Great essay. And as you rightly imply in the penultimate paragraph, we must be wary about using Homer as a stand-in for "Greek religion". That would be a form of survivorship bias. Homer, together with a few other salvaged artworks, is all that has come down to us of Greek spiritual life.
A passage from the Oxford Handbook of Greek Religion that I find useful:
"Gods cannot be conceived in static terms because cults and myths reconfigure and redefine them as personalities and, at the same time, as powers interrelated to each other. Under the same name, a deity is at once the cult persona worshipped in a particular place and the figure that is, for example, described in the Iliad as feasting on Mount Olympos or staged by Euripides in the theatre of Dionysos at Athens. The divine name has a central value because the god is not completely absorbed in and reduced to what is particular and temporary in its function or narrative construction. A god is still more than the heterogeneous mosaic resulting from an arbitrary combination of epithets, images, and narratives. To use once again the metaphor of the network, a sum would be static, while a network is dynamic, fluid, flexible. A god can be conceptualized like such a network: different activities or contexts, such as the telling of myths or practice of particular cults, let some segments and portions of the network appear."
Yes, we got a Homer problem. He’s not the fat yellow-belly guy who go “D’oh!” And when Hector suggested a pact, Achilles did NOT said, “Eat my shorts, man.”
I don't think that divinities emerged as the fleeting sprites of phenomena, but as the names and symbols that primitive peoples believed invoked those spirits. Poseidon was the name that invoked the sprite of the sea, but he was not the sea itself. The gods became known to man as soon as he gained the ability of language, before that he knew something else more limited.
The gods of Mesopotamia and Egypt were clearly already pretty anthropomorphized, but retained some unusual bestial traits. The Egyptian gods were rational agents, but had the heads of animals. The Mesopotamian gods were more erratic and unpredictable. One of the biggest non-Anthropomorphic features of Archaic Greek religion was, of course, the ability and propensity for shapeshifting among the gods... It is not impossible that at some time Zeus/Jove was mainly viewed as an eagle, similar to how Tengri is thought of as a white goose flying over the abyss
A big problem with your argument that Homer introduced divine anthropomorphism to the world is that the Mesopotamians and Egyptians conceived of (or at least described) the gods in anthropomorphic terms centuries before Homer was even born. I would argue that the anthropomorphization of the divine is a natural byproduct of conceiving the divine as cognizant/sapient and therefore able to be communicated with.
This was a very fruitful article. I'm inspired by the volume of significant work you've been writing for us.
Very kind, I appreciate it
"We must overcome even the Greeks"
Great essay. And as you rightly imply in the penultimate paragraph, we must be wary about using Homer as a stand-in for "Greek religion". That would be a form of survivorship bias. Homer, together with a few other salvaged artworks, is all that has come down to us of Greek spiritual life.
A passage from the Oxford Handbook of Greek Religion that I find useful:
"Gods cannot be conceived in static terms because cults and myths reconfigure and redefine them as personalities and, at the same time, as powers interrelated to each other. Under the same name, a deity is at once the cult persona worshipped in a particular place and the figure that is, for example, described in the Iliad as feasting on Mount Olympos or staged by Euripides in the theatre of Dionysos at Athens. The divine name has a central value because the god is not completely absorbed in and reduced to what is particular and temporary in its function or narrative construction. A god is still more than the heterogeneous mosaic resulting from an arbitrary combination of epithets, images, and narratives. To use once again the metaphor of the network, a sum would be static, while a network is dynamic, fluid, flexible. A god can be conceptualized like such a network: different activities or contexts, such as the telling of myths or practice of particular cults, let some segments and portions of the network appear."
Bravo, you are building quite a prolific portfolio of works Sir.
Fantastic essay! Provides much to ponder.
Very good! Was it you who described his own current outlook as animist in an interview some time ago?
Probably, I've only done 2, w BAP and Lance. So if it was in either of those, yes. But I would call myself that either way
Jung also speaks to this in Aion, the morphing of the Gods, a new change is coming in the new Aion
Yes, we got a Homer problem. He’s not the fat yellow-belly guy who go “D’oh!” And when Hector suggested a pact, Achilles did NOT said, “Eat my shorts, man.”
I don't think that divinities emerged as the fleeting sprites of phenomena, but as the names and symbols that primitive peoples believed invoked those spirits. Poseidon was the name that invoked the sprite of the sea, but he was not the sea itself. The gods became known to man as soon as he gained the ability of language, before that he knew something else more limited.
The gods of Mesopotamia and Egypt were clearly already pretty anthropomorphized, but retained some unusual bestial traits. The Egyptian gods were rational agents, but had the heads of animals. The Mesopotamian gods were more erratic and unpredictable. One of the biggest non-Anthropomorphic features of Archaic Greek religion was, of course, the ability and propensity for shapeshifting among the gods... It is not impossible that at some time Zeus/Jove was mainly viewed as an eagle, similar to how Tengri is thought of as a white goose flying over the abyss
A big problem with your argument that Homer introduced divine anthropomorphism to the world is that the Mesopotamians and Egyptians conceived of (or at least described) the gods in anthropomorphic terms centuries before Homer was even born. I would argue that the anthropomorphization of the divine is a natural byproduct of conceiving the divine as cognizant/sapient and therefore able to be communicated with.