Theophany, Part Two
by Walter F. Otto. Translated from the original German by Farasha Euker
Why the Greek man loves his Gods
We have seen what the Olympian Gods can be, and are, for man; how they calm and comfort him during the troubles of earthly existence. They do this not—or not always—by actively helping or promising salvation, but—always—through their very being, being what they are. They are, in fact, by essence, the Blessed, untouched by care, and thus bear witness that the being of all that is, at its ultimate root, is divine tranquility. We have seen how they guide the will of man and even become involved in their blindness and guilt according to their plan, and yet they do not take away from man his freedom, but give him the security through which only true freedom can exist.
Therefore, the Greek loves his Gods, whatever their actions towards him may be, and even when he must succumb [to fate], he finds comfort in lifting his gaze towards their eternal perfection and bliss.
Happiness
Regarding this eternal blessedness of the Gods—revelation and testimony of the stillness that lies beneath all things—it is helpful to add another remark, so that we might understand the fundamental difference between the blessedness and beauty of the Divine and the blessedness and beauty possible in the sphere of the terrestrial and the human—a difference that exists despite the kinship between the two.
No earthly, no human thing can be said to be blessed in itself. Blessedness does not belong to any being or creation taken in its isolated individuality. For this reason, Mörike closes his beautiful lyric On a lamp with the words:
A perfect artistic creation. Who notices it?
But what is beautiful seems blessed in itself.
“Seems”—who could say “is”?
Beauty is a phenomenon, or as Goethe said, an “original phenomenon.” But bliss only shines upon us in encounter. Those who love receive it from their beloved, and in turn the beloved receives it from them, and so it happens that each can appear blissful in oneself to the other. Only from the unity of the reciprocal relationship between lover and beloved does the realm of Aphrodite and captivating beauty arise. Because only in this unity from duality does the being of the world become present as a living whole and therefore become a mirror of the divine.
Only the divine, God, can be blissful in and of itself: for it appears as a person and in human form, but in appearing so—as the eye of the Greeks saw it with extreme clarity—it is never an individual reality, but rather, as we will see better, the entire being of the world. Therefore, peace and bliss are in God: intrinsic to His essence and eternal; in the sphere of the human, the Gods appear only in encounter and in becoming one with what is separate.
The Divine does not offer promises of salvation to humanity as in other religions, but reveals the essence of its being, and by making itself present through such revelation, It does not merely instruct about the future, but gives them, here and now, moments of eternity.
Shame (aidos) as sacred respect
The love of man for the Divinity is not expressed here in forms as lively, passionate, or perhaps even exalted as in the religion of modern times, since it is not a question of love for a Being who loves, provides paternally, and redeems.
But, if in this love man expects and asks for nothing, this does not make that love any less authentic. It is the love of man touched in his being by the essence of being. It is the emotion and rapture of the spirit, to which the depth in which what is rooted has been revealed, and which from this depth draws its existence back, as if from divine hands. In fact, in the figure of God, and only in it, the being of the world is present integrally: in it, knowledge and truth, subjective and objective, are present in balance and unity.
This can be made evident from different perspectives.
The Greek language has a term of inexhaustible meaning: it indicates a Goddess and evokes a whole world populated by Gods. It is the term aidos. This word is usually translated as “shame.” But “shame” is not here synonymous with shame for something one should be ashamed of: it rather indicates sacred respect in the face of the inviolable, the tenderness of heart and spirit, the consideration, veneration, and, in sexual life, virginal purity. All this and much more, related to this, is gathered in the charm of a divine figure that is both one and the other of these two things: the worthy of sacred respect and the sacred respect, the pure and the veneration of the pure.
Aidos is in kings who are owed honor; not for nothing are they considered worthy of sacred respect, of veneration; but so is also the stranger who asks for protection and hospitality, so is the bride, indeed the noble woman in general. When, in Euripides’ Iphigenia in Aulis (verse 821), Achilles suddenly sees Clytemnestra, the queen, it is as if he meets the Goddess Aidos: “Aidos—he exclaims—oh lady.” But the Goddess Aidos is not only the pure one, to whom nothing vulgar or shameless can be approached, she is also the modest reserve itself. In Aeschylus’ Prometheus (verse 128 ff.), the chorus of Oceanids lands [on a winged chariot] at the rock where the Titan is chained. In their marine recess they were struck by the “echo of the sound of steel mace.” and immediately came, overcoming the modest reserve.
Deaf, an echo
of a resonant steel mace
fell, steeply, into the hollow
marine cove
broke the reserve
that bows the gaze
The gaze of Aidos is lowered and tranquil, not bold and provocative; but it is a free, clear, and confident gaze. In Euripides’ Iphigenia in Aulis (line 994), Clytemnestra, in extreme anguish for her daughter destined for sacrifice, thinks of inducing the daughter to overcome any reluctance imposed by custom, to throw herself suppliant with her virgin arms around the man’s knees, “looking with free eyes in her shy modesty.”
Of the Goddess Aidos, it is said in Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus (line 1267) that she sits on the throne next to Zeus, participating in every decision. In Athens, on the Acropolis, Aidos had an altar in the enclosure dedicated to Athena, the virgin Goddess, of whom it was said she was the nurse. In the Iron Age, when evil dominates according to Hesiod, Aidos flees, wrapped in a white robe, from the earth and rises to the sky, where—according to writers of later times—she shines as the constellation of Virgo.
But Aidos does not manifest herself only in man, but also in nature. In the sacred silence of her inviolate places, she testifies to herself. In Euripides’ Hippolytus (line 73), the protagonist weaves a garland for the virgin Goddess Artemis with flowers he has picked “on the inviolate meadow, where the shepherd dare not pasture the flock, where no iron blade has ever entered and only the bees, swarming in spring, fly over: here Aidos is the gardener and the dew of the clear stream.” What is said of Aidos here is said of the Nymphs in an Orphic Hymn. The Nymphs, the enchanting maidens of the silent solitudes of fields, woods, and mountains, can all rightfully be called Aidos. And so, in fact—there is evidence—their queen Artemis is called.
In the mysterious silence of the caves, the presence of the Goddess Aidos is felt. In the name of Aidos, the silent, unhappy Andromeda implores Echo to respect her lamentations, suspending the game of echoes.
Aidos is therefore an entire world, in which both man and nature enter, penetrated by the Divine. It is the “pure spring” (Hölderlin); it is the Sacred and, at the same time, the religious respect for the Sacred; it is therefore being in its living totality.
What has emerged in relation to the figure of Aidos will also be made more evident by considering another figure.
Charis: grace and joy
Charis: the name itself evokes the sphere of grace and joy.
The Charites, like the Muses and the Horae, sometimes appear as a single figure and other times as a plurality (usually triadic) of figures. Their worship is very ancient in the centers where it is sacred. Herodotus numbered them among the Pelasgian divinities, among those whose “name” did not come from Egypt. In Orchomenus, in Boeotia, where their cult was traced back to the legendary king Eteocles, where in later times real statues were placed, there were originally rough stones, which were said to have fallen from the sky (Pausanias 9, 38). In their honor, the Charites were celebrated there with musical agons. On the road that led from Sparta to Amyclae, near the Tiasa River, according to the testimony of Alcman, a sanctuary dedicated to two Charites stood: Phene and Cleta. The founder was said to be Lacedaemon, son of Taygetus. Pausanias also recounts that he saw ancient statues of the Charites in Elis: they were made of wood, but their faces, hands, and feet were made of white marble, and their clothes were made of gold. One of them held a rose in her hand, the one in the middle held an astragalus, and the third held a sprig of myrtle. In Attica—again according to Pausanias—the semi-mythical Pamphos had already composed a song in honor of the Charites. At the entrance to the Acropolis of Athens, there were statues of the three Charites. The image of the three young Goddesses dancing together is familiar to us through later depictions, although not under the Greek name of Charites, but under the Latin name of Graces. Originally, they were clothed, and they still appeared clothed, as we clearly see in the aforementioned group on the Acropolis.
According to Hesiod (Theogony 907 ff.), they were the daughters of the Oceanid Eurynome and Zeus and were named Aglaia, Euphrosyne, and Thalia. Their maternal lineage connects them to the sphere of primordial divinities.
Their nature and their gift is expressed in a luminous way by Pindar in the fourteenth of the Olympian odes, the ode dedicated to Asopichus of Orchomenus, winner of the race:
You dwellers by the waters of Kaphisos,
from the country of raging stallions,
ladies with seductive voices
that haunt Orchomenos’ lanes,
guardians of the old Minyans,
hear me, Graces, for I pray:
if anything true or beautiful
softens the heart of a mortal,
whether he is beautiful or skilled,
or shines with the numinous light of victory,
it is your gift.
Even the Gods are dependent upon you
and would be unable to
order dances and feasts
were your favors not provided.
You have charge of all in heaven,
and are seated next to Pythian Apollo,
God of the bow. Zeus’ glory
is due to your worship.
And the same poet says (Nemean Odes 4, 6): “Longer than deeds, words live, which, by the grace of the Charites, the tongue draws from the depths of the heart.”
It is they who give to the works of man the luminous charm of beauty. Therefore, it is said (Iliad 18, 382) of Hephaestus, the divine smith, that a Charis was his wife: Aglaia, according to Hesiod (Theogony 945), “the youngest of the Charites.” In Delos, a statue depicted Apollo holding the three Charites in one hand. In the Francois Vase, they accompany the chariot on which Apollo and Artemis ride. Sappho invokes them: “Come, graceful Charites and you Muses with your beautiful braided hair.” The Muses are their sisters, born like them from Zeus; like them always intent on singing, dancing, and playing. Euripides, already on the threshold of old age, makes the chorus sing the unforgettable words in the tragedy Hercules (verses 673–79):
I will always want the Graces
to be united with the Muses,
sweetest of pairs.
May I never have a life
without music, may I always
be among the crowns.
Even in old age the poet
gives voice to Memory.
Famous is the song that the Charites and Muses would have sung at the wedding of Cadmus and Harmony (Theogony 15): “What is beautiful is lovable; what is not beautiful is not lovable.”
Just as the creations of art are marked by the blessing of the Charites, so too are the hours of happiness. Hypnos, the God of sweet sleep, desires for a spouse (Iliad 14, 275) “one of the young Charites,” Pasithea.
