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FOLLOW THE REQUIREMENT
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MYTHOLOGY (OR BETTER STILL: POLYTHEISM)
Polytheism is the ancient world hiding in broad daylight. You dont need to be an archeologist
to uncover this buried treasure. Perhaps archeologists dig holes in the ground looking for facts,
artifacts, because they believe that the work of digging in the ground is somehow easier or
better paying than the work of digging into their own way of seeing the world, which
determines how truth is perceived. Polytheism is a way of seeing the world and a way of living
in it. Of all the creations of the ancient world and not only of the ancient western world
polytheism is maybe the most wondrous. The most beautiful, the most tragic, the most cruel,
the most happy, the most immoral, the most innocent. Lets look at polytheism, lets look at how
polytheism looks at the world, and lets look at its variant: monotheism, also an invention of the
world called ancient.
You will see, dear students, that the Greek language, and also the Latin language, are hiding
inside of English, and also inside of Spanish, in a way akin to how polytheism might be hiding in
the world lived by you. It is a compound of two Greek words: (pols): many, and
(thes): god. Look at the Greek letter theta, : it looks like a mouth with the tongue flat in the
middle making the th sound. Did someone look at life, at someone else speaking, when he first
wrote this letter? Was the writer of this letter enchanted by the mouth he saw? Enchanted,
encantado: from the Latin word incantare, which means to be spellbound by magic. What
magic? What chant, what canto, what song? The one of the wind blowing through the trees like
echoes of the oceans waves, the one that nature always sings and that maybe we tune out,
distracted by reality? Like how we are so distracted by grades and points that we dont have the
time to think and feel rushing to somewhere, we forget where we are. Youve heard of Pink
Floyd?
Run, rabbit run
Dig that hole,
forget the sun.
When at last the work is done,
dont sit down
its time to dig another one.
The maneuver of polytheism is to see the sun again, and the moon again, that we forgot were
here. Because nature is full of wonderful gifts, and we are rich if we know how to receive them
yet if we dont, and we are inwardly poor, then maybe well look for compensations elsewhere.
Is it so, dear rabbit?
Polytheism resounds throughout the ancient world. Civilizations which never met each other
were simultaneously and similarly polytheistic. How could it be? From the Egyptians, to the
Persians, to the Greeks and Romans, to the Celts and the Vikings, to the Maya, the Incas, the
Yoruba, the Hindus How remarkable it is to imagine that the diversity of the worlds cultures
holds this creation in common: polytheism, which in its essence means to see the world as a
collection of diversities. I say that polytheism is a creation, and I add that for the sake of this
class, focused as it is on Western civilization, I want to draw your attention primarily to Greek
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polytheism, or Greek mythology, as an example that illuminates the whole of world polytheism.
Because all of the worlds polytheisms are very much alike.
What is the difference between a mythology and a religion? Is a mythology simply a religion
that no one believes in anymore? Very good, let it be so. Without belief it is easier to think and
imagine, and so we can look at polytheism as just a mythology, just a set of stories like
literature, an essential and essentially human creation. Who was it who said that humans are a
tool-creating animal? Someone in the Enlightenment, perhaps? But stories are tools too. And
we use story-tools to create: to make sense of life, and what we see and do. But behold stories
have already created us. We already live inside of a vision of reality of a larger story with its
concepts, categories and characters framing and defining what we experience. The terms of our
perception have been created, but creation is never complete and so you have the space to create
more if you choose, to create differently if you choose, and to destroy as gently as you choose.
Lets look now at polytheisms method of creation: how did it create gods and goddesses, and
what can we do with them?
The Greek word for creation is (poema) like the word poem, or poema in Spanish.
Poetry is the highest, ultimate form of creation, and its object the thing it creates is not
simply a poem in the banal sense of rhyming lines, but a perception of reality, a living story, a
pair of glasses through which we see the world and which we forget we are wearing. We
perceive the world through the filters of a storys meanings, and so that story creates the world
for us as we know it. You might say that whoever created the story through which we see and
experience the world essentially created us and this is true, literally true. Literally look at the
word. Literally, literate, literature, letter, letra its all the same word, it comes from the Greek
(lxis): word. We use words to create meanings. What would we do if our meanings were
lost? Would we become poets and create new ones? Because that is what the poet creates:
meaning. Story or meaning, whichever you prefer, its the same thing. You are literally in this
class now as you read, even if you are not physically so as there is no classroom to be in. Words
are magic spells that make the world real. Beware and rejoice at this discovery: you become
what you write, so write what you want and dont be a ventriloquist of someone elses words.
