The Gods of Greece [cont.]

During the Corybantic rituals, the patient found, by way of music, which god was causing his trouble: that was the diagnosis and the beginning of healing. What was a symptom, a fear, an obsession, became a god that had to be given his due. We are created in the god's images and, therefore, can do nothing and feel nothing that has not already found expression in their behaviour. 'It is not a matter if indifference', wrote Jung, 'whether one calls something a 'mania' or a 'god'. To serve a mania is detestable and undignified, but to serve a god is full of meaning.' By seeing our personal fears and inadequacies in a mythical light we are more likely to stop evading them - and by accepting them, we can begin to transform them.

Perhaps the greatest expression of such a transformation was given by Aeschylus in the Eumenides. Orestes is being pursued by the Erinyes, the dreaded Furies, the daughter of the Night. They demand revenge. Then Athena, representing the new, free, Olympian spirit, effects a reconciliation between the light of the new order and the darkness of the elemental deities, not by defeating and suppressing them but by offering them a place within the divine order, by promising them an altar and high honours instead of curses from the people. The transformation of the darkness takes place by acknowledging it and integrating it with the light. 'This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine', says Prospero of Caliban in The Tempest. And where Shakespear followed, Aeschylus and Athena had led the way.

'Not even a God can cope with Necessity' [Plato]

"Zeus' second consort was Themis [Law], and that radiant lady gave birth to the Hours - Good Order, Justice, and Prosperous Peace - who hourly attend the labours of mankind, and to the Fates - Clotho [Spinner], Lachesis [p. 25] [Allotter], and Atropus [Inflexible] - to whom Zeus gave the great privilege of distributing good and evil among mankind.'

The image of the Fates permeates Greek mythology and poetry from Hesiod onward. Plato describes in detail the way the three Fates portion our each soul's destiny 'resolved on from untold ages'. From Lachesis the soul goes on to Clotho to ratify the lot it received, and from her to Atropus 'to make the web of its destiny irreversible, and then without a backward look it passeth beneath the throne of Necessity'. The staff and hook of the spindle of Necessity, through which all the orbits turn, were made of adamant, and the three Fates were pictured, each on her throne, clad in white, singing in unision: 'Lachesis singing the things that were, Clotho the things that are, and Atropus the things that are to be.'

'As for death, it will come whenever the Fates with their spindle decree', laments the seventh-c. poet Callinos. And not even the gods, Homer tells us, can save a man however much they love him. In the Iliad, Zeus himself cries out over the fate of his son Sarpedon who, the Fates have decreed, must die by the hand of Patroclus.

Necessity is 'that which cannot not be', and the gods who could break all the laws of space, time, gravity, causality - and indeed morality - had to obey the laws of Necessity. However irrational and incredible their behavior, it was not arbitrary. Necessity rules - even on Olympos.

'And indeed, as far as godhead was concerned, even Zeus could think, reason, learn, and improve morally through time' [Joseph Campbell]

'If the gods do aught ugly, they are not gods!' cries one of Euripides' characters. In one sentence he sums up our modern ambivalence toward the ancient gods. We want our gods moral, just, pure - perfect. We want good gods. Instead we are confronted with gods who cheat, lie, kill and destroy, and our response is to dismiss them as ornaments, poetic fancies. To approach the gods through moral judgment and our fixed categories of good and evil is, as Blake puts it, to negate the imagination and ignore the passions, irrationalities and destructive urges which dominate so many of our fantasies and pathologies and which, indeed , have shaped the horrors of our century.

The Greek gods are not good gods because they mirror - and mirror accurately not wishfully - who we are. The Greek religion is not a religion of serene, preface being but of tumultuous becoming: sensual, emotional, impulsive. It is significant that Homer places the gods not in heaven, in a psychological outerspace, but on Olympos - on top of a mountain but still firmly attached to the earth. And the Greeks could both revere them and laugh with them; and the gods would laugh back. [p. 26]

In Greek the word for sin [armartia] means simply missing the mark. There is no haunting connotation of moral judgment, no sense of departing from the path of righteousness and, therefore, no need for guilt and remorse but only for correction. But by the time Plato was writing the Republic, the tendency to reduce the mystery and paradoxes of a living religion to a coherent system of philosophy and ethics was gathering force: 'Neither, then, said I, must we believe this, or suffer it to be said, that Theseus, the son of Poseidon, and Pirithous, the son of Zeus, attempted such dreadful rapes, nor that any other child of a god or hero would have brought himself to accomplish the terrible and impious deeds that they now falsely relate of them. 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. 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 'the near-sown seed of gods'.

