The (a)morality of the Gods

A few months ago I recommended "The folk-lore of plants" as a very good read. What I didn't mention was that the book required a very nice dose of goodwill and a certain detachment to be able to stomach without putting it away with a feeling of disgust. Indeed, Mr. Thieselton-Dyer made some rather crude and uncanny remarks regarding the people he considered to be of a "lower race" and "primitive" as opposed to the Aryan "cultured races" of Europe, however, what he did was nothing more than a presentation of the time's worldview. Fortunately for academia, perspectives evolve and the academic world considers that making students realize that we cannot pass judgment on the past using our current moral and ethical standards an important enough subject to spend a whole semester debating and dissecting it using an historical perspective. When Kenaz Filan wrote a blog post on the (a)morality of the Gods I wondered if that wasn't what was happening, if the discussion wasn't already heading on the wrong direction simply because something like this might be overlooked.

Myths and legends and all of the materia fantastica of humankind have some underlying lesson to them and some of those aren't pleasant. That lesson might be a Mystery: the abduction of Persephone or Eros and Psyche; might be a legendary account of past struggles with another nation: Athena and Arachne; might be an anthropomorphization of natural events: Iris; or it might just be a nursery story. Whatever they are, and wherever they fit, what they will provide, above all, is a testimony to its people's worldview and a window to their attempts to reconcile the human with the world through observation and rationalization. If we truly are to follow in the footsteps of our ancestors, the first thing to do is not to mask them but to understand, to any possible extent, their world. Expecting to find an all-loving and, by our standards, ethical and moral and godly god or even considering myths with this frame of mind is to take a great painting, scrap the paint off and then re-do it to our liking. The world is amoral, the gods are the world and also amoral. Their purpose is not one of comfort but one of attrition and, at times, reward for right action. But the myths aren't for the Gods neither are they facsimiles of the Gods. The myths are for the humans, who get to know that the path to glory lies in choosing the crooked path instead of the straight one; that get to know that Zeus raping sprees involved a third young God, one that shoots arrows and whose vitality runs the world and brews new life that is bound together by the gifts of his mother, that get to know that the gods are forces beyond their control. This is a game of shadow and light and peering into the mythic mind requires care because the symbolic and the ontological intertwine, sometimes in an indistinguishable way. The voice of morality is the chorus of the Greek Drama. An outside observer that revels in the right action, mourns in grief at our hubris, cries in sympathy and constantly reminds us that we are fated. This voice is so intrinsically human that always leads the audience to understanding of the forces outside our grasp that, godly such as they are, pain and torment us so.