2 page
1

MYTHOLOGY (OR BETTER STILL: POLYTHEISM)

Polytheism is the ancient world hiding in broad daylight. You don’t need to be an archeologist to uncover this buried treasure. Perhaps archeologists dig holes in the ground looking for facts, artifacts, because they believe that the work of digging in the ground is somehow easier – or better paying – than the work of digging into their own way of seeing the world, which determines how truth is perceived. Polytheism is a way of seeing the world and a way of living in it. Of all the creations of the ancient world – and not only of the ancient western world – polytheism is maybe the most wondrous. The most beautiful, the most tragic, the most cruel, the most happy, the most immoral, the most innocent. Let’s look at polytheism, let’s look at how polytheism looks at the world, and let’s look at its variant: monotheism, also an invention of the world called ancient. You will see, dear students, that the Greek language, and also the Latin language, are hiding inside of English, and also inside of Spanish, in a way akin to how polytheism might be hiding in the world lived by you. It is a compound of two Greek words: ????? (polís): many, and ???? (theós): god. Look at the Greek letter theta, ?: it looks like a mouth with the tongue flat in the middle making the th sound. Did someone look at life, at someone else speaking, when he first wrote this letter? Was the writer of this letter enchanted by the mouth he saw? Enchanted, encantado: from the Latin word incantare, which means to be spellbound by magic. What magic? What chant, what canto, what song? The one of the wind blowing through the trees like echoes of the ocean’s waves, the one that nature always sings and that maybe we tune out, distracted by reality? Like how we are so distracted by grades and points that we don’t have the time to think and feel – rushing to somewhere, we forget where we are. You’ve heard of Pink Floyd? Run, rabbit run Dig that hole, forget the sun. When at last the work is done, don’t sit down it’s time to dig another one. The maneuver of polytheism is to see the sun again, and the moon again, that we forgot were here. Because nature is full of wonderful gifts, and we are rich if we know how to receive them – yet if we don’t, and we are inwardly poor, then maybe we’ll look for compensations elsewhere. Is it so, dear rabbit? Polytheism resounds throughout the ancient world. Civilizations which never met each other were simultaneously and similarly polytheistic. How could it be? From the Egyptians, to the Persians, to the Greeks and Romans, to the Celts and the Vikings, to the Maya, the Incas, the Yoruba, the Hindus… How remarkable it is to imagine that the diversity of the world’s cultures holds this creation in common: polytheism, which in its essence means to see the world as a collection of diversities. I say that polytheism is a creation, and I add that for the sake of this class, focused as it is on Western civilization, I want to draw your attention primarily to Greek

2

polytheism, or Greek mythology, as an example that illuminates the whole of world polytheism. Because all of the world’s polytheisms are very much alike. What is the difference between a mythology and a religion? Is a mythology simply a religion that no one believes in anymore? Very good, let it be so. Without belief it is easier to think and imagine, and so we can look at polytheism as just a mythology, just a set of stories – like literature, an essential and essentially human creation. Who was it who said that humans are a tool-creating animal? Someone in the Enlightenment, perhaps? But stories are tools too. And we use story-tools to create: to make sense of life, and what we see and do. But behold – stories have already created us. We already live inside of a vision of reality – of a larger story with its concepts, categories and characters framing and defining what we experience. The terms of our perception have been created, but creation is never complete and so you have the space to create more if you choose, to create differently if you choose, and to destroy as gently as you choose. Let’s look now at polytheism’s method of creation: how did it create gods and goddesses, and what can we do with them? The Greek word for creation is ????µ? (poíema) – like the word poem, or poema in Spanish. Poetry is the highest, ultimate form of creation, and its object – the thing it creates – is not simply a poem in the banal sense of rhyming lines, but a perception of reality, a living story, a pair of glasses through which we see the world and which we forget we are wearing. We perceive the world through the filters of a story’s meanings, and so that story creates the world for us as we know it. You might say that whoever created the story through which we see and experience the world essentially created us – and this is true, literally true. Literally – look at the word. Literally, literate, literature, letter, letra – it’s all the same word, it comes from the Greek ????? (léxis): word. We use words to create meanings. What would we do if our meanings were lost? Would we become poets and create new ones? Because that is what the poet creates: meaning. Story or meaning, whichever you prefer, it’s the same thing. You are literally in this class now as you read, even if you are not physically so as there is no classroom to be in. Words are magic spells that make the world real. Beware and rejoice at this discovery: you become what you write, so write what you want and don’t be a ventriloquist of someone else’s words. The poet/creator, using words to make sense of the world, is – I will try to show you – a pivotal component of polytheism, but the essence of this concept is evident in our more familiar monotheism too. Look at this line from the Gospel of John: “First there was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” The meaning of the world, manifested in words, precedes the world itself – and that meaning is the work of the creator. The point is that meaning is the ultimate creation – and we can all be poets and creators if we choose, if we dare, if we realize that we already are. What poem of life did polytheism create? A poem is not a set of instructions or a formula, but a dream made real. But then again, so is a set of instructions, if you think about it – it is someone else’s dream that you are making real. Polytheism’s most obvious creation is a set of gods and goddesses. In Greek mythology there are twelve main ones, like there are twelve months of the year that return the same but different each time a number is added to our age. They are eternal not because they live forever in a universe apart, but because they are reincarnated time and again in life itself, wearing different masks but manifesting always the same spirits. Look around you, dear inhabitant of 2020, people are different, are they not? Different on the inside,