This is the classic statement of the social function of religion: religion as one of the pillars of a sound and stable society. But this is not the religion of the Greek gods. Their religion was summed up in the inscription on Appolo's temple at Delphi: 'Know thyself'. Know thyself as you are and as you are becoming, in your failings and destructive impulses no less than in your glory and essential divinity. This is religion as Thomas Mann experienced it: 'as the opposite of negligence and disregard, as taking care, respecting, considering, as a vigilant attitude, and finally as a concerned, attentive receptivity to the movements of the universal spirit'. This is the religion of attending to all the gods in all their aspects: a shift of perspective away from the persona and transient, towards the universal, the eternally recurring, the ageless, the mythological.

The gods do not tell us how to live. They are neither moral nor immoral, neither teachers nor examples. They simply provide an invisible background against which are lives take on new depth and meaning. 'As metaphors speak with inverted commas, giving an echo to a plain word, so when we begin to mythologize our plain lives they gain another dimension. We are more distanced because we are more richly involved.'

'We dance round in a ring and suppose,
But the Secret sits in the middle and knows' [Robert Frost]

Greek religion was a rich mixture of external forms, festivals, ceremonies, sacrifices and of inner experiences, mysteries, rites, initiations. while most [p. 27] men stood around in a ring and supposed, content with an external participation in festivals and ceremonies, man longed to unite with the Secret that sat in the middle and knew. For Aristotle, the highest thing a man could aspire to was the intellectual contemplation of god, which led to wisdom, but for those who sought union with god, intellectual contemplation was not enough. Nor were ceremonies and sacrifices enough. The official religion of the city-states and Homer's religion, with their emphasis on the gulf between men and gods, did not satisfy man's craving to connect with his inherent divinity. It was the Eleusinian Mysteries and the Orphic religion that placed this craving at the centre of man's life.

Orpheus, the legendary singer who inspired generations of European poets, was the original source of the Orphic religion with its emphasis on man's cultivation of his divine nature, on personal responsibility, on purity and goodness, on living what Plato calls an 'Orphic' life, with one's whole being turned towards the reality that lies on the other side of all conflict. Central to the Orphic religion was a belief in reincarnation which paralleled Plato's account in the Republic. All souls destined for rebirth were required to drink from the waters of Lethe, of Forgetfulness, so that before their return to Earth a memory veil would drop over everything they had experienced since their death. Only the souls that had attained their final incarnation and had 'flown out of the sorrowful, weary circle' were allowed to know and remember everything. This connection and ultimate union with the divine was the goal both of the Orphic and of the Eleusinian Mysteries. 'When a man has devoted himself to this', wrote Plato, 'and come to feel at home in it, there suddenly arises, as if kindled by a jumping spark, something like a fire in the soul, and from then it continues to feed itself.' And it continued to feed itself not only through initiations and purification rites but, most importantly, though everything that life brought, through living itself.

To persuade men to 'tend to their souls' and to connect them to a better way of living, you first had to give them, according to Socrates, a vision of the truth. This passion for truth, rather than the passion for beauty, was for Goethe the distinguishing mark of the Greeks. Nor was it a theoretical passion for an abstract truth. Man, Socrates was convinced, would choose the right if he only knew what it was. 'No one', he said, 'does wrong willingly.' So the passion for truth was a very practical passion informing the art of living that led to the realization of manÍs divine potential. In this context, the gods were transformed from forces that had to be propitiated in the course of an official religion to powerful symbols of the depth and complexity of man's experience. And the personification of the energies they represented made them powerful catalysts of self-knowledge and undedrstanding. [p. 28]

'I dare do all that may become a man;
Who dares do more is none' [Macbeth]

What becomes a man and what oversteps the measure of humanity were questions that received no unanimous answer in Greek religious thought. 'The cleverness of men is no real wisdom', cries the chorus in Euripides' Bacchae, 'if it means forgetting their mortality.' 'Al hail! I go about among you and immortal god, no longer a mortal! asserts the philosopher Empedocles in an exultant outburst that many in ancient Greece would have regarded as a clear case of hubris - of human insolence attempting to breach the gulf between gods and men. Such attempts, poets and playwrights warned, were destined to end in disaster.