Whatever grace and joy there is in human relationships is still bestowed by the Charites. This is especially true for the love between a man and a woman. Therefore, of a young girl still a child, Sappho says that she is acharis, without charis: too immature to feel or inspire love (Plutarch, Amatorius). The Charites and Himeros (the God of charm and amorous desire) dwell—according to Hesiod (Theogony 64)—next to the Muses. It is the Charites and Peitho, who are bound by a bond of kinship to Aphrodite, who—according to Hesiod—adorn Pandora, the primordial seductress sent by Zeus to men, with golden jewelry. In the Catalogue of Women by Hesiod, women of fascinating beauty are said to have the radiance of the Charites, who receive beauty from the Charites. Thus, the name of the Charites often appears next to that of Aphrodite (Pindar, Pythian Ode 6, 2).
Therefore, the Charites touch man with their grace, bestowing upon him beauty, amiability, wit, and happiness. However, their presence is not limited to man, as they also reveal themselves in nature, in the joy of growth and flowering, in the enchantment of spring that gladdens the hearts. Plutarch (Greek Questions 36) reports on an ancient custom that prevailed in Elis, according to which women used to sing a song to force Dionysus to come “to the sacred temple of Elis, in the company of the Charites.”
But the world of the Charites reveals its essence entirely only when it is understood that the “gift” (the “gift,” the “grace” is here a divine figure) is not only that which, through its grace, captures, spreads happiness, but is also the joyful awareness of the gift received. It is (as the expressions used suggest) the marvelous realm in which giving and gratitude, loving to give and loving to receive, are an inseparable unity, the realm to which law and justice have no access, the realm of the fullness of grace. Truly, a world in which subject and object are united, dissolved and assumed into the divine splendor of a higher life.
The Gods are not “personifications,” but they open man’s gaze to the essential and the true
There are numerous other deities of the type we have considered in the previous pages, such as Dike and Themis (“Law” and “Justice”), Irene (“Peace”), Pluto (“Wealth”), and so on. However, it is not possible to discuss them in detail here. Before moving on to the major deities—of which Aphrodite, whose affinity with the Charites has been seen, will be the first—it is necessary to say a word about the difference between the two categories, and, at the same time, about the nature of divine figures in general.
Figures such as Aidos and Charis are usually called “personifications,” and this is because their name is, in linguistic usage, a term that indicates an abstract concept. Yet in some cases it is certain, or at least probable, that the original element that is the name of the deity, and that it is from this name that the abstract concept has developed. We have long been accustomed to speaking of “personifications,” as if this were a completely natural process. But how is it possible for something that is by its nature impersonal—an abstraction—to become a person? Simply asking the question makes it clear that this is unthinkable. Even today, poetic language is full of such figures. When Hölderlin addresses “Peace” as a Goddess and pays homage to her, is he “personifying” an abstract concept? Even today, statues are erected to “Justice” and “Freedom,” depicting them as Goddesses. Or when, for example, in the famous popular play Everyman, “Faith” enters the scene as a celestial figure, is this a personification? How then could the spectators be so deeply impressed by it?
In reality, there is no “personification,” only depersonalization, just as there is no “construction of myths,” only demythization; just as—according to Schelling’s saying—it makes no sense to ask how man can have come to God, the real problem being rather how he could have distanced himself from him.
The mythical figure is an original phenomenon. Concepts such as “victory,” “peace,” “freedom,” “justice,” “love,” etc., as originally mythical figures, divine figures, can always reappear in poetry and art as superhuman beings.
Thus, language too, together with art, confirms to us the truth of the saying attributed to Thales: “All is full of Gods.”
This awareness of a multiplicity of Gods, who not only dwell in the world, but are the world, has nothing to do with pantheism. Everything that is essential and true—it would be said here—reveals a divine figure. More precisely, however, it is the divine figures that reveal everything that is essential and true. Here it is already possible to see how much clearer it will become later: if the Greeks were able to delve so deeply into infinite treasures of being, it is because their Gods opened their eyes.
For all the deities of the type we have been talking about, the miracle is repeated whereby subjective and objective are dissolved [in their abstract separateness] and resolved into a higher unity. And all those deities, as limited as they may appear as long as we stick to the conceptual meaning of their name, expand their domain as we are able to see more and better, so that in the end their reign is coextensive with the whole of the world and existence.
Above these deities rise, sublime, some figures of Gods, of which we will be speaking shortly. These latter do not take away the autonomous meaning of the former; they only assume it within the broader scope of their own being.
Even these Gods, in a way, each represent a specific sphere of the world and existence; however, the greatness, power, and complexity of what they reveal through their being, the area of reality they invest, and the depth with which they invest it, are such that each of these figures, on its own, seems to be the Divine in its entirety.
They are present with their divine greatness in all spheres of reality—from that of the elemental nature to that of plants and animals—and make them mirrors of their own being, to ultimately reveal themselves in human form. Thus, each of these deities, without prejudice to their superior figure, can not only have an animal or a plant beside them, but can themselves appear and be revered as a plant or an animal. The rationalist will speak of fetishism, but those who know how to look deeply understand that there is no debasement of the Divine here; rather, the living being here becomes transparent to the Divine in its infinity, so that humans are induced to religious veneration.
Regarding the greater deities, which we will now be discussing, it will already be evident from their names that their worship is much older than true Greek civilization. This is also true for Zeus, the God of the sky and the universe, even though his name is Greek. His worship—as far as we know from the Indians, the Italians, and the Germans—dates back to Indo-European prehistory, and was imported by the Greeks when they immigrated from the north to the land where they settled, mixing with the original population.
Although in most cases we know little about the conceptions that were associated with these Deities before they became Greek Gods, the little that we do know, combined with what is known about the religions of the ancient Near East, allows us to grasp the genuinely Greek conception of divinity in its peculiarities that distinguish it from that of other peoples.
Aphrodite, Apollo, Artemis, Hermes, and so on, no matter how they were configured in the eyes of their faithful in pre-Greek thought, are now as they appeared in their new revelation, as seen by Homer, our oldest and forever decisive witness. Their appearance is part of the decisive illuminations of the Greek spirit. It is utterly meaningless to explain the faith in such Gods on the basis of the living conditions and culture of the ancient Greeks. What we call Greek civilization, meaning a peculiar attitude of the spirit and a peculiar way of shaping life, is nothing other than the self-revelation of Deities such as Zeus, Athena, and Apollo. They are the ones who have made Greece what Greece is. Everything that the Greeks have acquired in the domain of art and knowledge, and which continues to be an object of infinite admiration, is nothing but an irradiation of the divine revelation, of which they, and only they, were given the gift.
Multiplicity and divine unity
The multiplicity of the Gods in Greek religion, which is scandalous for those of other faiths, is not in contrast with monotheism, but is perhaps its most vivid and open form.
Whatever may be said about what comes from the Gods, in the end, the will of Zeus is always all-determining. Therefore, the greatness of Zeus is unique and all-encompassing. Already in Homer, the continuous return of the thought that the “Gods” or “God” reigns over everything, attests to this unity of the Divine.
However, the Greeks would never have been the most intelligent and active people if the wonderful variety of being had not informed them of a multiplicity of diverse figures of the Divine, which are individually infinite and eternal, but together constitute the totality of the Divine. And they—as an ancient said—considered it more religious to venerate the Divine in all its magnificence, wherever and however it manifested itself, than to stubbornly reduce its various manifestations to a single Being. The servile idea of divine jealousy, intolerant and exclusive, was completely foreign to their feeling.
And yet, this divine multiplicity is not merely a juxtaposition of different contradictory deities. Certainly, each of the Olympic Gods has his own character, well distinguished from that of the others, no differently from what happens in the domains of the real, which are also irreducibly diversified; nevertheless, those Gods constitute a unity—a unity of which Greek myth offers a deep image.
The Olympic Gods form a family headed by Zeus, the father or older brother who is called “king.” The sister Hera sits as his spouse beside him; the brothers Poseidon and Hades, the God of the sea and the God of the realm of the dead, share the dominion of the world with him, the elder (thus in Homer, Iliad 15, 204; in Hesiod, Theogony 454 ff., it is said instead that he is the younger, but superior to the others in intelligence and power), the dominion of the world, but in such a way that it is not possible for them to act in contrast to his will. Apollo, Artemis, Athena, Hermes, Aphrodite, and others are his children; Leto, the mother of Apollo, and others are bound to him by the bond of kinship, starting from Gaia, the Goddess of the earth, the progenitor of the luminous race of the Gods.
An attempt has been made to see in the Olympic realm of Zeus a transposition of earthly monarchy: but on earth, there has never been anything like it. In this family of Gods, one must rather recognize and religiously respect the most magnificent expression of the unity that dominates the boundless multiplicity of the divine. Whatever the original ideas about the origin of individual deities may have been, it is certain that in the Olympic religion there is one Father, in the deepest meaning of the word: the heavenly Zeus. It is from him that those deities, as figures [of an aspect or domain] of the cosmos, have their being. Aphrodite, who according to the primitive myth handed down to us by Hesiod’s Theogony was born from the foam that sprang from the genitals of the wandering Uranus in the sea, is now the daughter of Zeus (Iliad 5, 312) and Dione. The Moirai, whom the primitive myth of the Theogony knew as daughters of Night, and whom she conceived without lying with anyone (Theogony 217), become daughters of Zeus and Themis (ibid. 909), thus ascending to a higher rank (ibid. 904). Zeus has also fathered the Horae and the Charites (ibid. 901 ff.). The ancient Goddess of the dead, Persephone, is the child of Zeus and Demeter (ibid. 912). Even the Muses, whom an older tradition made daughters of Uranus and Gaia have Zeus as their father (Theogony 915). As is said in Pindar’s famous hymn, Zeus begot them when, after he had reorganized the world, he saw that the world, to be complete, needed a divine voice to announce and celebrate its magnificence. And Zeus finally (Theogony 924) generated Athena, the Goddess of prudent and energetic action, from his own head. The fact that even the innumerable Nymphs, the graceful deities of the fields, trees, springs, and mountains, are called his daughters, demonstrates with what right he can be called the universal Father, although Hesiod (Theogony 187) still preserves the memory of an older tradition that attributed to them a different origin.
These primordial Gods, the ancient progeny of Gaia, whose revolt against the Olympians still echoes in the great Tragedies—these same Gods did Jupiter subdue with the superiority of his strength, although without taking him into his family—and release from their chains, making peace with them. Thus incorporated into his realm, they inhabit its depths, having their own cult. What a difference there is between their fate and that of the primordial deities of other religions, upon whom, once conquered by the realm of light, damnation and demonization fall!
This unity of the divine kingdom under Zeus, who as king and father encompasses everything in himself, is radically different from the monotheistic absolutism that knows only servants and ministers around autocracy. The individual Gods, far from being mere instruments of the supreme Will, receive specific missions from Zeus, and are not allowed to oppose his plans; but they are and remain Gods in the full sense of the word: in their eternity, the multifaceted universe is reflected in a unified manner. They are and remain the sublime representatives of the spheres of reality and existence, the revelation of that ultimate dimension of such spheres, for which each of them is infinite and, in its specification, is always the totality of being and the Divine.