3

in their characters and personalities – you don’t need to be a psychologist to sense this. Are we really just apprentice robots, all trying to assume the same model of existence? Does that work? Is it even worth asking? People are varied in their behaviors and energies. Sometimes they are irreconcilable in their differences, sometimes they are attracted to each other magnetically as if by destiny. Humanity is variable, messy, conflictual, harmonious, irresolvable if posed as a problem, but perhaps enjoyable if posed as a cosmos (as a complete universe). It is from this awareness – that we can still sense today – of the many types of people there are, that polytheism’s vision of life is born. The gods and goddesses are representations of human types – or if you prefer archetypes, or essential types, that recur throughout human history – wearing the specific clothes of their day, but manifesting the same spirit underneath, speaking the specific language of their place, but saying the same thing on the subliminal level of meaning. The gods and goddesses are literary constructs – theoretical characters, that represent essential human characters. It has been said, provocatively, that monotheism, in its postulating of only one god also postulates, by extension, only one model of a human life: one morality valid for all, one system of definitions, one conceptual world that universalizes itself and wishes to include everyone. Whereas polytheism postulates a plurality of types of life, of systems of meaning, that do not line up together but tumble around in perpetual disorder – in frolic and in fight, like a telenovela that never ends. What are the human types that make up polytheism’s pantheon of deities? Perhaps you are already thinking of zodiac signs by now – and why not? That is one way into the question. What types of people, and what scenarios of life, inhabit the cosmos and reappear, in differential repetition, throughout eternity? This question implies that there are certain fundamental things that do not change (types, scenarios), while it also allows that there are other superficial things that do change: the appearance of eternal types and scenarios. The polytheistic world of eternal recurrence is without salvation (a cornerstone of monotheism) and without progress (a cornerstone of modernity’s transcription of monotheism’s essential concept). The polytheistic world is tragic because it can never be fixed and reconciled into a harmonious whole – like the spectrum of emotions that we all feel and that are eternal: love, fear, happiness, anger, wonderment… None of them can be cured, and none of them can exist forever except in the illusion of their own eternity. So what does it mean then, to live well, if living consists of these many sensations that always scatter about? I ask you a question that does not have a preordained answer – and hence is a real question. A question is different from a problem that requires only calculation to find a solution, to find the right solution (just one!). A question gives you the space to wander, to wonder, to create an answer – and to create yourselves in the process, dear poets. Parents: A Short Story If we follow the archeological evidence, we find that the oldest, first, deity that people ever created – in prehistoric times, long before any civilization – was of the mother. Or more lucidly, of the fertility goddess which identifies the mother with the earth – with nature, as in Mother Nature. But consider: archeology only confirms what every child already knows – the first human relation, determined by nature itself, is with the mother and the mother’s body. Is it surprising then, that when people began to create myths and figures to represent life and its meanings, their first creation was of their own creator: of their mother? Perhaps the oldest representation of a human figure in art is of a pregnant woman:

