Why Do We Revert to Greek Gods?
By Augustine Wasef
We live in a culture that is ridden with analogy.
Considering the wealth of the cultural canon, finding metaphor is not a particularly difficult task.
And yet humanity has this collective tendency to revert to Greek mythology as a rosetta stone for translating abstract thought into something more tangible. Between American Prometheus and The Odyssey the ubiquity is indisputable. The question lingers: Why give meaning to a demographically irrelevant religion?
When looking purely through literary capacity nothing strictly favors it. The Mayan civilization had an intricate cosmological model. Early Buddhism was succinct. Norse mythology had a similar level of narrative allure.
And it isn’t out of moral clarity either.
The Iliad had a distinct ambiguity in morality between the Greeks and Trojans.
One possible explanation: We are deeply dependent on Greco-Roman culture. Even the language of Latin, no clear innovation, has lingered in the Catholic Church and certain academic disciplines.
A more plausible explanation may be the nature of Greek gods. Like many agrarian societies they are used to explain corresponding natural phenomena. Unlike our modern belief systems they have two shocking characteristics.
The first is that they are not fully abstract. Dominant religions like Christianity, Islam, and Hinduism (in the case of Brahma) portray Gods as beyond our comprehension and somewhat abstract. In some it would be blasphemy to imply God(s) are corporeally bound like us.
But Greek gods had several enormous limitations. They, on occasion, fought amongst themselves. They had an unfortunate tendency to act out distinctly human desires (hint Zeus’s extramarital incidents).
The second is that they are often somewhat stereotyped. At a fundamental basis we get personalities that are deep internal contradictions. Zeus, a supposedly fatherly personality, repeatedly disguises himself for very human reasons.
This, unintentionally, makes Greek gods a mirror reflection for our own humanity. When we see one with a handful of supposedly divine attributes coexisting with human weaknesses we see ourselves.
For better or worse humanity is noncommittal. We are infinitely fractured upon axis of ideology. And in this ambiguity we see our own mortality along with the incorporeal nature of identity.
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