But today there is the possibility of directly experiencing the divine unity of the multiple, recreating in novelty the experience of the Greeks: and this is because the world, in its immense multiplicity, is this unity. It is still possible to experience the presence of the Divine in every part and moment of reality, for in this realm, Aphrodite still smiles, Apollo’s eye still shines, Artemis dances and hunts with the nymphs, Hermes drifts about, and Dionysus in blissful intoxication gazes at the stars: it is the experience of the Whole as a single divine life, as a reality filtered through a unified meaning, like a symphony in which the serious and the playful, the depths of night and the majesty of light, more than alternating, are—as Mozart famously said—simultaneously present.
It is not meditation or speculation that opens up the knowledge that is being discussed here, but only the great moment, the one in which it is given to say with Nietzsche: “Was not my world perfect?”
But what unites the world into a unity?
It is precisely the spirit of the fulfilled moment.
This spirit can, if desired, be called Zeus in the Greek sense—but it can also be called by another, higher name.
When, in Greek depictions, Zeus pours the sacrificial offering from the cup, he is sacrificing to the original Divine, which encompasses and sustains everything, even the Gods, and which has no name unless one wishes to call it Gaia (the Earth, in the Greek sense of the word), the primordial, which from itself generated the Sky (Theogony 126), or, with Hölderlin, “Nature”—Nature “which is older than time and stands higher than the Gods of the West and the East.”
[Ethics] not of will and obedience, but of love
Faced with the individual deities and the original Divine, which encompasses them all, one cannot help but wonder what the Divine is for the Greeks, how it appeared to the Greek man, and what difference there is between this revelation and that of other peoples.
The problem raised by these questions has never been seriously addressed, although it is the fundamental problem that must be faced in relation to Greek culture: only if and insofar as this problem is answered, do the various manifestations of Greek civilization reveal their essence.
One searches in vain for the Greek revelation among the religions that speak in some way to modern humanity. This is due to the misunderstanding [that easily accompanies that reference], not only of the polytheism but also—and even more so—of the anthropomorphism of that religion. The essential on this has already been said; however, it is relevant here to show how, precisely at the most decisive point, the Greek conception of the Divine is, of all conceptions in this regard, the least “anthropomorphic.” What is more “characteristic of man” than the desire for dominance, the will to power, the demand for unconditional subjugation from the other, jealousy, and intolerance?
The Greek God is not the Master, not the Will that dictates the law. As God, he demands recognition and veneration, but not fanaticism, not unconditional obedience, let alone blind faith. The ways of moral behavior are not commandments from his Will, to which man must submit, but rather realities that carry their own truth and value and that, in themselves, elicit respect, or more precisely, love. In Plato, those modes of ethics are, as is known, “ideas,” which is to say “figures,” belonging to the realm of eternal being, and it is love that elevates man to them. But in language, all this is already anticipated, as seen, since in language, justice and the other virtues are all seen as living figures, essentially as divine figures.
Here is one of the fundamental differences between Greek and Christian religion: in the latter, will and obedience assume a centrality that is completely alien to the Greek spirit. It should be noted that the Greek language even lacks a term that indicates what modern man means by “will” or “to will.” As we will see, while modern thinking is subjective, Greek thinking is realistic. The rules of conduct and action are, for the Greek, ideals of perfection that are inscribed in the economy of existence and the world, and as such, they appeal not to will and obedience, but to intelligence and experience.
A comparison between Augustine and Plotinus can help to make the extent of the gap clear. Respecting and loving virtues for their own sake, and not out of obedience to the will of the true God—so Augustine declares—is to be considered vice rather than virtue. This understanding lingers in Kant when he denies the character of morality to an action that is upright in itself but is moved by inclination rather than obedient submission to the moral law.
How different the Greek way of seeing things, which—just as Christianity was beginning to take over—found once again in Plotinus an exceptionally vivid and intense expression. In a tract on beauty (Enneads 1, 6, 4) he says: “Just as one cannot speak of the beauty of sensible things to someone blind from birth,… so one cannot speak of the splendor of virtue to someone who has not seen how beautiful the face of justice and temperance is: neither the evening star nor the morning star is so beautiful. One must see… and rejoice and remain as if enraptured… Wonder and sweet bewilderment and desire and love… [Those supersensible things] truly exist and manifest themselves, and whoever has seen them can say nothing else but that they are what really is.”
Therefore not will and obedience, but love, omnipotent love.
What is said here in unmistakably Platonic language was already known to the most ancient of the Greeks. They could love and venerate eternal figures as divine figures (which they truly are), because their religiosity was free from the anxiety of a jealous Lord who feels offended when homage is paid to others outside of his Person.
But nobility, which has such a hold on the human soul by virtue of the divine that is its own, is also the characteristic that distinguishes the great Divinities. Even if myth tells of things about them that sound scandalous to a bourgeois morality, those Gods always preserve their greatness, appearing worthy of reverent respect in their anger no less than in the celestial enchantment of the smiles and grace they bestow. They are not legislators, but luminous ideals. And it remains an incomparable value of Greek religion—even in the final periods—that its great Divinities were primarily revealed to royal heroes. Athena is the Goddess of an Achilles, of an Odysseus, and so it is no different for the other Divinities.
Scrutinize the images of these Divinities and ask yourself whether the figure of man—which is said to have been created in the likeness of God—has ever appeared with more noble, pure, luminous, and divine features than those with which it appears here.
The essence of the Greek experience of the Divine: the revelation of the infinite richness of being
The Divinities we are talking about, reveal to man true nobility and authentic greatness, not by means of precepts or doctrines, but with their simple being—thus they also open up to him, always with their simple being, the depths and vastness of the world.
Here we touch on the essence of the Greek experience of the Divine. The Gods reveal to the one who looks them in the face the infinite richness of being.
They each reveal it according to their particular nature. Apollo unveils the world in its clarity and order, revealing existence as knowledge, as a singing that knows, as clear freedom from the demonic. The sister Artemis manifests another purity of the world and of existence: she, the perpetual virgin who perpetually delights in sounds and dances, the friend of wild beasts whom she still goes hunting with in carefree joy; she, who coolly dismisses and irresistibly fascinates. From Athena’s eyes flashes the proud splendor of judicious and energetic action, the eternal that is in the moment of victorious achievement. In the spirit of Dionysus, the world is revealed in its primordial moment: wild primordiality, unrestrained vitality. In the name of golden Aphrodite, the world becomes golden, and all things show the face of love, of divine enchantment, which invites to self-offering, to union, to becoming one.
We could go on, but the mention of these figures is enough to highlight what is pressing here. Are not all those Divinities original figures of the infinite life of the world, of the fascinating aspects and dark mysteries of such life? The different moments in which the unitary life of the world is articulated are nothing but Gods: in each of them a God is and reveals himself. The Divine testifies in the sphere of the inanimate, the vegetable, the animal, and reveals itself, at the summit, in the face of man. But each God, in the act of revealing a moment of the world, actually reveals the world in its totality.
The “ancient” Gods and the Olympic deities
Let us return to talking about the Gods individually, but focusing our attention on the great Olympic deities. A clear delineation of their figures will serve to make things more perspicuous and to confirm what has been said so far in general.
Since we had interrupted the analysis of individual figures with the Goddess Charites, we will resume by talking about Aphrodite, who is similar to the Charites but far superior in herself and in terms of her sphere of influence.
This Goddess clearly shows that Greek religion (in the proper sense of the word) derives from a more ancient and fundamentally different religion.
As evidenced by Hesiod’s Theogony, as well as by Tragedy, the Greeks knew of a pre-existing world of Gods that was defeated in the battle waged against them by Zeus and the Olympians. These were the Titans, children of Uranus and Gaia (Theogony 132 ff.), later characterized as violent and arrogant forces. The legend of Prometheus is the most prominent account of their conflict with Zeus. This is not the place to delve into the study of these primordial deities. We will only say that among them there were also deities from ancient Eastern religions. Zeus, as his name suggests, was already a Greek God before the Greeks separated from the Indo-European stock. But even other major Gods such as Apollo clearly reveal (through a name that remains obscure despite every attempt at interpretation) their pre-Greek origins. However, for all these Gods there was a new revelation. This is the significant event of myth, which tells of Zeus subduing the primordial deities, re-ordering the world, and assigning to the now reigning Gods the honors due to them as his children and relatives (Theogony 881 ff.). When these Gods revealed themselves to the Greek man as Olympic figures, that man was Greek in the proper sense of the word and his role in the history of the world was defined.
No tradition informs us of this self-revelation of the Olympic Gods. By the time the Homeric epic emerged, those Gods had long been uncontested in their dominance, and the fact that they had once had to fight to achieve such dominance was now nothing more than an obscure legend.
Aphrodite
Aphrodite arrived in Greece from the East: and it is known through which route. One of her oldest and most recurring epithets, Cyprian, refers to the island of Cyprus, where there were sanctuaries dedicated to her from time immemorial; and we know, on the other hand, from Herodotus (1, 105) that the Cypriots had imported her cult from Ascalon. Aphrodite was originally the great Goddess of fertility and love of the Babylonians, Phoenicians, and other Asian populations, the “Goddess of the sky,” whose cult by Israelite women was an object of horror and abomination for the prophet Jeremiah.
It is possible that in Greece she met and fused with an indigenous deity: it remains certain, however, that to the Greeks she revealed herself in a completely new figure: in the “Olympic” figure.
Since then she is no longer the “queen of heaven.” But while the other major Gods have the Sky as their father and Earth as their mother, she, “delight of men and Gods” (Lucretius, On the Nature of Things 1, 1), was generated by the God of heaven, as the ultimate blossoming of his virile power, in the sea.
When the mighty Uranus—as told by Hesiod (Theogony 176 ff.)—in the darkness of the night, lay burning with love on Gaia for the last time, Cronus was lurking and mutilated him; his severed member fell into the immense sea, and a white foam thickened around it, and a wonderful maiden arose from it, who moved towards Cyprus. As she set foot there, the land bloomed under her step. Eros and Himeros, the geniuses of love, hovered around when she was born and when she ascended among the Gods. And among the honors distributed to the Gods, Aphrodite was assigned this: “to converse with young girls and to have smiles and deceptions and sweet delights, embraces, and caresses.”
What an image! With such features Phidias sculpted the emergence of Aphrodite on the base of the famous statue of Zeus in Olympia: Eros welcomes the one born from the sea, Peitho crowns her with a wreath, while the great Gods stand by. The memory of the beautiful relief in the Museum of the Baths in Rome spontaneously comes to mind.