4

This small statue, only four inches tall, was found in Willendorf, Austria and dated to about 25,000 BC. It is called The Venus of Willendorf. It was made by cave people, hunter-gatherers, millennia before the advent of the world’s first civilizations in Mesopotamia and Egypt. It was made by a people without a written language, and yet it speaks – as all art does – in the language of shapes and of the human form. What does it say? It says, “I am pregnant. I am well fed and able to well feed. And I am round.” Round: think of the emotive meaning of the shape of roundness. Soft, without jagged edges, approachable, touchable – nurturing, maternal. Our first human type: the mother, which exists not only and not always in actual mothers but in each of us, as all human types do – in which of us does this type prevail and what outward form does it take? – Another question that doesn’t fit into the anorexic space of the multiple-choice quiz. But the poetic eye that created deities did not only look at people and their variations. It also looked at nature and found correspondences and affinities between what occurred there and what occurred in the human world. What phenomenon in nature is like the mother giving birth to new life? What phenomenon in nature is a metaphor of this human occurrence? – But the earth also gives birth to new life when flowers bloom and fruits and vegetables grow ripe. In the spring and in the summer, it is as though the earth is bearing children like it were a grand mother. And the earth happens to be round, exactly like the emotive symbol of the mother – a poetic intuition

5

duly confirmed by science. And so, in polytheism, the mother goddess always finds her symbol in nature in the generative earth. She is called a fertility goddess because fertility is the shared quality seen in people (motherhood) and in nature (the generation of new life). Fertility – the ability to create life. May our minds and imaginations be fertile too, however our bodies choose to live. The fertility goddess, created in prehistoric times when people, as “hunter gatherers” were directly and defenselessly dependent of the earth as a baby is to his mother, survived into the pantheon of the first civilizations’ deities. Every polytheism of the world’s ancient civilizations contains a fertility goddess that identifies motherhood with the earth. Here are some examples:

Look at the Roman fertility goddess, Ceres. What is she holding? Cereals. The offspring of the earth, a gift from the giver of life. And look at the name of the Norse goddess: Freyja. It is from this name, which comes from the Anglo-Saxon language, that we get the English word free. Freedom is different than liberty. Liberty, which comes from the Latin libertas, indicates a legal status, whereas freedom indicates a spiritual status. For the Anglo-Saxons to be free meant to be happy and expansive: to be creative and fecund, or fertile. When we create we are free. And back when the days of the week mattered more, was it not on Fridays that we felt a surge of freedom? Because Friday is named after Freyja. Just as Thursday is named after Thor, and Wednesday is named after Woden.

6

In Greek mythology the fertility goddess is Demeter. Ancient Greece has left us a plethora of written stories in which the gods and goddesses relate to each other in scenarios that are as timeless as the individual deities themselves. What relates to each other in these stories are not simply characters (the gods and goddesses) but the life qualities that each of them represent. A story that well illustrates this point is that of Demeter, her teenage daughter Persephone, and her antithesis Hades, the god of death. Perhaps you’ve heard it before. It’s oldest written version dates to around 700 BC and is attributed to Homer. But beware: there is no Bible or definitive book of Greek mythology. Its authorship belongs to the Greek people, because as in the case of all ancient polytheisms, their myths developed as folk stories transmitted orally across generations. Some of them were written down, but their written versions never became rigid – they never became the only way of telling the story. Ancient myths are like a piece of music that can be played differently – at different tempos and with lyrics free to be changed – according to the circumstances in which they are being told. Myths are elastic, and hence they never break. Their basic structure is adaptable to all times, or such at least is this myth-lover’s impression of them. Here I will try to retell the story of Demeter, Persephone and Hades in a brief way that puts in the fore the concept of a scenario or relation between life’s components – and in a way that makes clear polytheism’s tragic, irresolvable, yet happy vision of life. Puberty, that mysterious age, is where the story begins. No, just before puberty is where the story begins, because puberty is the story itself. So childhood’s last days is where the story really begins, and to represent this state of life we see Persephone in a field collecting flowers, as though she were still in her mother’s bosom, because that field is her mother’s bosom, since her mother is the earth. And then, an eruption from a cold distant place – from the land of the dead, the domain of Hades, deep underground. Hades, who happens to be Demeter’s brother and therefore also Persephone’s uncle (just ignore all the incest), sees Persephone innocently frolicking in the field and is drawn. Tremendous, cruel, yes, but not a sin in the sense of the disobeying of an injunction, because polytheism is without injunction or sin, and in this it is even more tremendous – for however you choose to interpret this word. Death (Hades) sees the fruit of life (Persephone) with longing eyes, but she does not see him. She is innocent. This painting, from the Roman city of Pompeii in the first century AD, shows us how Hades saw Persephone:

