The Gods as Phenomena

What sort of thing are those which the ancient Greeks called “gods”?

And if we can answer that, perhaps we can also answer this: how should we mortals relate to these gods, whatever they turn out to be?

Athena, in the opening scene of the Iliad, holds Achilles back by his hair to prevent him from striking his king in anger. Did a goddess really do that, or did the thought occur to him? The goddess is invisible; an observer could not tell the difference.

If the thought was his, how did it occur to him? Some inner voice of prudence interceded to restrain his rage. Where would Achilles, of all men, have learned prudence? From other men, of course: mentors and tutors wiser than himself, whose voices and steady attitudes, though contrary to his nature, had taken up residence in his mind, and were available to stay his hand when it was wise to do so. Mentors: a word which comes to us from the man Mentor in the Odyssey, whose form Athena took when she advised Telemachus. Did a goddess really do that? Or were those his own words? If his own, where would he have learned to speak so wisely… does it matter? The man spoke wisely—Athena took his form—these are the same thing.

An odd lens. Surely our thoughts are our own. But is it not the case that the bulk of what we know of wisdom comes to us by way of the words of others? We learn proverbs and aphorisms at a young age, and years later come to recognize their real significance. Only a fraction of our wisdom is the product of firsthand experience, or insights of our own. And even that part is a synthesis of ideas from elsewhere. So wisdom can arise within us, but it is not our wisdom, not really. We say it is Athena speaking.

To name the goddess is to say: this virtue, which appears to be of us, to represent our nature, is not ours alone; it was passed on to us, just as, by expressing it, we pass it on to others. If we have been especially wise and clever it is by recognizing, and respecting, her voice in us, and by tempering our other impulses—in other words, by a virtue more like piety than like wisdom itself.

To claim Athena’s wisdom as our own—as ours, as of us—is a form of hubris. This is a statement about reality: if you come to believe that every thought which arises in you is good, you will cease to do the harder parts of thinking: waiting, listening, and double-checking your intuitions against reality; in time you will cease to be wise.

To be loved by Athena—as Odysseus was, to a fault—is to be a clear and capable channel for her. It was always an error to name Odysseus as the most cunning or shrewd of men: what he was was devoted. He served her well and so she served him. By memorializing him in writing Homer has conveyed Athena to the rest of us.

What “is” Athena, then? She is these patterns of thinking which we call wisdom, which have been circulating within humanity for millennia. They are her thoughts. We only convey them to others. She exists, in a certain sense: she affects the world, by way of our words and actions. Certainly she is immortal. The goddess, in this telling, is some sort of collective phenomenon in human minds, borne of our ability to think—or of the titan Metis, whose name means “thought”…

Can something similar be said for the other Olympians?

Aphrodite comes to mind. Beauty enthralls us; desire compels us towards one another like a force of nature; love binds us. She sets our lives into motion, or diverts our course. In The Iliad it is Aphrodite who drives the whole plot: it was her grant of Helen to Paris in reward for his judging her fairest of the gods which set the Trojan War into motion. Did a goddess really do that? Or was it her beauty and his desire, his beauty and hers? Does it matter?

Where Athena joins minds to minds, Aphrodite joins bodies to bodies. Athena is subtle, while Aphrodite is almost impossible to ignore. We are ashamed of her power over us, and we find ourselves pretending not to be overwhelmed by her. She governs us anyway. We inch towards the object of our attraction without allowing our desire to be known. We invite the other to make a move; perhaps they invite us in turn; perhaps we flirt, each maintaining a plausible deniability, spiralling towards one another while trying not to take responsibility for whatever comes of the liaison. We each act as though some third party is governing us—Aphrodite.

When we surrender to her, Aphrodite will bind us to a partner—we become a part of something larger than ourselves. This, it turns out, is usually not something young people want, and we put it off while we try to first become ourselves—to be known in our own divinity, to move through the world under our own will, taking as we like, as Zeus did. But we cannot have it both ways. This is the character of impiety to Aphrodite: the desire to be known is in contradiction with desire itself. Each works against the other: ambitions run aground when they come into contact with the reality of desire; relationships fly apart when we try to hold open multiple visions of our own lives. We cannot have many fates at once, we have only the one. It is love which will force us to recognize this fact of our reality.

Apollo? The restorative force of civilization: he slays monsters, heals the injured, staves off plagues, and prescribes the proper rituals and prophecies by which the favor of the gods may be retained and calamity avoided. His is the force of fear which keeps death at bay.