Even when Aphrodite becomes the daughter of Zeus and Dione, the memory of her marine origin is not entirely obscured; Dione is, in fact, one of the daughters of Oceanus (Theogony 353).
The Goddess of beauty and love, the “eternal feminine,” rises from the sea!
Schiller fully understood the meaning of this myth when he said: “Every Venus of the earth is born like the first one in heaven: mysteriously—from the infinite sea.”
The feminine is essentially connected to the Original and the Eternal in a way that is different and deeper than the masculine. Therefore, the myth has it that she is born from the primordial water, from the Pontus that Gaia generated from herself at the beginning of all things, without lying with anyone (Theogony 131). Everything that has life originated from the sea; from the sea—as the spirits and divinities that inhabit it testify—wisdom and prophecy have come. Dionysus is at home in its depths. But the most enchanting of its creatures is Aphrodite. Does she not resemble the divine repose of the sea when it is at peace?
Aphrodite is love—but she is so in a different respect from Eros, whom the Theogony of Hesiod knows, alongside Chaos, as the original generative power and who was later said to be her son: Eros, who, according to Plato, is himself poor and eager for the fullness of beauty in order to generate in it. Aphrodite is wealth itself, golden abundance, the gem that embellishes the world: she always only gives, and never loses any of her wealth by giving; she is the object of love, which is happy in itself and always ready to radiate happiness.
Although the joys of love are her “work,” her “gift,” and can rightly even take her name, she is not by her essence a subject, but rather an object of love; not the one who, like Eros, desires to possess, but rather the one who leads to ecstasy. For this reason, her realm encompasses all delights, from sexual love to the celestial enchantment of eternal beauty. Everything we call lovely—be it figure or gesture, word or action—takes its name from her. “Let us pray to the Goddess,” says Socrates in Xenophon’s Symposium (8, 15), “to grant us lovely words and deeds,” that is, to infuse human relationships with something of the loveliness that is characteristic of Aphrodite.
The realms of Aphrodite
For time immemorial, the one born from the sea was worshipped as the Goddess of the sea—not, however, in the sense or in the manner in which Poseidon, Amphitrite, and other marine divinities were worshipped. The magnificence, with which all of nature is filled, also invests the sea. The calmness of the sea and happy navigation bear witness to its divine presence. Lucretius sings (1, 6–9):
You, Goddess, the winds flee from you, the clouds of the sky,
await your arrival, to you the sweet earth yields its flowers,
to you the smiling sea and the peaceful heaven shine
with light diffused.
Therefore she was called the “Goddess of Happy Journey,” the “Goddess of the Port,” and Poseidon became her companion in worship. Rhodes, the divine figure of the island, which tradition believed emerged from the depths of the sea, was called their creature.
Goddess of the sea, Aphrodite pours her charm on it; but she does not confine the revelation of her divinity to the sea, but extends it to all the domains of the living. It is naturally repeated here what must be said of every authentic deity: the area of her domain is not a fragment of the world: it is a world, indeed it is the world.
She is the Goddess of nature at the moment of its blooming and is thus intimately linked to the Graces, the beneficial geniuses of vegetation. She dances with them; she is washed by them, anointed with immortal oil and dressed in precious clothing (Odyssey 8, 364; Iliad 5, 338). She has her sacred gardens. In Athens, just outside the city, on the Ilissos River, there was a place called “gardens,” and there stood a temple, the temple of “Aphrodite in the gardens,” for which Alcamene sculpted a famous statue. In Euripides’ Medea (831 ff.), the chorus sings of Aphrodite, who, “drawing rivers from the beautiful source of the Cephissus,… pours on the country soft golden breaths,… with her hair wreathed in a fragrant crown of roses.” A place consecrated to her in Cyprus was called “Tamarisk.” It was said that she introduced the pomegranate to the island. The plant sacred to her was the myrtle.
And with what power she reveals herself in the lives of animals and humans! “Sing, O Muse,”—so sounds the beginning of the Homeric hymn to Aphrodite (1–6)—“the works of golden Aphrodite, who awakens sweet desire in the Gods and bends the lineages of mortal men, the birds of the sky, and all the animals that the earth and the sea nourish: all are moved by the works of Cythera with the beautiful crown.” The same Hymn (69 ff.) describes the effect of her presence: when she is on her way to Ida, where Anchises, the mortal of divine beauty, pastures his herds, grey wagging wolves follow her, lions with fiery eyes, bears, and nimble panthers: “seeing them, the Goddess rejoices in her heart and infuses into their breasts the desire of love, and they lie in pairs in the shady hollows.” This power of love is, as is known, the subject of a wonderful song at the beginning of Lucretius’ poem:
As soon as the appearance of the spring day is revealed,
and the generative breeze of Favonius is unleashed,
the first birds of the air, and you, Goddess, your
beginning signify to the struck hearts through your power.
Then wild animals leap with joy over abundant pastures
and swiftly cross rivers: so, captured by warmth,
eagerly following wherever you go;
finally, through seas and mountain ranges and rapacious rivers,
the leafy homes of birds and the fertile fields,
you, striking a pleasing love through all hearts,
make it so that they eagerly propagate their kind.
(1, 10–20)
In the realm of man, the wedding ritual cannot forget her. But she can never become the Goddess of marriage. On the contrary, she is the antagonist of Hera, the great protector of marriages. From Aphrodite comes desire that overcomes all strength, makes one forget everything, breaks ties, and tears apart the most sacred of loyalties, to be with the one who seems to exist alone. She has her favorites, like Phaon, to whom she gives her ointment (Odyssey 18, 192), making him the most beautiful among men, and this is because he ferried her from Lesbos to the mainland when she appeared in the guise of an old woman. Legend has it that Sappho was so ardently in love with Phaon (echoes of such passions resonate in her verses) that she threw herself off the cliff of Lefkada for him. The most famous of Aphrodite’s favorites is Paris, who awarded her the prize in the beauty contest among the Goddesses, thus winning her favor. The legitimate husband of Helen, Menelaus, could boast of being the favorite of Ares. But for the love of another “favorite,” the “favorite” of Aphrodite, Helen blindly fled from her home, abandoning her husband and son, to go towards her ruin. In Homer, she bitterly laments and accuses herself of the fatal blindness that led her to leave her noble and heroic husband, her dignified and affluent status as a wife.
Aphrodite, therefore, brings fortune to men—provided they do not show irreverence towards her, as in the case of Hippolytus. Nor did she fail to be revered precisely as the Goddess of happiness. Significantly, in the game of dice, the luckiest roll was named after her. The Roman Sulla, wanting to translate his surname Felix into Greek, resorted to Epaphroditus, the term that designates one who enjoys the favor of Aphrodite.
It is a matter of undeserved happiness, the one of which one of Schiller’s most profound lyrics (Happiness) speaks:
Blessed is he whom, even before he was born, the kind Gods
spoke of; whom Venus cradled in her arms as a child…
To him, even before he began to live it, was given fullness of life;
he has not yet overcome fatigue, and he has already reached the Charites.
But to women, Aphrodite often brings only misfortune, as she tears them away from the security of a peaceful and honest life, and throws them into the grip of overwhelming and often criminal love for a stranger, marking their unhappiness. This is the case with Medea, who for the love of Jason, the handsome stranger, commits a horrible crime and becomes the appalling symbol of love turned to hate. In Euripides’ Medea, the chorus of women (632 ff.) prays thus: “O Lady, never shoot at me from your golden bow the arrow steeped in desire, which cannot be avoided. And may temperance, the most beautiful gift of the Gods, protect me.” Another famous example is the mad love of Phaedra for the reluctant son of her husband Theseus, Hippolytus, whose rejection leads her to take her own life. “It is impossible to resist Aphrodite when she bursts forth violently,” it is said in Euripides’ Hippolytus (443 ff.). “She is gentle with those who surrender, but if she finds one who is arrogant and proud, she is merciless beyond belief.” In Thebes, Aphrodite was also worshipped as “Apostrophia,” undoubtedly for the power that was recognized in her to keep one away from sinful passion. Similarly, in Rome, Venus Verticordia, publicly worshipped there by precise prescription of the Sibylline Books, was supposed to preserve young girls and women, first among them the Vestals, from sacrilegious love passions (Ovid, Fasti 4, 133 ff.).
Aphrodite as a cosmic force
But the Goddess of Love, who—not unlike Dionysus, the God of blissful intoxication—can suddenly overwhelm man with the night of madness, reveals herself in the highest spheres of the spirit as the benign one who with her beauty bestows fulfillment upon the works of thought and poetry. We have already heard the chorus of Euripides’ Medea sing of her that, “drawing streams from the beautiful source of the Cephissus…, she spreads mild breezes of sweet breath over the land…” Of her, that same chorus says that, “with hair adorned with a fragrant crown of roses, she sends the Geniuses of love to sit next to Sophia (knowledge): they, the collaborators in the birth of everything that has value” (840–845). Similarly, Pindar calls his poetry a working in the field of Aphrodite and the Charites (Pythian Ode 6, 1), and Lucretius, at the beginning of his poem (1, 28), prays the Goddess to give his words an “eternal grace” (…Goddess, give an eternal charm to these words).
But this is not all, for she becomes, in a new sense, a cosmic force, identifying herself with that eternal power of eros that together unites what is divided. She, who makes human hearts beat for each other, is the same one who always reconstructs harmony and concord in the great cosmic cycles (Empedocles). In a fragment of Aeschylus’ Danaïdes, it is Aphrodite herself who speaks of the desire that drives the sky to approach the Earth in marriage, and of the bridal desire of the Earth that generates herbs and fruits from the celestial seed—and all is the work of Aphrodite. So speaks, in a not dissimilar way, a fragment of a lost tragedy by Euripides. And only she, the Goddess of the eternal miracle of love, can—as Lucretius says (1, 31 ff.)—give peace to the world.
Artemis and the domains of her world
Artemis reveals the world in the sign of a femininity that is totally different: that of virgin freshness, purity, sweetness and, at the same time, wildness.
To understand this character, the best way is to consider her next to her brother, Apollo.
The characteristics that distinguish them together are called purity and sacredness. Among all the celestial deities, Artemis is the only one whose name appears in Homer accompanied by the attribute “pure and sacred.” This same predicate is attributed by Aeschylus and Pindar to Apollo. According to the interpretation of the ancients, the meaning of Phoebus, which already appears in Homer not only as an attribute but as the name of the God, was no different. Both Artemis and Apollo live, unapproachable, in a mysterious distance: always far away, even when they are not actually distant. Thus, according to the Delphic myth, Apollo resides in the fabulous country of the Hyperboreans during the winter months, where disease and old age are unknown. It was also said of Artemis that she disappeared from time to time.