The poet/creator, using words to make sense of the world, is I will try to show you a pivotal
component of polytheism, but the essence of this concept is evident in our more familiar
monotheism too. Look at this line from the Gospel of John: First there was the Word, and the
Word was with God, and the Word was God. The meaning of the world, manifested in words,
precedes the world itself and that meaning is the work of the creator. The point is that
meaning is the ultimate creation and we can all be poets and creators if we choose, if we dare,
if we realize that we already are.
What poem of life did polytheism create? A poem is not a set of instructions or a formula, but a
dream made real. But then again, so is a set of instructions, if you think about it it is someone
elses dream that you are making real. Polytheisms most obvious creation is a set of gods and
goddesses. In Greek mythology there are twelve main ones, like there are twelve months of the
year that return the same but different each time a number is added to our age. They are eternal
not because they live forever in a universe apart, but because they are reincarnated time and
again in life itself, wearing different masks but manifesting always the same spirits. Look
around you, dear inhabitant of 2020, people are different, are they not? Different on the inside,
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in their characters and personalities you dont need to be a psychologist to sense this. Are we
really just apprentice robots, all trying to assume the same model of existence? Does that work?
Is it even worth asking? People are varied in their behaviors and energies. Sometimes they are
irreconcilable in their differences, sometimes they are attracted to each other magnetically as if
by destiny. Humanity is variable, messy, conflictual, harmonious, irresolvable if posed as a
problem, but perhaps enjoyable if posed as a cosmos (as a complete universe). It is from this
awareness that we can still sense today of the many types of people there are, that
polytheisms vision of life is born. The gods and goddesses are representations of human types
or if you prefer archetypes, or essential types, that recur throughout human history wearing the
specific clothes of their day, but manifesting the same spirit underneath, speaking the specific
language of their place, but saying the same thing on the subliminal level of meaning. The gods
and goddesses are literary constructs theoretical characters, that represent essential human
characters. It has been said, provocatively, that monotheism, in its postulating of only one god
also postulates, by extension, only one model of a human life: one morality valid for all, one
system of definitions, one conceptual world that universalizes itself and wishes to include
everyone. Whereas polytheism postulates a plurality of types of life, of systems of meaning, that
do not line up together but tumble around in perpetual disorder in frolic and in fight, like a
telenovela that never ends. What are the human types that make up polytheisms pantheon of
deities? Perhaps you are already thinking of zodiac signs by now and why not? That is one
way into the question.
What types of people, and what scenarios of life, inhabit the cosmos and reappear, in differential
repetition, throughout eternity? This question implies that there are certain fundamental things
that do not change (types, scenarios), while it also allows that there are other superficial things
that do change: the appearance of eternal types and scenarios. The polytheistic world of eternal
recurrence is without salvation (a cornerstone of monotheism) and without progress (a
cornerstone of modernitys transcription of monotheisms essential concept). The polytheistic
world is tragic because it can never be fixed and reconciled into a harmonious whole like the
spectrum of emotions that we all feel and that are eternal: love, fear, happiness, anger,
wonderment None of them can be cured, and none of them can exist forever except in the
illusion of their own eternity. So what does it mean then, to live well, if living consists of these
many sensations that always scatter about? I ask you a question that does not have a preordained
answer and hence is a real question. A question is different from a problem that requires only
calculation to find a solution, to find the right solution (just one!). A question gives you the
space to wander, to wonder, to create an answer and to create yourselves in the process, dear
poets.
