ON ZEUS

On April 23, in response to a query on the blog A Heathen’s Day about the contents of my new book, ZEUS: A Journey Through Greece in the Footsteps of a God, I sent the blogger, Hrafknell, a copy of the book’s foreward. I include it here:

Foreword

Anyone who has ever ventured into the world of Greek myth knows how quickly you can become lost in its labyrinth of tales, with their hordes of gods and goddesses, heroes and heroines, demi-gods, nymphs, satyrs, monsters, and the occasional, often badly-treated mortal. Most mythographers deal with this by retelling the stories as separate units—Theseus and the Minotaur, Leda and the Swan, Kadmos and Harmonía, etc. In this book, I have ventured to order the tales into a coherent whole by focusing on their primary cause, Zeus, and recounting them as they happened during the course of both the god's lusty, tempest-tossed reign and the history of the people who worshipped (and created) him according to their ever-changing needs.

For most of his "life," Zeus was not thought of as dwelling disembodied in some distant ethereal realm. Nor did his worshippers believe that he had created the universe and all its living creatures. Instead, he was said to have been sired by one of the gods who came before him, was born on earth in human form, and grew into adulthood in sites which can be visited today, much as pilgrimages can be made to Bethlehem and Golgotha. Thus, it is possible to chart the god's journey—the stations of his cross, as it were—through real places and actual, near-historical times, from his rough-and-ready beginnings in the steppes of Russia to the heights of his glory in Classical and Hellenistic Greece, and thence, to his last, mortifying days as a pagan trophy of the newly-Christianized Roman Empire in Constantinople.

In writing this book, I have drawn parts from the odds and ends of knowledge I picked up during 22 years of once having lived and worked in Greece, mostly as an English teacher, often in the theater and, for one memorable summer, as a restauranteur (of sorts.) The greater portion of what I have written, however, is the result of admittedly amateur research which I did before, during, and after this period—my enchantment by the Greek myths extending back to my childhood and my fascination with Greek reality ongoing, even from as far away as L.A.. And last but not least are the insights gained during a trip which I recently took to Greece with my new Persian wife, Fárzaneh, d before, during, and after this period.and admittedly amateur) what it was all about. istory of his followersto tour the major sites associated with Zeus—many of which I had never visited before—and get a first-hand feel for the Great Thunderer in his natural settings—in, as it were, the flesh.

If I sometimes, perhaps confusingly, treat Zeus and the other immortals as though they had actually been alive, I beg the reader's forgiveness. When you live as long as I did in Greece, or are perhaps just passing through on a visit, you, too, may get the somewhat spooky sensation—"a shadow of a magnitude," Keats called it—that the gods and goddesses are all still there, poised to manifest themselves at any moment in unexpected ways—to remind us that behind the comforting facades of a high-rise resorts and happy billboards, there is still the mystery, the terror, and the magic. And still a chance, if we are in the right place at the right time, for a god to descend and, in some transcendent moment, effect profound changes in our lives. Anyone who has wandered by the Aegean on a moonlit night, or sat on a mountainside rock in the vast, cicada-filled silence of a hot Greek afternoon in a universe seemingly emptied of all other humanity, will, I think, understand exactly what I mean...

Thanks to everyone on that blog for their interest in my book and the lively discussion that has followed. Among other things, it has prompted me to start my own blog. In this initial effort, I'd like to clear up a certain confusion that emerged in the discussion about my position with regard to the “reality” of the gods and goddesses.

The basic purpose of the book was not to make an overt case for the existence of the gods and goddesses. Instead, I was simply (!) trying to show how the Greeks saw and depicted them over the course of more than 4,000 years, from the Russian steppes to the reigns of Theodosius I & II in 4^th- and 5^th-century Constantinople.

At the same time, however, I followed up my comments in the Foreward by dropping very heavy hints along the way that for me, personally, the presence of the Greek deities in the Greek landscape was quite palpable (can’t say the same about LA!). And - more important – that a belief in them was not only preferable, but much more “realistic” than a belief in a single deity (except, perhaps, Mother Earth). As I recently wrote to Hrafnkell, I believe that most monotheism is fundamentally “evil” in the terrible ways that it attempts to impose its structures and strictures on great masses of people, espousing its glorious virtues with one hand and, with the other, attempting to eradicate all opposing beliefs (as the Christians tried to do with the Greek religion. – among others…).

In contrast, polytheism and pantheism not only admit each individual’s (and community’s) personal relationship to the Ineffable, but their writings and oral traditions embrace not only the good but the bad in the way their deities manifest themselves. As I noted in Zeus when speaking about the Cretans belief in the Great Goddess:

To the followers of this faith (which had held unchallenged supremacy in Europe and the Middle East for nearly twenty thousand years), the entire cosmos—earth, sky, waters, and the plants and animals within and upon them—was a single entity enveloped by the life-giving and -receiving Great Mother, she who created, nurtured, and took into her bosom all living things, just as, on a much smaller scale, the females of every species daily performed mirroring aspects of the same miracle. The statues which were offered to her, or fashioned to be worshipped in her stead, were the same tiny but enormously voluptuous female figurines that the Greeks had made such cautious fun of upon their arrival in the area. Wide-hipped, sometimes large-vulvaed, and full-breasted, these effigies were the essence of earth in all its endless fecundity. Some of them, however, were tellingly blind. The goddess, who could at one moment bestow wondrous bounties upon her creation and the next, visit it with all manner of afflictions—earthquakes, plagues, storms, floods, and droughts, all without apparent provocation—was utterly indifferent to individuals, blind to their tiny needs and little sorrows. She cherished only Life itself.

Mother Goddess c. 6000-5800 B.C., Çatal Hüyük

[Unfortunately, the difficulty of obtaining rights to good quality pictures made it necessary to excise all of the 70-some images I had intended to include…]

This, it seems, is much more “realistic” than most anything monotheism has dreamed up. It is also, in its way, a lot more comforting…

I could go on and on. Later.

Tom Stone