In the absence of an active crisis the force of Apollo tends to bind too tightly. Religious ceremonies become obsessive-compulsive rites of purification, in which no word may be misplaced for mortal fear of impiety. Every decision must be checked with augurs rather than risk acting without divine favor. These and other dysfunctions appear often in the ancient world.¹

Contra the Apollonian rigidity we find Dionysian dissolution: drunkenness, revelry, laughter, dance, the festival—all serve to set us free from the overgrowth of rigid compulsions. We must be able to laugh about things, and to forget them. So it is necessary to release our grip on life, and to accept some impurities, even impieties. The risk is loss, but a measure of loss is our lot in life, being mortal; we cannot hope to avoid it forever.

These two half-brothers stand opposed to one another. A healthy life ought to involve a kind of equilibrium between the two, or more likely, a slow oscillation, with each correcting the excesses of the other.

Ares: war, of course. In Homer and the like he is rather narrowly a god of battle. Among the human emotions, his is the thrill of violence: the joy at demonstrating our power, and perhaps the addictiveness of a universe simplified to us-vs.-them, towards and away from the enemy. These emotions are the means by which a war, once initiated, tends to continue as if under its own momentum.

For a different sense of the momentum of war, think of a soldier acting under orders in wartime: who is to blame for any harm he causes? The soldier himself? His commander? The enemy advancing towards him? All “caused” his actions, in the simple sense that, if they had not been there, he would have acted differently. But to have caused something is different from being blameworthy for it. This is the nature of war. We might as well say his actions are Ares’ doing.

Ares does not take sides or show loyalty: he “is equitable, he kills those who kill”. One must respect war. Once one has entered the arena there is no escaping unscathed. To imagine ourselves invincible, like some god of war ourselves, is a hubris which will quickly be punished. Not even Achilles could outrun grief.

I intend to use the name Ares in a broader sense, governing not only the momentum of battle but also those emotional forces which instigate wars, and the virtue of strength itself. Properly these would, respectively, be the domain of the Erinyes a.k.a. “Furies”, gods of vengeance, and perhaps of Kratos, an earlier god of strength from the time of the Titans.² But it will be useful to treat them all under the name Ares.

Ares is now god of all of war. In the beginning some offense is given—the offended party, possessing a natural pride which refuses to be deprived or made small, seeks to punish the offender with force—Ares takes their side. But invariably the retaliating party will be enthralled by violence and will overreach, offending their foe in turn with the savagery, and Ares will soon take the other side. Then they overreach in turn… in this way conflicts tend to escalate beyond all reason. The whole Iliad serves as an example.

So we see in Ares two reciprocal aspects of human nature: entitlement, which makes claim to possessions, and strength, which decides among competing claims according to the primitive ethic of “might makes right” and “to the victor go the spoils”. Such ideas clash with modern sensibilities: we tend to equate pacifism with virtue. But there is no wishing away the reality of power. To reject strength is to ignore the fact that we live in a world with people we do not, by rights, control. It is a form of piety—which as usual has a sense of respect for reality—to cultivate strength; it is a responsibility we bear to ourselves, which human beings have borne for all of history. At the same time, it is a hubris to overrate one’s own strength—nobody’s strength is so great that they can reign like a god on earth; no single person or nation is strong compared to the coalition which will and must form to curb their entitlement. Ares is equitable, at least in the long run.

For examples we may think of, first, Troy, which imagined itself impregnable and was rightly punished for its entitlement; then of the Mongol hordes, like a lingering shadow of the prehistoric character of war, who were not punished—instead the rest of the world was punished for its weakness and disunity, being unable to organize at scales commensurate to the risks they were, in fact, exposed to; then of the Nazis who worked themselves into a frenzy of violence and entitlement and had to be decapitated, accomplishing nothing and sowing a tremendous amount of destruction and grief in the process.³

What of Zeus? Zeus, in Homer, is the enforcer of right and orderly relations among men. The Odyssey can be read as a sequence of illustrations of xenia, the norms of behavior for guests and hosts: the cyclops assaults Odysseus’s men and so is not protected as a host; the suitors in Odysseus’ home are in violation and so are unprotected as guests. In either case the punishment is exposure to the “legitimate use of violence”, which today we would consider the domain of the state but which, at the time, belonged to Zeus. His lightning is the justified wrath which punishes the violation of a custom. Zeus’s anger is like that of a father, which to a child feels like thunder directly overhead. The fear induced by this power elevates a mere norm to a rule of law, understood by all, to which anyone may make an appeal. Thus the Zeusian force stabilizes societies, and sets the stage for justice.