'Men?' wrote the poet Simonides of Keos, 'Small is their strength, fruitless their cares, brief their life, toil upon toil. Death inescapable hangs over all alike, dealing impartially with good and bad.' Set against this view of man's nature and man's lot, that drew much strength from Homer, was the belief, growing more widespread after the fifth century, that man's aim was, in Plato's words, 'the completest possible assimilation to God'. Yet the two views are much less incompatible than it has so far been assumed. 'I am a weak, ephemeral creature', wrote Kazantzakis, 'made of mud and dream. But I feel all the powers of the universe within me.' Man is indeed guilty of hubris and of overstepping his measure to the extent that he sets himself in competition with the gods, compulsively seeking to prove his greatness while ignoring its true source in his own connection with the divine. In fact the heroic rebellion against the gods is in essence an adolescent rebellion against our own unrealized divinity, a proud, misguided assertion of the established consciousness against the infinitely greater possibilities that man encompasses.

Man, proud man,
Drest in a little brief authority, -
Most ignorant of what he's most assured,
His glassy essence, - like an angry ape,
Plays such fantastic tricks before high heaven
As make the angels weep.

When Plato asserted that 'God is the measure' and Protagoras objected that 'Man is the measure', the conflict between two fundamentally different attitudes to man and to life was given a classic expression that continues to permeate our time. Yet there is reconciliation possible between the two measures, a reconciliation that eliminates the element of hubris from Protagoras' statement. God is undoubtedly the invisible measure, infinitely more powerful than man's visible, realized greatness. But man can and does [p. 2 9] become the measure of things to the extent that he is awakened to his invisible, divine nature and manifests in his life the divine truth that he incarnates.

'I grasp nothing in the life of the gods so much as the moment in which they withdraw themselves: what would be a God without the cloud which preserves him? What would be a worn-out God?'[Rainer Maria Rilke]

Rilke's statement makes perfect sense to our modern, Cartesian mind that has placed concepts before experiences, but it would have made no sense to the Greeks. The language of gods withdrawing in order to recharge themselves is the language of rationalism, and whether in the fifth c. BC or the 20th c. AD, rationalism could never encompass the reality of the gods. For the Greeks there was no place, no act, no moment when the gods were not. 'The gods could not absent themselves from existence in a Protestant theological manner; they were existence. There could not be two worlds - one sacred, one profane; one Christ's, one Caesar's - for the mundane was precisely the scene of divine enactment.'

To understand the meaning of the gods for the Greeks and their meaning for our lives, we have to recapture the mythic way of seeing, where 'once upon a time' is now and forever and where the gods are inexhaustible symbols that cannot be reduced to allegories and poetic inventions. Herder said that 'poets and none but poets made the myths and gave them their character', but in truth poets have as much to do with the creation of myths as we do with the creation of our dreams. Our dreams happen to us and the myths are just as spontaneous a manifestation of the mysterious play of the human spirit. The manifestation is spontaneous but, far from being arbitrary, it is primordial and universal. Through the gods and their myths our lives are taken out of their blinding immediacy and placed in 'a momentary eternity which encloses everything, past and future'. As we feel our way through a twilight of self-knowledge, our different personalities and the roles we play, normally fragmentary and inconsistent, can find in the different gods a voice and a universal expression that recognizes their autonomous influence in our lives, as potent as it invisible.

