National Geographic magazines once came with great maps. One of them detailing the Midwest states I hung over my bed in a tiny room I shared with three guys on a floating cannery offshore Togiak, Alaska.
In far-flung, gray and barren Togiak, I needed reassurance I was still somehow attached to civilization, or at least to Wisconsin.
I picked up one of the maps the other day showing the Greek and Roman empires titled, “Classical Lands of the Mediterranean.” There, south of the Greek mainland, I spotted an island, Kythira, with this inscription, “Here, Aphrodite emerged from the sea.”
No kidding. The Goddess of Love and Beauty, born of sea foam, first revealed herself to the world on this little nub of an isle south of the Greek mainland. Who knew? I certainly didn’t. I was raised by Catholics and taught to believe in a God comprised of three parts, a father, son and a Holy Ghost, of all things.
It was an upbringing bereft of shapely love goddesses washing ashore.
The map inspired me to pick up Edith Hamilton’s “Mythology,” a once best-selling overview of the myths of the ancient world. Now I’m taking great comfort in the Greeks, those old boys in togas who gave us not only the Olympics, the marathon race and the gyro sandwich, but also the stories that became our literature and poetry.
As Hamilton tells it, the Greeks devised their own worldview. They didn’t believe their gods created the earth and the universe. The Greeks took the earth and the universe as givens. Their gods were born right here. And they lived on Mount Olympus, a peak that any fit person could climb up, given a sturdy pair of sandals.
Greek gods were powerful but they weren’t omnipotent or omniscient. And they were fallible. And some of them were women. Greek gods didn’t so much rule life on Earth as they offered the Greeks an explanation of it.
Even the benevolent gods were sometimes cruel and capricious. They acted against their better judgment and they contradicted themselves.
Zeus, king of the gods and the most powerful of them, was an incurable womanizer. Hermes (who the Romans called Mercury), the messenger of the famous winged feet, was the god of commerce but also a thief. Artemis, the goddess and protector of youth, in a rash moment demanded a maiden be sacrificed before allowing the Greeks to attack Troy.
Hamilton also tells us about the Titans, ancestors of the gods who lived on Olympus, beings like Atlas, who was condemned to hold up the roof of the sky, and Prometheus, who created humans from clay and lit a torch from the sun to give us fire and keep warm.
To light a torch from the sun. That’s poetry and it’s impressive. In comparison, Christ rising from the dead seems like a cheap carnival trick.
Zeus, the bastard, was so angry about the theft of fire that he chained Prometheus to a rock.
How did it happen that so many of us got stuck with just one god, invariably a man, who we are obligated to worship and to follow all our lives just to be saved from hellfire and damnation? Plus, we are led to believe that our one god is all good but allows evil. What is up with that?
Having good gods and bad gods and ones whose moods change seems a more plausible explanation of the chaos we manage to survive.
Also, compared to the Greek ones, our god is not so interesting. If we met him at a party, we might not even talk to him.
Especially in a capitalist country, you’d think we’d be offered a selection of gods. Can you imagine a universe full of soda that was only Coke? I’m not knocking Coke but sometimes a person wants some variety.
I have just started Hamilton’s book, and she is still just introducing the gods. I can hardly wait for them to start misbehaving.