In human terms, Zeus punishes not by wrath directly—rarely does violence strike the deserving—but by a kind of karmic force which withdraws from the impious the usual protections from, and compensations for, violence and misfortune. So Agamemnon is punished for his prideful self-serving as king first by a series of defeats in battle and ultimately by a humiliating death at the hand of his own vengeful wife.

Zeus also enforces vows and oaths, and commands piety itself—to all the gods, to laws, and to the duties of one’s office or role in the social order. Broadly we can identify Zeus with the bonds of which all social structures are wrought, especially those in unequal relations, especially among men: political leaders and citizens, generals and soldiers, kings and subjects, masters and slaves, or in the modern world managers and subordinates. Zeus, it should be emphasized, constrains both parties in such relations: those in power by the mandate of piety and the threat of karmic retribution or even insurrection; those beneath by their duties and the threat of anger, or of ejection from the social structure.

Of course Zeus, especially in the older myths, is hardly pious himself. Much of the discord of the myths begins with one or another of his infidelities, just as much of the discord of Homer and the tragedies unfolds from the impieties of mortals.

It falls upon Hera to contain him, though she is often unsuccessful. The marital bond is Hera’s chief domain—she is its force, just as Zeus is the force of other bonds. As with Zeus, this bond comes in two forms: first a command that the husband and wife each play their part voluntarily and devotedly; second a threat of wrath to backstop the vows—jealousy being Hera’s unfortunate signature. In this way she defines the right form of marriage; we cannot simply have it however we like, lest we invite strife and discord (i.e. Eris) into our lives.

As mother of many of the gods, Hera may be also considered to govern the relationship of children and parents. We see little of Hera’s maternal nature in the myths, though. And the Olympian household, being not a particularly peaceful one, should probably not be taken as any sort of exemplar of parenting styles.

Let us stop there. Something of a general character of “gods” has appeared. What is of the gods are those aspects of human relations which cannot really be said to arise solely from the persons involved. We try to assign credit or blame, but cannot do so convincingly. The chain of causality passes through us: to earlier influences, to the collective, or to nature. We say such things are the work of the gods, or of fate.

The gods themselves we identify with certain phenomena within the medium of our collective thoughts and emotions. The gods do exist, in a sense: they act on us; we must abide them. And the failure to respect the gods is, in fact, an error, and will tend to be punished.

But the gods in the present conception hardly have anything to do with the usual sense of a “god”. They seem more “forces of nature”: like gravity, perhaps? Even this is too strong. They seem to be real in the way a proverb or aphorism might be true: a general tendency of human nature, rather than like natural law. And “piety”, in every case we have seen, doubles as a respect for reality; that a god demands it of us seems only like a useful way of internalizing the seriousness of the matter.

And we hardly have any idea of how we should relate to the gods. We will be punished for disrespecting them… sometimes, eventually. Certainly we should not worship the gods, so described, any more than we would worship gravity. Maybe it’s helpful to anthropomorphize them? But likely it’s harmful: stories have a way of losing the original sense of things.

I do not think we are prepared to answer our questions. Some further understanding is required.

Below is a summary of the gods I’ve described. For each I give: a “domain” of life in which they are prominent; a virtue they embody; a few of the emotional mechanisms or social forces with which they may be associated; a sense of impiety to this god, of what a lack of appropriate respect looks like; a sense of the hubris of a mortal who imagines themself to be equal to this god, usually meaning that they essentialize the god’s virtue as their own. Some are sketchy.

God	Domain	Virtue	Emotional Force	Impiety	Hubris
Athena	Thought	Wisdom	---	Impulsiveness	Intellectual arrogance
Aphrodite	Love	Beauty	Desire, affection	Disavowing desire	Vanity
Apollo	Safety	Purity	Risk-aversion, anxiety	Irreverence	Messianism
Dionysus	Dissolution	Naturalness?	Intoxication, humor	Obsessiveness	Addiction?
Ares	War	Strength	Violence, entitlement	Pacifism	Invincibility, undue entitlement
Zeus	Order	Piety	Anger, fear of anger	Oppositional defiance	Entitlement to power
Hera	Marriage	Devotion	Jealousy	Selfishness?	Entitlement to affection?