Parents: A Short Story
If we follow the archeological evidence, we find that the oldest, first, deity that people ever
created in prehistoric times, long before any civilization was of the mother. Or more lucidly,
of the fertility goddess which identifies the mother with the earth with nature, as in Mother
Nature. But consider: archeology only confirms what every child already knows the first
human relation, determined by nature itself, is with the mother and the mothers body. Is it
surprising then, that when people began to create myths and figures to represent life and its
meanings, their first creation was of their own creator: of their mother? Perhaps the oldest
representation of a human figure in art is of a pregnant woman:
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This small statue, only four inches tall, was found in Willendorf, Austria and dated to about
25,000 BC. It is called The Venus of Willendorf. It was made by cave people, hunter-gatherers,
millennia before the advent of the worlds first civilizations in Mesopotamia and Egypt. It was
made by a people without a written language, and yet it speaks as all art does in the language
of shapes and of the human form. What does it say? It says, I am pregnant. I am well fed and
able to well feed. And I am round. Round: think of the emotive meaning of the shape of
roundness. Soft, without jagged edges, approachable, touchable nurturing, maternal. Our first
human type: the mother, which exists not only and not always in actual mothers but in each of
us, as all human types do in which of us does this type prevail and what outward form does it
take? Another question that doesnt fit into the anorexic space of the multiple-choice quiz.
But the poetic eye that created deities did not only look at people and their variations. It also
looked at nature and found correspondences and affinities between what occurred there and what
occurred in the human world. What phenomenon in nature is like the mother giving birth to new
life? What phenomenon in nature is a metaphor of this human occurrence? But the earth also
gives birth to new life when flowers bloom and fruits and vegetables grow ripe. In the spring
and in the summer, it is as though the earth is bearing children like it were a grand mother. And
the earth happens to be round, exactly like the emotive symbol of the mother a poetic intuition
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duly confirmed by science. And so, in polytheism, the mother goddess always finds her symbol
in nature in the generative earth. She is called a fertility goddess because fertility is the shared
quality seen in people (motherhood) and in nature (the generation of new life). Fertility the
ability to create life. May our minds and imaginations be fertile too, however our bodies choose
to live.
The fertility goddess, created in prehistoric times when people, as hunter gatherers were
directly and defenselessly dependent of the earth as a baby is to his mother, survived into the
pantheon of the first civilizations deities. Every polytheism of the worlds ancient civilizations
contains a fertility goddess that identifies motherhood with the earth. Here are some examples:
Look at the Roman fertility goddess, Ceres. What is she holding? Cereals. The offspring of the
earth, a gift from the giver of life. And look at the name of the Norse goddess: Freyja. It is from
this name, which comes from the Anglo-Saxon language, that we get the English word free.
Freedom is different than liberty. Liberty, which comes from the Latin libertas, indicates a legal
status, whereas freedom indicates a spiritual status. For the Anglo-Saxons to be free meant to be
happy and expansive: to be creative and fecund, or fertile. When we create we are free. And
back when the days of the week mattered more, was it not on Fridays that we felt a surge of
freedom? Because Friday is named after Freyja. Just as Thursday is named after Thor, and
Wednesday is named after Woden.
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In Greek mythology the fertility goddess is Demeter. Ancient Greece has left us a plethora of
written stories in which the gods and goddesses relate to each other in scenarios that are as
timeless as the individual deities themselves. What relates to each other in these stories are not
simply characters (the gods and goddesses) but the life qualities that each of them represent. A
story that well illustrates this point is that of Demeter, her teenage daughter Persephone, and her
antithesis Hades, the god of death. Perhaps youve heard it before. Its oldest written version
dates to around 700 BC and is attributed to Homer. But beware: there is no Bible or definitive
book of Greek mythology. Its authorship belongs to the Greek people, because as in the case of
all ancient polytheisms, their myths developed as folk stories transmitted orally across
generations. Some of them were written down, but their written versions never became rigid
they never became the only way of telling the story. Ancient myths are like a piece of music that
can be played differently at different tempos and with lyrics free to be changed according to
the circumstances in which they are being told. Myths are elastic, and hence they never break.
Their basic structure is adaptable to all times, or such at least is this myth-lovers impression of
them.