If in Apollo, distance means freedom and detachment of the spirit, the meaning it presents in Artemis is different. What it evokes is still freedom, but of another kind—of a feminine kind: the freedom of nature with its splendor and its wildness, with its innocent purity and its mystery.
Her realm is in remote and wild places. Like the unapproachable, she is a virgin. Nevertheless, she has a motherly care for all newborns, whether they are of men or beasts. Her genuine maternal sense as a maiden is in no way in conflict with her reserve. “Virgin” and “maiden” are the epithets with which she usually appears in Homer. According to the Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite (17 ff.), she has no power over her, for her delights are “the bow and hunting in the mountains, the lyre and dancing and the far-reaching shouts.” Thus, she dances and hunts, goes through mountains, meadows, and woods in the company of nymphs. She loves the reflection of clear waters and causes hot, healing springs to gush from the ground. Her brilliance shines on flowery meadows, and “on the inviolate meadow” the devout gather the flowers with which they weave a garland for her: “on the inviolate meadow, where the shepherd does not dare to graze his flock, where no iron blade has ever entered, and only the bees, in spring, swarm and fly away: Chastity (Aidos) is the gardener here…” And Aidos—as seen before—is called herself in a vase figure.
Artemis is intimately linked with everything that lives in the freedom of nature; animals, plants, flowers. She is the “mistress of beasts” (Iliad 21, 470). The fact that she cares for them maternally and joyfully hunts them with her bow is entirely in the spirit of nature. The art of the sixth century BCE shows her lifting a lion with each hand, as if they were cats, or grabbing a leopard by the throat with one hand and a deer with the other. In Aeschylus’ Agamemnon (133 ff.), it is told that eagles have killed and torn apart a pregnant hare: the sacred Artemis laments for the unfortunate hare, for she is “kind to the tender cubs of fierce lions and to the little ones still suckling of all wild beasts.” Among the animals, the lion and the bear have her preference. Callisto, one of her companions, had been transformed into a bear and, as a bear, carried into the sky. She is called “hunter of deer” in the Homeric Hymn and is always accompanied by a deer in figurative art. The role of the deer in the legend of Iphigenia, a legend closely linked to Artemis, is well known. There is much more to say on this subject (besides the deer, other animals also appear beside the Goddess), but these hints will suffice here.
Many of the ancient appellations of Artemis evoke the bow and hunting. She is the Goddess who instructs the hunter and bestows fortune upon him. Of a hunter, Homer (Iliad 5, 51) says that “Artemis herself instructs him to strike every beast that feeds in the woods on the mountains.”
At night, when the moon spreads its fascinating and secret light, she goes hunting in the mountains of Lycia, waving fiery torches (Sophocles, Oedipus at Colonus 206). The Goddess “who wanders at night,” “who goes hunting for deer waving the torch with both hands” is often called the “bringer of light.”
Her connection with the moon certainly dates back to ancient times, and as the Goddess of the moon she was later venerated, not unlike the Roman deity Diana (the Divine), who derives from her. The nocturnal “torchbearer” is also “she who shows the way.” In legends related to “foundings,” it is she who indicates to colonizers the place where they must found new cities. One of these legends—that relating to the origin of Boeae in Laconia—said that a hare ran ahead of the colonizers and then disappeared among the branches of a myrtle tree: the plant was considered sacred and the place became sacred to the cult of Artemis “the Savior.”
But one should not forget how much the wild is also inherent and constitutive of her. Artemis demanded human sacrifices. Iphigenia was to be sacrificed to her as “the most beautiful creature of the year” (Euripides, Iphigenia in Tauris 21). In a suburb of Athens, there was the temple of Artemis Aristobule, and this stood precisely where the bodies of the executed were thrown. Without a doubt, her name was associated, in the ear of a Greek, with that of “exterminator.” She was the Goddess of battles and a warrior herself. To her, under the epithet of Agrotera, the Spartans offered sacrifices on the battlefield during the war. In Athens, large public sacrifices were regularly celebrated in her honor, as a thanksgiving for the victory at Marathon; her temple stood in the suburb of Agra, near the Ilisos, where tradition said the hunt began.
But she also attacks human dwellings with fearful violence. It is true that, even as the bringer of death, she can fascinate. Not unlike Apollo, with his arrows, she condemns to death whoever she strikes, but they expire without suffering, with the smile of life on their lips (Odyssey 5, 124).
For women, the arrival of the primordial and wild Goddess only brings misfortune. From her comes bitterness and the danger of the most difficult hours: from her, who—not unlike many spirits in the myths of other peoples—sinisterly bursts from the forest into the women’s quarters of houses. Zeus—says Homer (Iliad 21, 483)—made her a lioness to women, and granted them the power to kill whomever they want. It is she who sends the rapidly lethal fever of childbirth. And yet she is also “the helper of childbirth pains,” and as such she is invoked. In one of Callimachus’ Hymns, she says of herself: “I want to dwell in the mountains—I only go to the city when a woman, in the pains of childbirth, calls for my help.” Like Artemis Eileithyia, she is thus identified with the helpful Goddess of childbirth pains. “May Artemis, the longbow-wielder, benignly watch over the births of women,” prays the Chorus of Suppliants by Aeschylus (676). A Hellenistic epigram expresses gratitude to her for a happy childbirth: “…without a bow, oh Lady, you came to the birthing woman, and gently laid your hands on her.” Therefore she is called “Lady of Women,” and Athenian women swear by her name. At Brauron in Attica, young girls were dedicated to her service. And dances of young girls in her honor are found in numerous cults.
Just as the fate of birthing women, so too that of newborns and children is entrusted to her grace: hence the epithet of “nurturer of young ones.” In Sparta, the festival of nurses were celebrated in her honor: it was the “festival of the nurses,” and it was customary that, on such occasion, the nurses brought the babies to the temple of Artemis. In Athens, the hair of children was consecrated to her during the Apaturia celebrations. The ephebes organized processions in her honor in which they participated armed. In this too, she is similar to her brother Apollo. Like him, she watches over adolescents in particular. This is evidenced by the harsh test that the cult of Artemis Orthia demanded of Spartan boys, thus showing, in all its fearful cruelty, also the wild aspect of the Goddess.
Although Artemis enters into the lives of men, she remains the restless queen of solitudes, fascinating and wild, unapproachable, and eternally pure.
Once again, an entire world with the unity of its inexhaustible richness comes together here as a living divine figure: the world in its primordial and germinal moment, which belongs to plants, animals, and even humans themselves. Such a world is revealed to be imbued, in its light and darkness, with a single divine spirit: the spirit of freshness and virgin clarity. This spirit, which is nature itself in its germinal state, can be said to be pure and sacred, whether it captivates with grace and goodness or terrifies with its threat.
Apollo: his imperious will for intelligence, measure, and order
The male counterpart of Artemis is Apollo.
In the Ionian epic, they have long been known as siblings, children of Leto and Zeus. And they are indeed siblings at the core of their being. Only the same traits have a different imprint in the two: masculine in one, feminine in the other. Thus it is for those characteristics that we already know of them: detachment and distance, clarity and purity.
Specialist research tends to see Apollo as a deity of eastern origin. Without a doubt, he is originally a pre-Greek deity; nevertheless, there are absolutely no oriental traits in him. The fact that the number seven is sacred to him shows the eastern hypothesis to be fallacious. Nor does the assertion that in Homer he still appears as an “Asian” God, and precisely as a dark force, a bringer of death, rest on pure misunderstandings. If we ask what he was in the context of Greek culture—a context that certainly includes the ancient Near East—the answer can only be this: God of the sun. Since this original character of his (a character that the post-classical and late antique periods did not fail to recognize) had been overshadowed by the Homeric epic, it was said with astonishing lightness that it was an innovation of later centuries, as if the essence of a God like Apollo were so indefinite and formless that it could transform itself into its opposite. In reality, if we gather together the fundamental traits of his figure as it now appears firmly fixed in the historical era, it immediately becomes clear that they all come together in the well-known image of the ancient solar deities. Is it not true that Orpheus gave Helios, whom he worshipped as the supreme of the Gods, the name Apollo? One can speak of his new revelation in the Olympian religion only in the sense of a refinement in a spiritual sense that has been achieved with all his ancient attributes here. But he is still the God of early morning, the beginning of the month, the number seven that regulates the lunar cycles. Only the sun ceases to be his immediate and direct theophanic place, and—what matters most—that claim to supreme dominion over everything that is typical of a sun God disappears. Above him is Zeus, and his greatest title of glory—the prophetic power—is not his wisdom, but, as he himself says, the inspiration of the heavenly Father.
Being a son, however, does not diminish his greatness. He is, and is called, the “Lord.” Wherever he appears, he shows his superiority, often in grand form. “The most powerful of the Numina” is what the horse Xanthus calls him, a “speaking creation” by Hera (Iliad 19, 413). Even the most arrogant human being feels his own mortality in front of him. His power and greatness have found their most grand and true representation in the hands of the artist who sculpted the western pediment of the Temple of Zeus in Olympia. In the midst of the wildest turmoil, the God suddenly appears and commands calm with his outstretched arm. The clarity that illuminates his face in this appearance could not find a more compelling expression.
In Homer, his oldest witness, his figure already has well-defined and firm features as he appears in classical times. It is a gross misunderstanding to base oneself on the fact that his character as a guardian of purity and instructor of purifying rites does not appear in Homer and deduce that such an attribute must be ascribed to the faith of later centuries. When one understands “purity” in the profound and vast meaning it has in Apollo, one cannot doubt that it has been constitutive of him since the beginning, and expresses his nature more and better than any other predicate.
In fact, already in Homer, if one has eyes to see, his figure radiates clarity, intelligence, an imperious will to knowledge, measure, and order: in short, everything we still call Apollonian. Recall how he responds to Poseidon, who provokes him to a duel:
Ennosigaios, with your sound mind you would not tell me
to fight with you for the sake of mortal men,
mere leaves that now flourish, eating the fruit of the field,
and soon wither lifelessly… (Iliad 21, 462–66)
Is this not the God of Pindar, the herald of discernment, self-knowledge, measure, and rational order? “Man is the dream of a shadow,” says Pindar (Pythian Ode 8, 95), and gives the famous advice to Geryon: “Be what you are, knowing yourself” (Pythian Ode 2, 72). The meaning of Pindar’s words is the same as the warning with which Apollo greeted the visitor to his temple in Delphi: “Know yourself.” Which means: know what man is; reflect on the limits of man as such and on the limits peculiar to you. Apollo already says this several times in Homer with a powerful emphasis. In the last canto of the Iliad, he is the one who, with the pathos of reason, which demands respect for limits, and with that of noble feeling, laments against the inhumanity with which Achilles torments the corpse of Hector.