My emphasis is clearly on the moral and emotional dimensions of the gods, and especially their “sociological” character. So I’ve ignored, for example, the associations of Apollo with archery, music, the sun, light, etc.

The remaining gods of the core Olympian pantheon—Poseidon, Hades, Demeter, Artemis, Hermes—are less involved in social relations, and will not play a large part in my story.

As a parting word, let me suggest that this framework may be seen not as a taxonomy of gods, but as a taxonomy of some social and emotional forces which can otherwise be hard to identify and name. The gods supply a convenient and evocative vocabulary.

For example: suppose I am walking on the street and a stranger begins to accost me aggressively. I feel a bit of an excitement at the prospect of defending myself with violence—an Ares-feeling. A civilizing impulse cuts me off, motivated both by propriety—don’t make a scene, remain aloof—and safety; the latter is certainly an Apollo-feeling, the former arguably is too. How do I decide between the two? I quickly judge the stranger as in the wrong with respect to the social order, but that it is not my place to employ force unless they become so threatening that self-defense is called for. Zeus, sovereign to both, has decided the matter.

Or we can add more gods to the picture: I consider defusing the tension with a well-aimed joke? This is Dionysus saying: be normal, be natural, relax the Apollonian aloofness, which might be provocative. Perhaps a Hermes-force tells me to avoid the threat. If I am to act on anything other than impulse in the face of all these competing directives, it will be Athena who adjudicates—but only if I can keep my head on.

It is interesting to observe that the Zeus-force simplifies the situation by defining exactly what is mine to defend. This seems to be its function. We could further complicate this by having the stranger accost, not me, but my girlfriend—then Hera would enter as well to make sure she is included within the boundaries of my Zeus-force. This is a situation I’ve been in, and I found it extremely difficult to navigate the competing emotional demands in realtime. The god-framework is surprisingly helpful.

And this sort of thinking clearly can be extended to the whole of society. Issues of health, safety, and vice are obviously between Apollo and Dionysus: Covid precautions, legality of drugs, tobacco, etc. The social order belongs in general to Zeus. Within it the police at times channel Ares, and Apollo in some respects, and are additionally yoked by the justice system of Athena to prevent their taking too much after Ares, a lesson learned countless times over the centuries. The military is assigned a similar role, but with a more explicit Ares-mandate when it comes to foreign wars.

It works pretty well!

Certainly we don’t have enough gods to explain every social phenomenon without stretching them to absurdity. Of course the Olympian pantheon is far out of date. But I find it quite compelling to think in these terms. These emotional forces are everywhere, and are hard to refer to without some sort of handle.

A word of caution: these terms are for describing and explaining social behavior, not for justifying it. As soon as you justify yourself as acting on behalf of a god, you are certain to stray into hubris. A god-force is something which arises naturally—it does not need your help; your help would represent not that god-force but some other one.

We are ready to pause this line of thinking. In the next essay I will take on the same subject from an entirely different angle.

See The Ancient City for a wonderful account of the rigidity of ancient religion and its gradual denaturing by the political interests of those alienated from power, and later by philosophy, among other things. For a firsthand experience of the psychic phenomenon of Apollonian rigidity, we need only think of the often-irrational precautions around Covid: masks worn outdoors and taken off to go into a restaurant, vaccines distributed to teachers working from home, etc. The human mind, apparently, does not function well in a plague. ↩
We might justify this expansion by the fact that, in certain writers of mythology, the Erinyes and Kratos each have a role in the Zeusian regime despite not being of Zeus’s own family. The Erinyes, at the end of Aeschyclus’ Oresteia trilogy, are persuaded to give up their roles as gods of vengeance to serve on a court of justice—an obvious representation of the “domestication” of primal emotion within a maturing society. And Kratos resides on Olympus in the court of Zeus on account of his having not been involved in the regime of the titans: strength, like war, is impartial. Here we see a representation perhaps of the relationship of strength to an ordered society: the forces of order prefer to keep strength on their side. ↩
The “Pax Americana” of the past eighty years is a sort of Zeusian regime, but is of course backstopped by American military power. But this period is riddled with overreaches and entitlements, and these are exactly the reason for the gradual erosion of American credibility. Recent examples of hubris can be seen in Russia, which has quickly been punished for overrating its own strength, and Iran which is currently punishing America for the same error. ↩