Here I will try to retell the story of Demeter, Persephone and Hades in a brief way that puts in
the fore the concept of a scenario or relation between lifes components and in a way that
makes clear polytheisms tragic, irresolvable, yet happy vision of life. Puberty, that mysterious
age, is where the story begins. No, just before puberty is where the story begins, because
puberty is the story itself. So childhoods last days is where the story really begins, and to
represent this state of life we see Persephone in a field collecting flowers, as though she were
still in her mothers bosom, because that field is her mothers bosom, since her mother is the
earth. And then, an eruption from a cold distant place from the land of the dead, the domain of
Hades, deep underground. Hades, who happens to be Demeters brother and therefore also
Persephones uncle (just ignore all the incest), sees Persephone innocently frolicking in the field
and is drawn. Tremendous, cruel, yes, but not a sin in the sense of the disobeying of an
injunction, because polytheism is without injunction or sin, and in this it is even more
tremendous for however you choose to interpret this word. Death (Hades) sees the fruit of life
(Persephone) with longing eyes, but she does not see him. She is innocent. This painting, from
the Roman city of Pompeii in the first century AD, shows us how Hades saw Persephone:
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She is seen from behind, picking flowers, unaware of deaths enjoyment of her we, the
viewers, occupy the point of view of death. Hades, then, rides up on his chariot and abducts her,
bringing her to the underworld to be his bride. Demeter (life, fertility) searches everywhere for
her missing daughter until finally her location is revealed. How can Demeter bring Persephone
back from the land of death? She asks Zeus, the god of authority, to intervene and bring justice.
Zeus is also her brother, but never mind. What does Zeus say? Persephone may be returned to
her mother forever, and Hades claim on her can be eternally forgotten on the condition that
Persephone did not eat anything while in the underworld. Food! An important symbol in
mythology. Food is nourishment, but even long before the fast-food industry turned food into a
cartoon, food was enjoyment and functions as such symbolically in the stories of mythology.
Foods equation to enjoyment remains in our language: look at the word companion, or
compaero in Spanish it is a compound of two Latin words: cum (with) and panem (bread).
We are true companions, true friends, when we can enjoy the same things the same bread
together. Friends dont just survive together (food as nourishment), they enjoy themselves
together (food as pleasure). So Persephone, what did she eat, what did she enjoy with Hades
that, according to Zeuss arbitration, would keep her from returning permanently to her mother?
She ate four pomegranate seeds a symbol, of course, since no one can survive for months on
just that (and she was with Hades for months). The color of pomegranates a symbol taken
from nature and made akin to the color of blood. I leave the rest to your understanding. And the
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number four, what is that? According to Zeuss judgement, which might seem to us very much
like a joint-custody decision, Persephone is to return to Hades for four months of the year in
remembrance of the four pomegranate seeds. All of these characters are in our minds: what is it
that makes us return to the pleasures that wait for us under the sign of death? When can we no
longer bear these pleasures and become innocent again? Which life is not broken? Its fun to
put Humpty Dumpty back together again, but the season is called fall for a reason, because it
always returns.
And so, for eight months of the year Persephone is with her mother (life), and for the other four
she is with her husband (death). What does the earth goddess Demeter do when she is reunited
with her daughter? What does anyone do when they are reunited with the persons they love?
She is exuberant and this is a beautiful word that deserves to be known. From the Latin ex,
meaning out, and uber meaning the udder of a cow. Exuberant means to come out of the udder.
What comes out of the cows udder? Milk another symbol of life. It must come out, it must
overflow, it must be given away for the sake of the cows own wellbeing and not just the calfs
for if a cow is not milked then it is in pain. Exuberance: an excess of life, of joy, of energy, of
milk that must be given away to the world maybe to remind us that we are really a part of it
and accumulation is not an ultimate value. To be exuberant means to be so full of joy that the
joy flows out of us like a contact high. Does the earth (Demeter) not behave like an exuberant
person when she gives away all her fruit and flowers in the eight months of the year when things
are growing (at least in places where there are actual seasons, like Greece?) Fertility realizes its
own possibility in exuberance and exuberance is always the souvenir of love. But for the four
months of the year that the loved one is gone, what is the earth doing them? Do you know how it
feels to be lonely? Sometimes when were separated from the people we love we grow cold and
brittle, were down and far from exuberant, we dont want to do anything. We are in our
emotional winter, where nothing grows. The myth ends here. Or does it repeat forever, like the
seasons it paints for us in metaphor?
Observe the relations in this myths scenario: the power of one goddess (Demeter: fertility) is
limited by the power of another god (Hades: death), and vice versa. No one deity (no one part of
life) reigns supreme. Nothing is resolved into perfection, a spectrum of opposites instead
remains in dynamic tension. What do you make of the way that happiness or rather,
exuberance is presented in this myth? If exuberance is transient like a season, then how should
that fertile season be lived? How is it achieved? How do you spend your winters?