'Whoever will look narrowly into his own bosom', wrote Montaigne, 'will hardly find himself twice in the same condition. I give to my soul sometimes one face and sometimes another . . . all the contrarieties are there to be found in one corner or another . . . . I have nothing to say of myself entirely, simply, and solidly without mixture and confusion.' Jung called this babble of inner voices 'the little people', who draw their power from the universal figures, the gods we carry within us - ultimately far more important in steering our fate than our well-defined, socially recognized 'I'. [p. 30]

The many voices in us have different gods to obey, different moments of coming to the forefront and withdrawn to the background. Recognizing the different gods in us dissolves our exclusive identification with the 'I' of our surface personality and at the same time expands the scope of our being to include an entire mythical universe. Jung actually described his mode of psychological thinking as 'mythologizing', and even Freud, whose aim was to create a scientific psychology, found that concepts could not begin to express his psychological insights and ended up creating what Wittgenstein called 'a powerful mythology'. He also ended up receiving not the Nobel prize for Science but the Goethe Prize for literature. Scientific concepts can help us sort out and grasp objects and things, but when it comes to ourselves and our lives we need the language of myths - emotional, dramatic, sensual - that can embrace the battles among the gods being waged in our souls and evoke a universal significance in the roles we play and the problems and games in which we are caught.

When, like the ancients, we search for the gods in the events of our lives, in our feelings, attitudes and motives, we find not only a hidden richness in our internal confusions but a structure of meaning underlying our raw experiences, turning our lives into an unending inner adventure full of creative possibilities. 'But what can a man "create" if he doesn't happen to be a poet? . . . If you have nothing at all to create, then perhaps you create yourself.' And imagination is a true creative power from which destiny itself is bodied forth.

'It is, of course, the stars and the bodies we can perceive existing along with them that must be named first as the visible gods, and the greatest, most worshipful, and clearsighted of them all' [Plato]

Plato called the stars and planets the visible gods, and in the Republic what happens to souls and to the stars turns on the same spindle of Necessity. Plato's fascination was with astrology as psychology - with the connection between the movements of men on earth and the motions of planets in the heavens and with the essential correspondence of the planets to the psychic forces represented by the ancient gods and goddesses. 'The morning star, which is also the evening star, is usually reputed to be that of Aphrodite . . . and that which keeps pace at once with it and with the sun, the star of Hermes . . . the slowest moving of all is called that of Cronos, that which is next slowest we should call the star of Zeus, and the next slowest after him the star of Ares, and this has the ruddiest colour of them all.'

The gods' names have been changed since Plato's time to their Roman equivalents - Hermes to Mercury, Ares to Mars, Aphrodite to Venus, Zeus to Jupiter, Poseidon to Neptune - but what the ancients knew intuitively [p. 31] when they gave the planets their particular names has been borne out empirically in the connections between the nature of the gods and the nature of the planets. "It is not that astrologers have over the years arbitrarily used the stories of the ancients about Venus, Mars and Mercury to project meaning onto the planets . . . . On the contrary, astrologers seem to have been recognizing with striking intuitive and perceptive clarity that the planets named Venus, Mars and Mercury have tended to 'act' exactly as their mythical counterparts would lead us to expect they should . . . . To encounter the profound universal intelligence that establishes a systematic correspondence between a physical planet and a mythological essence which affects life processes in innumerable ways is to have one's benighted intellect drawn to a totally new understanding of life.'

The term zodiac was first used by Aristotle in the fourth c. BC. Since then, and especially in this century with its facile fascination with astrology, the meaning of the astrological horoscope has tended to be reduced to the celestial equivalent of reading the cards or the coffee beans: a quest for clues to our immutable fate. The perspective we gain from seeing the planets active in our lives in terms of the gods they embody transforms astrology from a way of gaining knowledge of our future to a way of gaining understanding of ourselves.

All signs and al planets are contained in each horoscope chart, in the same way that we contain in us all the gods. What is more, each of the signs of the Zodiac and each of the gods has a light and a dark side. Jupiter can affect us either in the judging and punishing aspect of Zeus seeking tyrannical control over the flow of life or in his expansive, empowering aspect of the benevolent father. In the same way, Venus, so often symbolized by the dog in Greek mythology, is both the goddess of love and beauty and the love goddess turned into bitch, as Helen, Aphrodite's earthly embodiment, testifies in the Iliad.