He reproaches him for cruelty and brutality, contempt for the eternal laws of nature, and lack of moderation, which even in the face of the most painful losses, is still fitting for the great. “Let him beware, though he is brave, that we do not take offense at him: since in his wild fury he is ravaging the mute, insensitive earth” (Iliad 24, 53–54).
Apollo, the Purifier
As God of distance—and distance is not simply spatial distance, but rather a higher detachment, a rejection of everything that is too immediate—Apollo is the one among the Gods who most reveals the spirit in its freedom. It is by looking at Apollo that Empedocles could assert of Divinity in general, that it is a sacred Spirit that traverses the cosmos with swift thoughts. In the philosopher-poet Scythinus we find a grandiose representation of Apollo: the God strikes the lyre, imparting harmony to the movement of the universe with the sounds that he draws from it; and the plectrum with which he strikes it is the light of the sun.
Included in this spirit are Apollonian music, the consciousness of the just and the foresight of the future, the establishment of superior orders, but also the purity and the institution of his rituals.
It was foreign to Homer’s sensibility to expect purifications and expiations from Apollo of the kind that play such a significant part in the cult of the God in the post-Homeric era. But this does not mean that Apollo has not been a God of healing from the beginning; nor should we forget that for ancient tradition to purify is equivalent to heal, and to heal is equivalent to purify. If it is difficult for us to reconcile the purification rituals with the figure of a God whose spiritual significance is indisputable, this is due to the materialism that imbues our way of thinking, and which we uncritically project onto the ritual actions of the ancients. But the idea that underpinned their rituals and their way of life was different. Goethe expresses this very well in the commentary on the aphoristic essay Nature, where he says: “…there is no matter without spirit, nor life or action of the spirit without matter” (Hamburger Ausgabe 13, p. 48).
Apollo purifies the one who has killed and carries the stain of the slain’s blood on himself, thus freeing him from the curse. The “enlightened” one, that is, the updated intellectual, in the superficiality that is inherent in him, thinks that this is about a stain in a material sense and accordingly interprets the purification ritual as a therapy aimed at materially washing and erasing that stain. But the truth is that that blood “cries out to heaven,” as the Bible says. Original thought, immune to intellectualistic abstraction, does not know a corporeality that is pure matter. The spilled blood calls upon the Furies, who pursue the guilty party, not only by threatening his physical existence, but also by haunting his soul with an even more terrible curse. Therefore, even the material means of purification have a profound significance in themselves.
But it is not only the crime of blood that brings man into sinister contact with the realm of darkness and the demonic. Even a natural death in the family circle leads to a closeness with death that requires liberation and purification capable of disentangling life from what entangles it with death, returning it to itself. Apollo knows the dark reality of the demonic, but he knows how to indicate the ways in which man can and must escape its fatal fascination. He himself had to be purified from the blood of the dragon of Delphi once—so the myth goes.
But Apollo also reveals a higher form of purification, which unmistakably manifests the character of the power of the spirit. The clarity of one’s own inner being must enable man to avoid those dangers from which he is not precluded from escaping. And Apollo proposes an ideal of external and internal behavior that, regardless of what one may choose to follow, can certainly be called purity in the highest sense of the word.
As already seen, he therefore greets the visitor to his temple in Delphi not with the usual “be happy,” but with the stern “know thyself.”
The authors of this saying and others like it were said to be the seven sages who, according to a legend charged with profound meaning, were chosen directly by Apollo. These sayings would have been conceived by them as a form of tribute—a tribute of the spirit—to be brought to Delphi. In reality, the wisdom of these men, whose freedom has no equal, perfectly corresponds to the character of the God of Delphi. Not a few of the answers given by his oracle to questions of a general nature (such as who is the happiest, who is the dearest to the Gods) are known to us: in inventive and original form, they always sound like scorn for all kinds of human vanity, aiming to induce the questioner to be ashamed of their own presumption. The most famous and memorable example is the answer given by the oracle to the question of who was the wisest. “Socrates,” was the answer of the oracle. Socrates himself interpreted—as is well known—the response: his “wisdom” consisted in doing what he could never not do: dedicating his life to the search for truth and the examination of himself and his fellow human beings; this was the “divine service” from which he could not withdraw, and from which no earthly force could take him away.
In this undoubtedly authentic testimony of the great thinker, the figure of Apollo is illuminated, becoming transparent in its meaning. But another impressive gap is revealed by this testimony, like a flash of light: the striking hiatus between Greek religiosity and that of modern times. The philosopher can understand the absolute rigor of his own questioning, concerned with nothing but objective truth, as a task imposed upon him by the divinity. What holds for the experience of searching thought holds for every authentic experience, whatever its object and form: its origin and end is the divinity.
Apollo as the founder of institutions
At this point, it is not difficult to understand how Apollo is also the God who founds institutions, who confers order and justice on human coexistence.
Political legislators appeal to his authority. He indicates the way to colonizers; he is the patron of young people becoming adults and of adults in the prime of life; he guides in the noble daring of gymnastic exercises. The boy who becomes a man offers him his long hair. He is the lord of gymnasiums and wrestling schools. Therefore, Pindar—founding a new city—invokes him (Pythian 1, 40) to populate it with valiant men. Already in Homer, it is written (Odyssey 19, 85 ff.) that it was by the grace of Apollo that Telemachus grew so wise and brave.
Knowing what is right and true also implies being able to penetrate the secret of the future. Apollo is the great prophet, the one from whom all seers and sibyls, or whatever they are called, have received the gift of prophecy. For his oracles, Delphi was the most famous center, but there were others, no less proud of the presence of the God.
“I want to love the lyre and the curved bow, and announce to men the infallible will of Zeus,” are, according to a Homeric Hymn, the first words of Apollo as soon as he was born. But music is not just one of his many virtues: music is rather the spirit that lies at the root of all these virtues or perfections and that unites them all in living unity. Certainly, other Gods also love music, but it must be said that Apollo’s entire being is musical.
At the banquet of the Gods, Apollo plays the lyre (Iliad 1, 603 ff.), accompanying the singing of the Muses, to whom he is always bound. He and the Muses are the source of the art of singers. “From the Muses and from Apollo, the far-darter, come singers and players on the lyre” (Hesiod, Theogony 94–5). “Phoebus Apollo plays the lyre [for the Gods], moving gracefully and majestically, and a radiance surrounds him: his feet and precious robe shine brightly:” thus the Homeric Hymn (Hymn to Aphrodite 201–3) describes his entrance into Olympus, where all the Gods are enchanted by the music. In Apollo’s music, the world, which the lofty thought of Zeus has given new structure and form, becomes a living voice. Those who understand and love that thought listen to it enraptured, but it sounds strange and hostile to beings in whom the formless and wild dominate. In this regard, one should remember the splendid verses with which the first of Pindar’s Pythian Odes opens. Thanks to his music, Apollo was the first and greatest educator of humanity, as Plato admirably says in the Laws.
But to understand why and how the God of knowledge is also the God of music, it is necessary to know what Apollonian music is properly.
Origin and meaning of Apollonian music
“I want to love the lyre and the bow” is exclaimed by the newly born God in the Homeric Hymn.
What does it mean that both the lyre and the bow are among the greatest attributes of Apollo?
The skilled archer owes his prowess to him and turns to him before shooting an arrow. There are many epithets that designate him as a great archer. At the beginning of the Iliad, to avenge the offense done to his priest, he unleashes the arrows that sow death and destruction among animals and men on the Greek field.
But, as we have already seen, he is also the God who sends “gentle” arrows: whoever is hit suddenly falls into the sleep of death without suffering.
The bow is a symbol of distance.
Could there be a secret affinity between it and the lyre?
Certainly. And it is not limited to the external form that made them both. In the eyes of Heraclitus, it is a symbol of the unity of that which tends to separate. Both have strings made from animal guts; the same verb is often used to indicate both the act of the archer who vibrates an arrow and the act of the musician who vibrates the strings of the lyre. The bow also resonates. “The bow sounded, the string hummed hollowly,” when Pandarus tried to hit Menelaus in the Iliad (4, 125). “Hollow-sounding” is, in Pindar (Isthmian 6, 34 ff.), the string of the bow of Hercules.
When Odysseus (Odyssey 21, 410 ff.), after the failed attempts of the Suitors, observes and tries the great bow, “like someone who, skilled in lyres and singing, without effort stretches the strings on new pegs,” that bow “sings, like the cry of a swallow.”
Ethnology knows the so-called “musical bow.” Perhaps one day it will be found that the bow and stringed instrument really have the same origin. What we already know for sure, however, is that in ancient times the bow was also used for musical purposes. Plutarch reports that the Scythians, when they gathered to drink and revel, used to make music with bows. And we learn from Ferdowsi that the ancient Persians did the same when they went to battle.
The most significant fact, however, is that the Greeks themselves felt a substantial affinity between the bow and the lyre, between the archer and the musician. Both launch missiles aiming at a target: one launches the arrow, the other the song: both excellent, if they hit the target. Pindar sees the true singer as an archer whose song is an arrow that never misses its mark. On Delphi, the “target” of his song, the poet launches “the sweet, winged arrow” (Olympian 9, 11).
Now bend your bow towards the target, my soul!
At whom do we aim
launching with a spirited mind
arrows of glory? (Pindar, Olympian Ode 2, 89)
The metaphor, so frequent among the Greeks, of the shot that does not miss its target to indicate knowledge that reaches the truth is immediately comprehensible to us. Don’t we also say of a persuasive speech that it “hits the mark”? However, when applied to music and singing, that same metaphor seems strange to us. And yet, it is precisely through this metaphor that the essence of Apollonian music becomes clear.
The singing of the most vigilant among the Gods does not rise in a dreamlike state of the soul, but flies straight to the goal that it clearly sees ahead: the truth. The fact that it achieves it is a sign of its divine nature. Apollo’s music implies and radiates a divine order of knowledge. In everything, it sees and grasps the form. Chaos must become cosmos, tumult must become rhythm, and contrast must become harmony. Therefore, music is the great educator, the origin and symbol of everything that is orderly in the world and in man. Apollo the musician is the same God who founds institutions, who knows the true and the just, necessity and the future. For all these reasons, Hölderlin, mourning the disappearance of the Delphic oracle, exclaims:
Where, where do the oracles flash now that strike from afar?
