeus doesn't stop there, however, and punishes humans again:
Zeus sent them woman, that "beautiful evil", in the form of Pandora (the "present from all the gods,". "Snare from which there is no escaping, destined for mankind," Hesiod denounces her; "for it is from her that there came the race, the accursed tribe of woman, that terrible plague set among mortal men".
Whoa dude, chill out! For me, this extreme language puts bluntly the growing demonization of females and the ancient Great Goddesses worldwide, who, with the increasing rational order are represented by monstrous, serpent-like agents of chaos and defeated by heroic son or (Sun) deities in establishing civilization. The sacrifice is a turning point in man's descent away from a godlike nature, and with the birth of reasoning capacity (fire), religious man begins a long journey of re-ascent to the heavenly, Eden-like state of the Golden Age through the practicing of sacrifice. Later in the mythology, both Chronos and Prometheus are eventually released from their imprisonment and suffering, reflecting this redemptive quality. Along with the Hebrews, the Indian system, and the later Christians, the Greeks, dramatically discover sacrifice as a way of actively pursing a better spiritual state.
Bridging the Divine Divide
Apollo & Hermes
As the younger gods emerge, an increasing humanization of the gods converges toward a more apparent knowledge of the divine potential within humans. The transition away from the chaos and uncertainty projected onto the ancient Great Goddesses reaches a symbolic pinnacle with the story of Apollo. This Delphi was the site of an ancient feminine cult, and when this Sun god came on the scene, he slayed Python, the female dragon who ruled the temple of the priestesses and appropriated it as a worship place for himself, becoming a god of prophecy. However, like man, he too had to suffer for his crime of murder and also becomes the god of purification. Apollo and his appropriation of the intuitive, feminine prophesy at Delphi,
reveals to humankind the way that leads from divinatory "vision" to thought. The demonic element, implicit in all knowledge of the occult, is exorcised. The supreme Apollonian lesson is expressed in the famous Delphic formula "Know thyself!" Intelligence, knowledge, wisdom are regarded as divine models, bestowed by the gods, first of all by Apollo.
Hermes, regarded as "the companion of man" and messenger of the gods, continues to narrow the divine divide. His complex associations as the guide of travelers, patron of thieves and tricksters and master of inventions emphasize the mental world and suggest playful and experimental approach to exploring the nature and relationship of Man, the gods and the Universe. His unique ability to travel between all the worlds instantly assists his more mysterious role of psychopomp, or guide of souls the dead. The influence of Hermes sticks around longer than other gods as he is
identified by the philosophers as the Logos, [and] will be compared to Christ by the Church Fathers, in anticipation of the countless homologies and identifications made by the alchemists of the Renaissance.
Artemis, Athena & Aphrodite: From Wild Virgin to Sacred Sexuality
As for the symbolic evolution of the female circle of the pantheon, the civilizing Greek reason attempted to bring order to the wild and natural, feminine-oriented status quo. There are vague associations to be made in identifying Hera, the wife of Zeus, as representing the ancient Great Goddess. Her institution as the patron goddess of marriage was an ordering principle to feminine sexuality and institutional relationships.
Artemis represented a similar association to the older chaos and was literally the Mistress of Wild Beasts. She was goddess of the hunt and a virgin goddess. Fiercely independent, she didn't need a man, and thus was complete unto herself. Paradoxically, she was also the goddess of childbirth.
I sense a continued ordering of the feminine through Athena, the goddess of wisdom and intelligence. Like Artemis, she was fiercely independent, having been born without a mother and directly from the body of Zeus. She was even particularly warlike and proficient in battle. Like Hermes, Athena was a goddess of technical invention, and maritime navigation. Her emphasis on mental domains suggest a budding respect for an affinity for the emerging masculine reason. As she, herself, says, "In all things, my heart leans toward the male, except for marriage."
The re-ordering of the wild feminine takes another step with Aphrodite, the goddess of sexual love.
Aphrodite will never become the preeminent goddess of fertility. It is physical love, fleshly union, that she inspires, praises and defends. In this sense it may be said that, thanks to Aphrodite, the Greeks rediscovered the sacred nature of the original sexual urge.