The prehistoric Venus of Willendorf the ancient Demeter and then what? What happened to
the deities of polytheism with advent of monotheism? Were they simply abolished, or did they
merely change clothes? Here we can see a painting from the Italian renaissance, from the 1500s,
by Raphael:
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This painting is called The Small Cowper Madonna. Cowper was the name of the Englishman
who once owned the painting, and so is irrelevant to its content. Madonna is the Italian name for
Mary, the mother of Christ. Is this not also a symbol of fertility? Do you see the faint halos
around the heads of Mary and Christ? Why are they so faint? Why are they not intended to be
seen immediately, but require you to look closer? The halo a symbol of divinity is
intentionally faint. Why? Because what you are essentially looking at is a representation of an
average mother and child in central Italy from the 1500s you are looking at a representation of
everyday people. But the point is that divinity hides in the everyday, you must attune your eyes
to see it. The archetypes of mythology of polytheism and also of monotheism are there to be
seen, or to be discovered in everyday life, among real people. These figures create a poetry of
existence, and allow the world to be experienced as a recurrence of eternal forms. In our world
perhaps you will see fertility goddesses at the grocery store, or in some corner of the cement and
plastic city. To be able to see eternity in the everyday is a beautiful thing. If we dont do this
enough it is because it doesnt pay well, it is not a job skill, and we are taught to devalue
everything that is not immediately attached to the notion of success and its insistence on
monopolizing the whole of reality. But this is a very old discussion. As Oscar Wilde said quite
rightly in his ironic way, in modern times All art is quite useless.
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Look back at the The Small Cowper Madonna. Look at the background. In paintings such as
these, the background is an indication of the interiority of the central figures. Backgrounds in
paintings are never arbitrary, and never just filler. They are always symbolic. Background
symbols indicate the inner worlds of the central figures through metaphor. Behind Mary, to the
left, we see nature Mother Nature, la tierra, the eternal symbols of fertility. Follow the line of
the horizon, it moves directly across the heart, the childs embrace, and on the other side, behind
the child, the male, we see society, a separate entity from nature (because society is manmade)
but not completely detached. Behind the child, on the right, we see institutions: a church (with a
duomo) and a tower (representing the state). Society, personified by the male child, should
maintain an attachment to nature, personified by the mother, in order to be in harmony with
itself.
It is with the advent of the first civilizations that we see the creation of a new god that represents
civilizations novel and essential element: the authority of law. Prehistoric peoples gave us the
fertility goddess, and she floats with us through time. But prehistoric people lived without strong
legal structures, without settled agriculture, without demarcated social classes, without slaves,
without writing roaming the earth, wearing something akin to Uggs. But as you know, in
around 3000 BC, the first settled civilizations begin to appear in the Near East. You have heard,
that settled agriculture is what made the first civilizations possible, and what made the hunter-
gatherers stop roaming. But yet there is a great irony here, because agriculture, which is located
in a countryside, makes possible its opposite: the city, which etymologically is the root of the
word civilization. Etymology means the study of the origin of words, which we have been doing
here in this lesson with various Greek and Latin words. Etymology itself is compound of two
Greek words: (tumon): true, and (logos): logic. Hence etymology specifically
means the logic of the truth, which is contained within the history of words. Civilization is a
Latin word, and its root is civitas, which means city. A city is a place where no farming occurs,
yet a city can exist only if farming occurs somewhere else in a countryside. The advent of
farming (of agriculture) allowed some people to live away from the land, in a more manmade
environment where they could devote themselves to other things besides survival in the city.