Delphi is asleep: where does Destiny now resound? (Bread and Wine)
The Apollonian spirit
The Dionysian brings intoxication, therefore closeness; the Apollonian clarity and form, therefore distance: the attitude of one who aims to know. Apollo’s solar eye repels everything that is too close, the closure in the “objective” no less than the ecstatic intoxications of mysticism. Apollo does not want the “soul,” but the spirit, which is to say: freedom, detachment, spaciousness of vision. He is the spirit, to whom the being of the world speaks, in which the multiple realities of the world are reflected, revealing itself in a multiplicity of figures.
Apollo is therefore opposed not only to the exuberance and excess of Dionysus, but also to any tendency to accentuate the importance of man in his singularity, whatever the vision within which it is affirmed. Not unlike Buddha, even Christ was initially represented with typical Apollonian traits. But Apollo, far from having affinity with Christ and Buddha, represents the most decisive antithesis to the spirit of their message.
He never emphasizes his own person. None, mind you, of his oracles begins with that solemn self-presentation, so typical of the Gods of the East, “I am.” In Delphi, where from the most diverse parts of the world, for centuries and centuries, men of the most diverse conditions made pilgrimage to ask him what was to be done, he never—as we have already had occasion to note—claimed any sort of magnification for himself. Nor does he want to hear anything about an eternal value of the individual and his individual soul. His revelations call man, not to his own individuality and interiority, but to what transcends the person, to what does not change, to eternal forms. Between the eternal and the terrestrial, of which man as an individual is also a part, there is an abyss. The entrance into the realm of the infinite is closed to the individual as an individual. What Pindar, in the spirit of Apollo, tries to drive the minds of his listeners is not the mystical doctrine of a blessed or unblessed afterlife, but the consciousness of the gap that exists between the Gods and men. Certainly, both draw life from the same mother, but man passes away, he is nothing, only the Celestials remain (Pindar, Nemean 6, 1 ff.). “Man is a dream of a shadow; but when a light descends from heaven, he shines and his life is sweet” (Pindar, Pythian 8, 95–97). What man can aspire to as the crowning of his life is the memory of his virtues. Not his person, but what transcends the person, the spirit—the source and substance of all the beauty he has accomplished and created—surpasses death and breathes in the song, eternally young, from generation to generation.
The unified world of Apollo
A fundamental unity binds together the characteristics of the divinity of Apollo called upon by the epithets of “archer,” “leader of the Muses,” the “God who gives foresight and purifies,” the “God who establishes institutions and establishes order.” To designate the character in which the various attributes find their unity, the term “purity” can be used—as mentioned—as long as it is understood in an elevated sense. But, looking deeper, another word better illuminates and expresses that unifying principle: the word “music.” Apollo is, at the ultimate root of his being, music: the original music from which language and knowledge derive their origin. At the bottom of all things is rhythm and music, as Hölderlin wonderfully recalls in truly “Apollonian” words, which Bettina von Arnim collected and reported. “Everything is rhythm, the entire destiny of man is celestial rhythm, every work of art is a unique and unrepeatable rhythm. The rhythm of the universe originates from the poetic lips of the God; and where the spirit of man conforms to it, there the genius manifests itself, shining with heavenly light. Poetry is a struggle for truth… The God has used the poet as an arrow to shoot his rhythm from the bow.”
Apollo is therefore also a world. His spirit manifests itself in all domains and degrees of being: from the vegetal kingdom, in which the laurel with its flame that blazes towards the sky bears more witness of him; to the animal kingdom, in which the wolf, the vigilant wild beast of the places, is sacred to him, sometimes even lending him his own semblance; all the way up to man, who is called to be his image. And to testify that the cosmos announces his glory, as seen, is the word of the most enlightened spirits.
The error of 19th century historicism
We will not now discuss the other Greek deities in such an extensive and detailed manner as we have begun to do with some of them. The purpose of this text is not, in fact, to illustrate each individual divine figure from Greek religion, but rather to make their spirit understood. The perspective that dominates almost all treatments of Greek religion so far is that of 19th-century historicism: what is primarily, indeed exclusively, important is scientifically ascertaining the transformations that the religion under investigation presents over time, and it is not asked what it might be in itself that can gradually present itself in ever-new forms over the centuries. In deference to the scientificity of history, the result that is arrived at is this: a deity at the beginning was only a “power” devoid of concrete consistency or with extremely primitive and crude features; only with the progress of time did it gradually acquire characteristic and consistent traits, and this—one could say—almost by chance, not by necessity inscribed in its being. The deity, therefore, would not have revealed itself as a living figure from the beginning, but would have become so later. This historical science, imprisoned in the most vulgar form of Darwinism, does not take into account the fact that, since we are dealing with religious phenomena, it would be appropriate to have some clear idea of what religion is. Nor does it have eyes for the phenomena that follow from religion on the objective or factual level. If it did, how could that science have avoided being amazed at the fact that religious “ideas” could give rise to such grandiose and solemn cults? The birth of such cults in an age earlier than the properly historical one is evident and well-known. But then, already in the prehistoric period, there must have been something that led men to sacred song, brought them to festivals of life and rituals of the most varied kind. Anyone who believes that this “something” could have been a vain fantasy or a childish speculation belongs to the group of those “visionaries” who bring something out of nothing. Only when there is a revelation of the deity in living form, is that great event intelligible, which is man’s emergence from the everyday and his elevation to the sacredness of word, gesture, and cultic action.
This figure is what impresses itself on the entire religious and cultic life. The emergence of new traits in this figure over time is certainly noteworthy, but it testifies to nothing other than the richness and depth of its being: in the novelty of the emerging traits, this being confirms its uninterrupted and unmistakable identity.
The purpose of this book is precisely to make the figure of the Divine, as it revealed itself to the Greeks, more understandable and thus shed light on the spirit of Greek religion.
That the Greek God, whatever its profile and name, never represents the sacred background of a particular, isolated phenomenon of nature or existence, but always, as an authentic God, dominates an entire world and, in the miracle of his presence, opens up the depths, vastness, and heights of that world—this is what we have tried to clarify in the preceding pages.
But where does this incomparable awareness come from if not from these Gods, who are neither Lords nor Legislators, but who in their figure reveal reality, in its immeasurability, as a whole in which the Divine is present and appears worthy of worship? Not from transcendent mysteries, but from graspable realities, an awareness of the world and of life, which makes the works of the Greeks appear ever new through the millennia.
Athena: the divine clarity of conscious action
That which we have been examining in more or less depth in some particular figures could be highlighted in all the others, and we would thus arrive at experiencing, in and through their astonishingly diverse multiplicity, the divine depth of the world and confirming, case by case, the idea we have formed of the Greek God and his revelation.
For example, we could consider the figure of Athena.
Athena has been seen as the “virgin of the shield,” the “virgin of battles,” and has been compared to the Valkyries. The fact that we see her aiding heroes, taking part in battles, and appearing—in sculptural depictions—armed, even in the act of attacking, may lead to this interpretation. Moreover, according to the famous myth, did she not come out armed from the head of Zeus? Yet neither the Mycenaean depictions of an armed Goddess, almost completely covered by a shield—assuming they actually refer to Athena—nor the later depictions, in which references to war also appear, suffice to prove that Athena was originally nothing more than the Goddess of the shield and of battle. The oldest evidence portrays her rather as a sworn enemy of primitive and wild spirits, those that dissolve in the joy of the tumult of battle. Only reasonable and methodical battles are her concern. Significantly, the same myth that has her born from Zeus’s head recounts (Hesiod, Theogony 886 ff.) that Athena had a mother, the Goddess Metis (cunning, intelligence), who “knew more than any of the Gods or mortal men:” but before she gave birth, Zeus swallowed her. We also know that the city of Athens, which takes its name from her, venerated in the ancient temple on the Acropolis a wooden statue that did not conform to the type of the armed Goddess throwing a javelin.
Her father, from whose head she sprang forth alone among all the Gods, is called “master of wisdom” or “sagacity.” This shrewd wisdom, this astute sagacity, from which her mysterious mother took her name, is what characterizes her in the Iliad and the Odyssey.
In both poems, her favorite, Odysseus, is said to be “rich in sagacity;” and so is she called in a Homeric Hymn, and the epithet—note—is found right at the beginning, before the celebration of her warrior virtues begins. In a passage of the Odyssey (13, 297), it is she herself who tells Odysseus what characterizes them both and so tightly binds them:
…you are the best of all mortals
for counsel and speech, and I among all the Gods
am renowned for wisdom and shrewdness…
The Greek word that always comes up when speaking of Athena does not indicate speculative intelligence, but practical intelligence and imagination, that sharpness of understanding and that vivacity of devising that, even in the life of those who want to fight and win, count much more than strength and pure skill. With her always alert and ready inventiveness, Athena stands by the heroes: with Jason and Danaus to build the first great ship, with Epeius to make the famous wooden horse, with Bellerophon to tame Pegasus. She is linked to Hephaestus, the metalworker, and is the patroness of not only men’s but also women’s craft activities.
The death of Tydeus, the father of Diomedes, bears witness to how much she detests savage inhumanity. She was so attached to that hero that when he was fatally wounded, she was about to bring him the drink that makes one immortal. But suddenly she sees him smashing the skull of the enemy [whose head Amphiaraus had cut off], in cannibalistic fury to suck out his brain. Horrified, she turned around and went back on her steps, leaving her favorite, to whom she had destined the highest gift, to fall like any other into death. This behavior is all the more worthy of consideration since there is no evidence that heroic societies of other peoples have been scandalized by such brutality. It has been said that the Athena described by Homer does not yet know such a degree of “morality,” but a statement like this only demonstrates the superficiality with which the Homeric deities are looked upon [superficiality that is not disinterested: it is indeed used] to build an “evolutionary line” from the extremely crude to the increasingly elevated.
What Athena points out to man, what she inspires in his desire and purpose, is both daring and will to victory, but also thoughtfulness and clarity. It is from the latter that action worthy of the name arises: without them, courage and decision would be worth little or nothing. Athena is the moment of clarity and energy, which cannot but favor success. Athena thus differs from Apollo, the God of distance, of purity, and of knowledge; she is the Goddess of proximity.
Here is where her resemblance to Hermes lies. Like him, she also guides her favorites. But while in the case of Hermes, divine presence and guidance mean the “miracle” of sudden success, unexpected luck, a successful hit, a joy not disturbed by thoughts or scruples—in the case of Athena, they instead mean clarity and advice for understanding and achieving. Hermes is characterized by the mysterious, ambiguous, and demonic, while Athena is the clarity of the day. Dreams and longing are foreign to her. She is a virgin, or rather, in Athens, “the Virgin.” But she is not like Artemis, in whom virginity is synonymous with unripe youth and shy reserve. She has a natural inclination towards men, and her thoughts and help are constantly with them. It is an inclination that does not recall eros, but friendship. Athena is a woman, but—in this respect—it is as if she were not.
