TFBT: Gods in our Midst

The full title is “Gods in our Midst, Mythological Images of the Masculine: a Woman’s View” by Christine Downing.

I am enjoying Professor Downing’s book. Her approach is more psychological than mythological. Her sources are often secondary (or tertiary) and obscure. She does a good job of summarizing the Homeric Hymns, without specific reference. She gives the well-read reader much to think about, but not necessarily to agree with.

Her discussion of Persephone’s Abduction got me wondering. I wonder if Hades chariot and Persephone’s abduction is the prototype of wedding rituals where  fathers chasing after in their own chariots; Icarus, Oeonamus, or Idas, trying to save their daughters from death?

A few quotes and occasional comments;

• “In all of Greek mythology none of the gods ever denies another’s existence – though they may fiercely dispute a particular claim to authority.” “Fiercely” being like ripping off the other’s wings or skinning them alive.

• “The whole exerts pressure on each of the individual gods...so that each of these powers becomes distinct not in itself as an isolated object but by virtue of its relative position in the aggregate of forces.”

• “The clearly ordered Olympian pantheon with Zeus at its head is a creation of Homer….Only in Homer…are the Olympians, the Olympians, dwelling together on the mountain top.” I wonder what Hesiod would have to say about that comment?

• “Even after Homer, Zeus still does not have a supreme position in cult, only in myth”

• “I must begin with Hades, because he got me into all this…” I don’t know if this is insightful to most folks, but it is a great opening line.

• “In both myth and rite, (Hades) is little more than Persephone’s shadowy consort.” I would suppose his “shadowiness” is due to the avoidance of his name and himself as a taboo topic, but it is a good observation by Downing.

• “A variant version relates that Cronus, rather than swallowing his newborn sons, threw the infant Hades into Tartarus...as he threw newborn Poseidon into the sea.” Interesting thought, but her source here is Carl Kerenyi

• “The story of the overthrow of the Titans is clearly at one level the story of the overthrow of a more ancient race of gods, that is of the displacement of an earlier cult by a later one.” This seems obvious, but there is no evidence the Titans were worshipped by the Mycenaean and the few titanic cults outside Cronus at Olympia are clearly coincidence of name.

• “The aniconic origin testifies to Hermes being a very early divinity. He is the herm. He is also the crossroad itself. Every threshold is Hermes. When silence falls in a conversation that, too, marks Hermes’ presence. He is there, at all transitions, marking them as sacred, as eventful, as epiphany. Our awareness of Hermes’ presence opens us to the sacredness of such moments, of those in-between times that are strangely frightening and that we so often try to hurry past. We never really know what may lie on the other side of any threshold. I think particularly of the moment of silence that may fall in the midst of a conversation with a beloved friend, when eye is locked into eye and one suddenly realizes how all the words have been evasion for this moment when soul gazes directly into soul.” Wow!

• “Hermes is also the only son of a nymph among the Olympians…all of the other Olympian gods except Dionysus are sons of goddesses.” Except Athena, we might add. “Where Hermes tries to hide his origin outside of the Olympian world, Dionysus flaunts his.” Well, according  to Graves, Dionysus rescues his mom Semele from Hades and sneaks her up the backstairs of Olympus under the divine name of Thyone. Heracles, to hide his mortal heritage,  is ritually adopted by Hera.

• “The difference between gods and men, the divine immortality of the gods as contrasted with the finite mortality of humankind so important to Apollo, is of little import to Hermes.” “Apollo focuses on the importance of clearly defined boundaries, the gulf between the divine and the human…When Apollo says, “Know yourself.” he means, “Know you are not a god”.”

• Apollo, “a god whom the higher imagination of the Greek so exalted and purified that death and blood shed became unclean things in his sight…scholars want to separate the “real” Apollo from this original more fearful side is…the beginning of such idealization in the late classical world.”

• “The children of the major gods serve to bring into focused view some particular aspect of their divine parent.” Students of Greg Nagy have heard this a lot. I thought I would just document and another scholar’s support for the notion.

• “Hephaestus is the only Olympian god who works.” That’s an interesting observation. Although Hera’s daughter Eileithyia serves as needed as mid-wife to the gods and Apollo Paean serves occasionally as doctor. But it is a good insight. Hephaestus has a heavy daily work load like his buddy Helios.

• “Among the Olympians, only Hephaestus was not imagined as physically perfect, divinely beautiful.”

• “Ares was involved in many other liaisons and (sired) many sons, most of whom were violent. But surprisingly there are no accounts of his forcing himself upon women”

• “I may know Zeus too well or rather may see him in a more forgiving light than many other women will. For I am a father’s daughter.” Reminding us of Athena’s statement in the Eumenides that, “I am for the male and entirely on the father's side.”

• “(Zeus) is represented as endowed with seemingly inexhaustible sexual potency. (Walter Burkett) has counted them up and calculated that Zeus had at least 115 mistresses.”

• “The Greeks understood Zeus as a god secure in rule, a god who maintains order without suppressing diversity, vitality, life…Zeus as embodying Greek polytheism, an order that includes without suppressing difference…the god ready to honor the sanctity of the guest, the stranger, the alien.”