And so, civilization denotes divisions between people (city and country), classes, property, and
ultimately a system of law and authority to watch over this more elaborate form of social life. It
is then in human history, and only then, in human history when a male, authoritarian god makes
his appearance in human history bearing all the likeness of an actual ruler of a city, or more
intimately, bearing the resemblance of an ideal, stern but just father. Just as their remains a deep
symbolic connection, evidenced in language between the maternal figure and the earth, there
remains an equivocal connection between the paternal figure and social authority. Colloquial
English speech indicates Mother Nature and A Mans World these terms are clichd and sexist
from a contemporary point of view, but they are longstanding historical myths that are worth
examining from a distance. Fathers, in ancient times and in the particular civilizations we are
looking at, were small law-givers in their family setting, presiding over woman and children as
an authority, as an initiator into social conduct. How then could people imagine the larger
authorities that governed their lives kings and rulers who were rarely seen in person, but yet
whos laws (when the law itself was a new invention) had to be obeyed? This figure in human
history is represented mythologically as a patron god. The male, paternal counterpart to the
fertility goddess. A patron god appears in all of the worlds polytheisms, and in fact it is the
basis of the monotheistic god in very clear form. Lets look at this very interesting word patron
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to understand what this figure means. In contemporary English the word patron is used very
little, and when it is used we might think of someone making donations to a library. Very good.
But in Spanish the word patrn appears with greater frequency and means something quite
different: boss. But look at the word patrn: it comes from the Latin pater, which means father.
With the suffix of n the noun is made bigger. Padre, pardone (in Italian), patrn: this word for
boss literally means big father. Because bosses, rulers and law-givers according to an implicit
social contract govern others supposedly for the sake of the others wellbeing, like an
imaginary, ideal father. We all know that real bosses, rulers and lawgivers are rarely like this.
But mythology retains the idea.
Patron gods are the representation of social authority, of fathers of their people. Where do we
see the oldest one? We see him in 1700 BC, 23,000 years after The Venus of Willendorf, in the
Mesopotamian city of Babylon:
This seven-foot tall object is The Law Code of Hammurabi. It is the oldest written law code in
history yes, there is writing on it, look closely at the whiter fuzzy part extending from the
bottom of the relief to about a third from the bottom: that is engraved writing. Around 300 laws
are inscribed on this totem, which was placed in public, in the center of the city of Babylon, so
that it could be referred to by citizens (citi-zens, inhabitants of the city). The laws are
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depressing: for the same crime there are different punishments prescribed for free people and
slaves, and for men and women. Thou shall not steal thanks, Hammurabi. Also indicated in
the long list of laws is the set price for which a cow can be sold, and the price of a bundle of
grain The laws themselves are of little interest (to me), but what is interesting is their
preamble, which is illustrate in the relief at the top. The preamble to the laws says that Marduk,
the patron god of Babylon, dictated the laws to king Hammurabi who is essentially his prophet
and messenger. Hammurabi was instructed to bring Marduks laws to his people the
Babylonians and enforce them with the fear of divine punishment for the patron god Marduk
would always be watching you, like a hawk, even when the merely mortal Hammurabi and his
associates were not. Patron god > prophet > people. This is the essential formula of the three
monotheistic religions that grow out of the Near East. Each of them with a special book
containing a set of laws, or directives of conduct. Yet all of this already existed within
polytheism, where the patron god was only one among many, and therefore whos power was
limited by other deities, as opposed to unlimited. In the relief that the top of the totem you can
see two figures who look essentially like mirror images of each other, because they are. Their
only distinguishing feature is the size of their hats. Seated is the patron god Marduk, dictating
the law. Standing is king Hammurabi, in a listening pose. Note that it is only much later in
history in particular with the advent of democracy in Athens in around the year 600 BC that
the basis of law was shifted from a divine source to a human source. And yet, we, ultramodern
people, still like to fetishize rules and procedures as though they were an unquestionable,
inhuman perhaps technological destiny. Might our servility to law be in part the product of our
education? Simon Says is not a democratic game if only it were just a game.
But as we considered the emotive shape of the first representation of a fertility goddess, The
Venus of Willendorf, let us also consider the emotive shape of this first representation of a patron
god and his chain of command. What shape defines The Law Code of Hammurabi? What part
of the body does it resemble? Lift your left hand and point your index finger, place it next to the
image of the totem. Do you see? It is a giant index finger making the pointed gesture that
signifies command, attention, exclamation (!). The finger, the arrow, the lightning bolt we can
go on, but you get the idea. This shape is very much identified with the male and male power,
just as the round as we saw with The Venus of Willendorf is identified with the female in
mythological terms terms which reappear constantly in art.
I said that patron gods appear in all of the worlds polytheisms, and here are some examples:
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Notice that each of these patron gods bears a symbol that is long and pointed in shap