Aphrodite "puts desire" into animals as well as into men and gods." By inciting even the gods into scandalous and dramatic love affairs, she further closed the idealistic gap between the natures, behaviors and basic instincts between men and gods. But more importantly, Aphrodite's rulership over physical love as a shared dimension across all planes of life begins "the revelation of sexuality as transcendence and mystery" the feels like it's still in exploration for us today.
The Heroes and Hubris
To discuss the Greek heroes, we need to back up a little bit. The age of heroes must have occurred after the rise of Zeus, but in the beginnings of mankind. Less than gods, but more than the average man, the heroes probably represent the men embodying the earliest civilizing influences. Heroes were worshiped, like the gods, and their cults were often associating with the initiation of adolescents and the Mysteries. Their great feats earn many of them immortality and they probably plant a seed in Greek religious thought that by living an extremely glorious life, one could earn his way back to the paradise of the golden age.
While the heroes perform incredible deeds, it is most surprising that they also suffer miserable failures. Most of them die terribly violent and tragic deaths. In rising so high above men, the heroes often develop an incredible pride and hubris, in which they challenge the supremacy of the gods themselves and call down catastrophic punishments. Hercules, the perfect hero, is unique in that the trials he conquers are that of controlling (knowing) himself, and he gains immortality by committing suicide on a fire, a by-now familiar image of self-sacrifice.
For me, the strange heroes represent an early time of development in man's capacity for reason. It suggests that along with the birth of a revolutionary potential to know oneself and place in the Universe, is a correspondent birth of narcissistic potential for evil and a limitless hunger for power. To me, the heroes and their tragic adventures depict the long and messy process of man discovering the limits of himself and natural law, and the are the early prototypes of initiated individuals who undertake the conscious journey back toward the golden age by living with proof-of-work.
The Eleusinian Mysteries
The Eleusinian Mysteries were a set of secret rituals and initiations that had a profound impact on every person that experienced them. To speak of the secrets of the Mysteries to the uninitiated was forbidden by death, and every person who experienced them came away free from the fear of death. Initiation into the Mysteries, however, was available to everyone in society, including women and slaves.
The symbolism of the Mysteries centered on the myth of Demeter and Persephone. Demeter was a goddess of agriculture. When Persephone, her daughter, is kidnapped by Pluto and taken to Hades to married and/or raped, Demeter goes crazy in mourning and causes a drought on Earth. It is an important detail that during her time in mourning, she disguises herself as a human woman and acts as a nurse for the son of a royal family. For some reason, she decides to confer immortality upon the child and "cooks" him in a divine fire each night. Her weird behavior is caught and she reveals herself as the goddess. A temple is built for her and she teaches her mysteries to humans before she fixes the drought and returns to Olympus.
The activities of the Mysteries included public ceremonies, a ritual bath and pig sacrifice, a long walk and celebratory dancing, but the secret parts are still largely unknown to this day. It is generally accepted that some sort of hallucinogenic substance was ingested in ritual fashion alongside a guided experience through the symbolism of the above myth. It seems that, symbolically, the agricultural death-rebirth wisdom of the feminine agricultural societies were brought together with the masculine, initiatory trial-by-fire of human will, planting a seed of unforgettable experience inside the participants and compelling them to life different lives. As Eliade himself says,
the Eleusinian Mysteries, proclaimed the mystical solidarity between the hieros gamos (mystical union), violent death, agriculture, and the hope of a happy existence beyond the grave.
In essence they were a synthesis of the prior important and religious ideas emerging through Greek culture and civilization. Perhaps, as far as our exploration of the Mystery of Sacrifice is concerned, they were a spark that lit the Divine Fire within each individual and beginning them on their journey back to the Divine realms.
Conclusion
The evolution of ancient Greek culture and religious thought was a true golden age for the entire ancient world, and persisted after the persecution of pagan religion in occult form to exert an important influence today. In reading, I feel more painfully the absence of such meaningful symbolism and initiatory opportunities for young people in society today. One can only hope another such revolution in revolution is on the horizon for humanity given what can feel like the primordial chaos of current times. If similar change is to come about, however, I imagine it will do so through the combined burning vehicles of one fiery individual at a time. So if Fate and/or the search to Know Thyself brings one across an initiatory fire, jump right in.