The problem has often been raised of what the fact that the deity of action, struggle, and victory is a female deity could mean, and strange answers have been given to the problem.
The fullness of life of the present moment, the lucidly aware and victorious action, not aimed at an idea that involves unlimited horizons, but aimed at mastery of the moment—this has always been the charm of a woman on a man: from her, the man learns the high joy and desire of that experience and that action. The divine clarity of conscious action, the audacity and inflexibility of decision, a will to win that knows no surrender or fatigue—this, paradoxical though it may sound, is the gift that woman gives to man, man, who is naturally estranged from the determinateness of the moment and directed towards the unlimited. Wisdom or dream, sacrifice or pleasure are terms that do not apply to Athena. Athena is the one who brings everything to its realization, the Goddess of the immediacy of the present. “Here I am in the fullness of my being”: this is Athena.
It is not surprising that she could later be worshipped as a deity protecting medicine, agriculture, even marriage and the education of children once her nature is understood. Nor is it surprising that, at some point, she appears as the protector of arts and sciences, just as she is the patron of every artisanal activity. However, the spirit of the true Athena, in her clarity, has nothing to do with either true knowledge or music in its authentic meaning.
Also, it is worth recalling before finishing that Athena is a world unto herself. In reality, she manifests herself even in the plant and animal kingdom: the olive tree is her gift and bears witness to her; the owl is her sacred companion, and can even be the figure in which she manifests herself. But beyond this, isn’t there a world of action? How can we not think of Athena when we read about Faust wanting to translate the first words of the Gospel of John: “In the beginning was the action”?
A passage by Plotinus (6, 5, 7) testifies how even in the decline of the ancient world Athena was still present and alive enough to signify liberating action, even in the sense now given to it, of the struggle that man undertakes to rise to the highest aspiration: “But if one knew how to turn oneself, either on one’s own or because one is fortunate enough to be drawn by Athena herself, then…”
Dionysus, the God of the primordial world through perpetual reemergence
Essential aspects of Hermes have already been discussed. He too is a whole world, and the enigmatic realm of the dead is also part of that world. Hermes himself, in fact, even in the brightness of day, is a spirit of the night. Under his sign, everything is adventure and unpredictability: the possibility of gain as well as loss, of being led down the right path or onto a trail that leads to being lost. [He is the God of shepherds and flocks, but] if the flocks are fertile and prosper, even this has the character of good fortune. Similarly, love has a totally different character in his world than it does in the world of Aphrodite: here, love is the lucky chance that comes suddenly like a demon, the happy opportunity, the roguish “theft.” And even if music and intelligent conversation testify to his power, it is still the mysterious glow of the night that radiates from the figure of the divine Magus.
But what is most admirable in the Olympic religion and what attests to its spiritual greatness is the fact that it was able to understand in all its magnificence even the God of the primordial world in his perpetual re-emergence.
Dionysus is certainly not unknown in Homeric epic, but it is not difficult to understand how little he could have meant to warrior tribes imbued with the spirit of Athena: in fact, neither in the Iliad nor in the Odyssey does he appear to have a particularly prominent role. However, this does not mean that he truly became familiar to the Greeks only in late antiquity, as is commonly believed. We know today of his cult in Crete already around the middle of the second millennium BCE. In Delphi, his cult had such ancient origins that it was already said in antiquity that Dionysus was at home there even before Apollo. But his great era opened in Greece with the fall of the nobility that traced its ancestry back to its mythical forefathers. In the Bacchae, Euripides gives a powerful image of the resolution with which Pentheus, the generous nephew [and successor] of Cadmus in Thebes, opposed the entry of the Dionysian cult, until he had to pay for his opposition with his life. And Herodotus tells us that Clisthenes, the “tyrant” (“lord of the people,” around 600 BCE) of Sidon, made sure that those “tragic” choruses, which until then had celebrated the painful events of Adrastus, were no longer dedicated to this hero, but rather to Dionysus.
It is not possible to think of a deeper contrast than that between Zeus, Athena, and Apollo, the principal deities of the nobility of the heroic tradition, on the one hand, and, on the other, this Dionysus, who seems to dissolve into chaos the cosmic order of those Gods. In reality, it was the violent eruption of the oldest pre-Olympic religion, which tragedy had to contend with earnestly even in the classical age, as testified mainly by the Eumenides and Aeschylus’ Prometheus. However, where the Erinyes and other similar pre-Olympian deities were placated and confined to the underworld, Dionysus triumphed. In Delphi, he made such a close pact with Apollo, who was as different from him as day from night, that they seemed like brothers. And like brothers, Dionysus and Apollo reach out their hands to each other in well-known sculptural representations.
Perhaps the greatest wonder of the Greek religion lies here: the son of the God of Heaven and a mortal woman, who is persecuted, suffers and triumphs, dies and is reborn, has in a certain way become one of the Olympians. This happens as soon as Zeus snatches the not yet fully formed baby from the mother’s burning body among the flames ignited by his lightning, and takes him into his own body until he is perfectly formed, can come to light, be entrusted to Hermes, and then be raised by Zeus’s daughters, the Nymphs. Later, he is given the chance to descend into the Underworld, recover his dead mother and bring her to heaven. Pindar says (Olympian Ode 2, 21 ff.):
…Thus is the story of the daughters
of Cadmus, heroines who suffered greatly:
heavy is the pain, but it falls
before greater blessings.
Among the Olympians lives, shattered by thunder,
Semele with her hair strewn,
and she is loved always by Pallas
and her father Zeus, much loved by the ivy-crowned son.
But who is this God?
If Athena is, as we have seen, always near and her presence is the fertile moment of decisive action, Dionysus is the God who arrives enigmatically, with a disconcerting gaze. His symbol is the mask, which in all cultures signifies the immediate presence of a mysterious spirit. He himself is venerated as a mask. His gaze takes one’s breath away, confuses, annihilates balance and measure. Man is struck by madness: it can be the beatific madness that raptures one in ineffable ecstasy, that frees one from the weight of the earth, that dances and sings; and it can be the dark, tearing madness, the bringer of death.
When Dionysus bursts forth with his wild thiasus, the primordial world is again there, and it makes fun of barriers and laws, because it is older than they are; nor does it recognize hierarchies of merit or birth, because it, as life absorbed in death, embraces all beings equally and makes them all equal.
Dionysus represents the world of pure wonder, overflowing luxuriance, the magical power of the vine, which makes the very soul of man a wonder, joining it to infinity. He is the world of the original feminine, but in a different—and more elementary—sense than Aphrodite. Dionysus reveals himself not in the woman who loves and gives herself, who gives birth to a child, but in the woman who nourishes and raises, enchanted by the miracle of life. There is no distinction here between man and animal: the women of Dionysus nurse the young of wild animals at their breasts, twine snakes around their bodies that lovingly lick their cheeks. When the spirit of Dionysus is upon them, all of nature shows them maternal benevolence.
The ground flows with milk,
flows with wine, flows
with the nectar of bees,
Syrian incense
is the rising vapor.
Thus sing the chorus of women of Dionysus in Euripides’ Bacchae (141–145). Around the dancing women, the passionate companions, Satyrs and Silenus, gather. But the “mad” dancers, the Maenads, do not notice them, unless it is necessary to drive away with the thyrsus and the snakes someone too bold. And he, Dionysus, eternally in love, bound to his love (Ariadne) by a bond so deep and exclusive that it is unknown to every other God, he, abandoned in the arms of Ariadne, looks upward, as if he sensed among the stars the music of his enchanted world and of the eternal feminine.
But the abundance of life is not, in the world of Dionysus, without death. Indeed, the secret of his indescribable charm is the infinite depth of life linked to death.
[That trait of violence that marks the story of Dionysus] is the hunter who is hunted, the God who rises again, after having been overwhelmed and torn apart—it also marks the women who dance around him: maternal towards children and cubs, they are also in the frenzy of their dark madness—cruel and thirsty for blood.
Dionysus is the lord of the living and the dead. In the celebration of his spring festival, the Anthesteria, he leads the souls of the dead to secretly visit the living: the new wine is ripe and is tasted in festive enthusiasm in the presence of the God and in his company.
He brings the great dead to the theater, those of whom the heroic songs have sung: he brings them with their destinies of suffering and ruin. In the realm of his cult, in fact, tragedy was born and developed. But this already testifies—albeit not expressly—to his connection with Apollo. The surprising duality presented by tragedy (the chorus, which, accompanied by the flute, was originally everything, has come to be accompanied by that spoken discourse, which with Aeschylus comes to assume the main role) is the symbol of the union of the Dionysian and the Apollonian.
The cosmic meaning of the two Divinities—who, although so different, do not reject each other—is clear from the festivals dedicated to them. The connection that Apollo’s Divinity originally had with the sun has already been mentioned. Now, the day of his feast, on the winter solstice—the only regular religious festival mentioned in the Homeric poems—coincides with the day when Odysseus, having arrived in his homeland, wins the bow competition and eliminates the suitors, with the help of Apollo. In winter days, at sunrise, the Maenads dance on Parnassus and find the newborn Dionysus in the cradle.
Dionysus is the “ruler of the world.”
Regardless of what can be found on this subject in Orphic doctrines he appears in an event full of meaning, [evoked and renewed] in the Anthesteria festival: the God visits the “queen” and marries her. The assumption that illuminates the meaning of the event is the idea, which can also be found among other peoples, that the successor to the throne must be the son of a God.
The alliance between Dionysus and Apollo as a symbol of Greek religion
With the alliance between Dionysus and Apollo, Greek religion reached its highest point.
This meeting between Apollo and Dionysus is not pure chance: in fact, each was attracted to the other and sought after one another because their realms, despite the harshness of the contrast, are ultimately bound by an eternal bond.
The race of Olympian Gods itself emerged from those abyssal depths where Dionysus is at home, and it cannot renounce its origin from the regions of the dark. The light and spirit that are in the heights cannot help but have underneath them the nocturnal depths of the realm of the Mothers, upon which all being is founded. In Apollo is gathered—opposing the domains of becoming and disappearing—all the splendor of the Olympian. Apollo and Dionysus, the intoxicated guide of earthly dances: the contrasting agreement between these two figures is the substance and the ultimate law of the world. To the Olympic religion—a religion not of submission or the needs of the heart, but of the clairvoyance of the spirit—was reserved the recognition and veneration—where other religions separated and condemned—“the harmony of opposing tensions, like that of the bow and the lyre.”
This is really amazing stuff. Thank you! Just a minor proofreading point: quote marks *precede* a semicolon or colon.