Greek Mythology and Gods

For centuries, until recently, the king ruled by "divine sound" - and the poet, in Russia still to this day, some snips is know to speak to the divine spirit.

Ours is a Western civilization, born of the classic heritage with just a touch of the Asiatic human beings Goddess of the Mesopotamians thrown in for salt. So, while Egyptians and bog-bred Celts wended their own myths of theologys and the like, our savage Grecian forebears painted the inexplicable with the colors their heart-bound imaginations envisioned. Greeks saw their gods as extensions of themselves (or, in the Judeo-Christian turnaround, ourselves as reflection of God) - whatever - the divinities of the Greeks were passionate and comic, ludicrous and inconstant. They were sometimes brilliantly generous, as the titan Prometheus giving military personnel the flame; just as often they were perversely mean, as when almighty Zeus had that selfsame Prometheus' liver ripped out by an eagle - punishment for sharing the gods' jealously-guarded fire with us. At all(a) times, the gods were "human" in their emotions, supreme in their power over others.

And they were "natural" - like the sea swallowing up fishermen in a sudden squall, yet providing the larder for Greek villages on more or less other days. As the Greeks witnessed the similarities among nature, men, and gods, they allowed their poets to recount those characteristics - and they allowed their kings to assume some

Perhaps Oedipus and Atreus were only myths, but in the person of Alexander the Great legend and history became one. straightway a pattern was set for Western civilization: its massive men must be outsized - godlike heroes - both(prenominal) in accomplishment and prestige. Augustus Caesar was the first to understand that responsibility - and he made the Roman Senate (willingly) declare him a "god." This was only qualified to the Latin way of thinking, for they needed the legitimacy of a god to confirm the greatness of their nouveau Empire.

Still, the king's power was being harried by another rising power - if not "democracy," at least the rising sentiment against unearned privilege - and that power give its poet-priests, too.

Just as the Greek hero had its monsters as nemesis, the exaggerate vices of the aristocracy were painted with words by Rabelais as the atrocious giants, Gargantua and Pantagruel. These were popular caricatures, the early forerunners of the "mass culture" icons. By the time of the Russian Revolution in the early 20th degree Celsius - the watershed ideological event of this era - the divine right of kings was all but washed away with the creation of radical "gods" to feed the hungry maw of the masses.

of those traits. Homer, then, began a literary custom of "immortalizing" the deeds of heroes in verse. To be given the eternal liveliness of poetry, of course, a hero's deeds must be extraordinary: Achilles, Hector, Heracles and the meandering(a) bands of Ionian heroes grew to resemble the size of gods in the ancient poetry. Their kings, meanwhile, were endow with the powers of life and death, assumed to bear the wisdom to discern arbiter and morality. Oedipus and Atreus were humans, but they and their progeny lived the torrid, temptuous lives of the gods - where Truth blinds.

Kings are no more, surrender in tabloid press headlines, but godlike heroes continue. Is in that respect a need for primal fear of the night? Freddy Kruger invades your dreams in the Nightmare on Elm
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