Aidonian's blog

Recently someone asked me to talk about Greek mythology. The thing is, its all encompassing that it is not easy to start somewhere. Greek mythology is a collection of stories about heroes, monsters, gods, etc… The heroes are either local or pan-Hellenic like Herakles, Perseus, Pollux, Odysseus, Achilles.

For me it is different when these Gods are the ones you worship. The main difference between the stories of Greek mythology and the Bible or Quran is, that these stories aren’t sacred like the ones in the Bible or Quran. Modern day polytheists write new stories with the Gods in mind. The stories share a narrative about what events it is trying to tell: creation of the world, how the Gods came to power, how certain cities (Thebes, Athens) were created, etc… If you want to start somewhere, its best to start with Gust Schwab Greek myths and legends. From there you can go to the Illiad, Odysey, Jason and the Argonauts, Theogony, Aenead.

Greek myths has inspired many artists around the world: painters, writers, poets, filmmakers. Clash of the Titans was inspired by the myth of Perseus and Medusa. Jason and the Argonauts was based on the story of Jason and the Argonauts. Herakles under the Latin form Hercules inspired many movies and tv shows but rarely got it right.

Why? The heroes and Gods of Greek myths had human appearances and emotions. It means that they acted like humans would. There is one creation myth that states that Prometheus made mankind from clay and that Pallas Athena gave us life. There are various variants of this story. This one is a more famous one compared to the Orphic creation myth.

While modern day cinema tend to view heroes as avatars of good and decency and sometimes you also have your anti-heroes. The reality is that Greek heroes weren’t perfect. They were flawed, imperfect. They would raid a city if their payment was given to them. Sometimes like Achilles did, hide on a island, dressed as a woman so he wouldn’t go to the Trojan war because his divine mother Thetis said that if he went there, he would not survive it. And he died there. Shot in the ankle, the only place that wasn’t immortal. So you could say that the Greek heroes were more like anti-heroes than anything else. The Gods are no better. Here is the thing that you must remember from this. While the creation myths do state that humans were modelled after the Gods, the Gods of the myths are not the same as the ones who are being worshipped. Many philosophers ranted against this view of Homeric view of the Gods and they were correct. The myths show us stories so we can relate to the divine. They Gods aren’t humans or humanlike. They can manifest themselves to appear humanlike but they aren’t humans.

I will close this off for now and continue further with this on another time.