The principle of opposites is present in each god and each planet - in their capacity to manifest their essential nature either positively or negatively. It is up to us to what extent it will be the constructive or the destructive aspect of each particular god or sign that will rule our life's expression.

In the starry vault of our lives each god is a constellation of different values and attitudes, passions and compulsions, fantasies and failures. In the sections that follow on the individual gods and goddesses [See separate documents] we will look to Olympus to find in each god's essence patterns that reflect our own expressions and experiences. The aim is neither to paint portraits of the gods nor to write their biographies but to evoke the forces each god embodies - in all their brilliance and all their darkness. [p. 32]

Epilogue
Halfway through the writing of this book, I took a trip to Greece and found myself in a remote village in Crete. Time had indeed stopped, and looking at the rugged, almost primeval faces of the Cretan men and women, the first few lines of George William Russell's Exiles flooded through me:

'The gods have taken alien shapes upon them,
Wild peasants driving swine
In a strange country. Through the swarthy faces
The starry faces shine.'

A few days later, I had left the Greek light that dazzles and I was back under New York's grey skies, but the gods' starry faces have continued to shine - through baby faces and careworn faces, made-up faces and wrinkled faces, angry faces and happy faces.

Under grey tattered skies they strain and reel there:
Yet cannot a disguise
The majesty of fallen gods, the beauty,
The fire beneath their eyes . . . .
And, to themselves unknown,
They carry with them diadem and sceptre
And move from throne to throne.'

The ancient gods in their modern faces are now everywhere around me, which is why this book has been a kind of homecoming. The gods of my childhood no longer reveal themselves in lightning and thunder but they reveal themselves no less powerfully in myself, in my friends, in the men and women I encounter whether in the village of Crete or the streets of New York. By learning to recognize the gods and the goddesses in our midst, we add [p. 203] to our lives a dimension of depth and significance which is sorely lacking when life is experienced as 'nothing but' a series of problems to be overcome and the people around us as 'nothing but' an aggregate of character traits, defenses and responses.

In our longing to understand ourselves and our world, the gods of the past, very much alive today, can show us the way into our future. Because they are present in our darkness and our limitations, no less than in our greatness and our joy, they can teach us a deep acceptance of others and of ourselves in our totality; and acceptance, as the gods' myths tell us, is the first step on the way to change and transformation. Because they are so unique in their expression of the most basic aspects of living - in relationships, at work, in their sexuality, in their femininity or masculinity, in their inner lives - they can free us from the prevalent stereotypes of being and behaving and help us connect with our own uniqueness. Finally, because they are so natural, concrete and worldly in their divinity, they can help heal our culture's split between the earthly and the divine, the secular and the religious. In the Greek gods, the eternal and the divine are fully at home with the ephemeral and the earthly. The natural is the divine, and therefore nothing is accidental or meaningless. 'The singular events and their totalities reflect themselves in the eternal, and yet none of the blood and breath of living presence is lost.'

In the fourth century AD, all pagan worship was banned by a decree of Theodosius the Great. Apollo's oracle has been silenced and the paths leading to it 'are roughened by the hurrying winter rains, or tufted with green weeds'. The gods were reduced to 'phantoms of mist and cloud', 'goblin myths and hairbrain fantasies', alive only in poetic fancies and literary metaphors. But today, when our objective realities have failed us and our proud age of reason is sick unto death, there is a new readiness to welcome back the long-exiled gods and recreate for our time their richness, their power and their meaning.

'We are all under the same mental calamity', wrote Chesterton. 'We have forgotten what we really are. All that we call commonsense and rationality and practicality and positivism only means that for certain dead levels we forget that we have forgotten. All that we call spirit and art and ecstasy only means that for one awful instant we remember that we forget.' Making living, inner contact with the gods can call up the memory of our divine reality and help us to 'gather the meaning of things' and to discover in our conflicts and suffering the healing significance that leads to transformation. Apollo's oracle may have been silenced at Delphi, but the oracles inside ourselves are alive and speaking with a voice full of relevance, wisdom and wonder at the mystery of life and the miracle of man. [p. 205]