7

She is seen from behind, picking flowers, unaware of death’s enjoyment of her – we, the viewers, occupy the point of view of death. Hades, then, rides up on his chariot and abducts her, bringing her to the underworld to be his bride. Demeter (life, fertility) searches everywhere for her missing daughter until finally her location is revealed. How can Demeter bring Persephone back from the land of death? She asks Zeus, the god of authority, to intervene and bring justice. Zeus is also her brother, but never mind. What does Zeus say? Persephone may be returned to her mother forever, and Hades’ claim on her can be eternally forgotten – on the condition that Persephone did not eat anything while in the underworld. Food! An important symbol in mythology. Food is nourishment, but even long before the fast-food industry turned food into a cartoon, food was enjoyment and functions as such symbolically in the stories of mythology. Food’s equation to enjoyment remains in our language: look at the word companion, or compañero in Spanish – it is a compound of two Latin words: cum (with) and panem (bread). We are true companions, true friends, when we can enjoy the same things – the same “bread” – together. Friends don’t just survive together (food as nourishment), they enjoy themselves together (food as pleasure). So Persephone, what did she eat, what did she enjoy with Hades that, according to Zeus’s arbitration, would keep her from returning permanently to her mother? She ate four pomegranate seeds – a symbol, of course, since no one can survive for months on just that (and she was with Hades for months). The color of pomegranates – a symbol taken from nature and made akin to the color of blood. I leave the rest to your understanding. And the

8

number four, what is that? According to Zeus’s judgement, which might seem to us very much like a joint-custody decision, Persephone is to return to Hades for four months of the year in remembrance of the four pomegranate seeds. All of these characters are in our minds: what is it that makes us return to the pleasures that wait for us under the sign of death? When can we no longer bear these pleasures and become innocent again? Which life is not broken? It’s fun to put Humpty Dumpty back together again, but the season is called fall for a reason, because it always returns. And so, for eight months of the year Persephone is with her mother (life), and for the other four she is with her husband (death). What does the earth goddess Demeter do when she is reunited with her daughter? What does anyone do when they are reunited with the persons they love? She is exuberant – and this is a beautiful word that deserves to be known. From the Latin ex, meaning out, and uber meaning the udder of a cow. Exuberant means to come out of the udder. What comes out of the cow’s udder? Milk – another symbol of life. It must come out, it must overflow, it must be given away for the sake of the cow’s own wellbeing and not just the calf’s – for if a cow is not milked then it is in pain. Exuberance: an excess of life, of joy, of energy, of “milk” that must be given away to the world – maybe to remind us that we are really a part of it and accumulation is not an ultimate value. To be exuberant means to be so full of joy that the joy flows out of us – like a contact high. Does the earth (Demeter) not behave like an exuberant person when she gives away all her fruit and flowers in the eight months of the year when things are growing (at least in places where there are actual seasons, like Greece?) Fertility realizes its own possibility in exuberance – and exuberance is always the souvenir of love. But for the four months of the year that the loved one is gone, what is the earth doing them? Do you know how it feels to be lonely? Sometimes when we’re separated from the people we love we grow cold and brittle, we’re down and far from exuberant, we don’t want to do anything. We are in our emotional winter, where nothing grows. The myth ends here. Or does it repeat forever, like the seasons it paints for us in metaphor? Observe the relations in this myth’s scenario: the power of one goddess (Demeter: fertility) is limited by the power of another god (Hades: death), and vice versa. No one deity (no one part of life) reigns supreme. Nothing is resolved into perfection, a spectrum of opposites instead remains in dynamic tension. What do you make of the way that happiness – or rather, exuberance – is presented in this myth? If exuberance is transient like a season, then how should that fertile season be lived? How is it achieved? How do you spend your winters? The prehistoric Venus of Willendorf – the ancient Demeter – and then what? What happened to the deities of polytheism with advent of monotheism? Were they simply abolished, or did they merely change clothes? Here we can see a painting from the Italian renaissance, from the 1500s, by Raphael:

9

This painting is called The Small Cowper Madonna. Cowper was the name of the Englishman who once owned the painting, and so is irrelevant to its content. Madonna is the Italian name for Mary, the mother of Christ. Is this not also a symbol of fertility? Do you see the faint halos around the heads of Mary and Christ? Why are they so faint? Why are they not intended to be seen immediately, but require you to look closer? The halo – a symbol of divinity – is intentionally faint. Why? Because what you are essentially looking at is a representation of an average mother and child in central Italy from the 1500s – you are looking at a representation of everyday people. But the point is that divinity hides in the everyday, you must attune your eyes to see it. The archetypes of mythology – of polytheism and also of monotheism – are there to be seen, or to be discovered in everyday life, among real people. These figures create a poetry of existence, and allow the world to be experienced as a recurrence of eternal forms. In our world perhaps you will see fertility goddesses at the grocery store, or in some corner of the cement and plastic city. To be able to see eternity in the everyday is a beautiful thing. If we don’t do this enough it is because it doesn’t pay well, it is not a job skill, and we are taught to devalue everything that is not immediately attached to the notion of “success” and its insistence on monopolizing the whole of reality. But this is a very old discussion. As Oscar Wilde said quite rightly in his ironic way, in modern times “All art is quite useless.”

10

Look back at the The Small Cowper Madonna. Look at the background. In paintings such as these, the background is an indication of the interiority of the central figures. Backgrounds in paintings are never arbitrary, and never just filler. They are always symbolic. Background symbols indicate the inner worlds of the central figures through metaphor. Behind Mary, to the left, we see nature – Mother Nature, la tierra, the eternal symbols of fertility. Follow the line of the horizon, it moves directly across the heart, the child’s embrace, and on the other side, behind the child, the male, we see society, a separate entity from nature (because society is manmade) but not completely detached. Behind the child, on the right, we see institutions: a church (with a duomo) and a tower (representing the state). Society, personified by the male child, should maintain an attachment to nature, personified by the mother, in order to be in harmony with itself. It is with the advent of the first civilizations that we see the creation of a new god that represents civilization’s novel and essential element: the authority of law. Prehistoric peoples gave us the fertility goddess, and she floats with us through time. But prehistoric people lived without strong legal structures, without settled agriculture, without demarcated social classes, without slaves, without writing… roaming the earth, wearing something akin to Uggs. But as you know, in around 3000 BC, the first settled civilizations begin to appear in the Near East. You have heard, that settled agriculture is what made the first civilizations possible, and what made the hunter- gatherers stop roaming. But yet there is a great irony here, because agriculture, which is located in a countryside, makes possible its opposite: the city, which etymologically is the root of the word civilization. Etymology means the study of the origin of words, which we have been doing here in this lesson with various Greek and Latin words. Etymology itself is compound of two Greek words: ???µ?? (étumon): true, and ????? (logos): logic. Hence etymology specifically means the logic of the truth, which is contained within the history of words. Civilization is a Latin word, and it’s root is civitas, which means city. A city is a place where no farming occurs, yet a city can exist only if farming occurs somewhere else – in a countryside. The advent of farming (of agriculture) allowed some people to live away from the land, in a more manmade environment where they could devote themselves to other things besides survival – in the city. And so, civilization denotes divisions between people (city and country), classes, property, and ultimately a system of law and authority to watch over this more elaborate form of social life. It is then in human history, and only then, in human history when a male, authoritarian god makes his appearance in human history – bearing all the likeness of an actual ruler of a city, or more intimately, bearing the resemblance of an ideal, stern but just father. Just as their remains a deep symbolic connection, evidenced in language between the maternal figure and the earth, there remains an equivocal connection between the paternal figure and social authority. Colloquial English speech indicates Mother Nature and A Man’s World – these terms are clichéd and sexist from a contemporary point of view, but they are longstanding historical myths that are worth examining from a distance. Fathers, in ancient times and in the particular civilizations we are looking at, were small law-givers in their family setting, presiding over woman and children as an authority, as an initiator into social conduct. How then could people imagine the larger authorities that governed their lives – kings and rulers who were rarely seen in person, but yet who’s laws (when the law itself was a new invention) had to be obeyed? This figure in human history is represented mythologically as a patron god. The male, paternal counterpart to the fertility goddess. A patron god appears in all of the world’s polytheisms, and in fact it is the basis of the monotheistic god in very clear form. Let’s look at this very interesting word patron

11

to understand what this figure means. In contemporary English the word patron is used very little, and when it is used we might think of someone making donations to a library. Very good. But in Spanish the word patrón appears with greater frequency and means something quite different: boss. But look at the word patrón: it comes from the Latin …