The Fallibility of the Gods

I recently read that there is increasing evidence to suggest that the Greeks didn’t believe in the objective reality of their gods.

Contrary to popular belief in the naivety of the Greek Pantheon, the Greeks generally understood it to be a colourful framework, an essential cartographic geography of value structures and cultural archetypes.

If this is the case (along with the Roman and Hindu pantheons), these pagan religions appear to have been vastly more sophisticated than their later monotheistic counterparts (at least in the most extreme form of monotheistic fanaticism still thriving globally).

To not truly believe in the reality of your pantheon as tangible deities infers trust and comfortability with the unknown, with the chaotic, feminine life principle.

It appears to be an understanding that all beliefs, mythologies, and sociocultural systems are but linguistic frameworks, ultimately abstractions implanted on the ever-evasive true essence of reality.

All pagan religions seem to have understood and symbolised this through at least one primary or multiple deities, each representing an aspect of terrestrial existence.

This trust is tantamount to a complex and potentially more advanced understanding of experience—one less grounded in hubristic delusion and seemingly closer to the source—and one we post-moderns, in our ignorance and arrogance, have difficulty stomaching.

The great howling void of the Tao.

If this is the case, and the Gods were mere placeholders rather than certainties in the face of the Mystery, what was their intended purpose to the people and institutions that placed them at the centre of their lives?

It seems that the ancients (for want of a better term) used the creation and subordination to a hierarchy of deities both for purely practical and deeply metaphysical, existential reasons.

Practically, they realised that social cohesion was best garnered through a dominance hierarchy and a morality system of checks and balances that extended in both directions beyond birth, life, and death.

Their religion was the bedrock of their cultural model of being, and the various Gods served as ethical vigilantes that (at the very least) were symbolic representations of just and honourable living or at their most potent, reminders of the retribution for committing evil acts.

However, what makes this even more peculiar is that the Gods themselves were fallible, almost human in the vulnerability of their petty desires and squabbles.

This is most evident in ancient texts such as the Hindu Mahabharata and Bhagavad Gita, the Greek Illiad, and the Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh.

These ancient mythologies portray the respective deities as strikingly human in their vulnerabilities. They are argumentative, vain, jealous, greedy, lustful, and often seek to bed humans. Even the God Yahweh of the Old Testament is more eerily aligned to a powerful, irrational, egotistical emperor than the creator and destroyer of reality.

This tendency of the Gods to echo human weakness and vice seems to have made them more relatable and accessible. The often fickleness of their actions meant that perhaps divinity and honourable living were quasi-attainable through right action. A powerful reminder to those who held them in their prayers.

On the metaphysical, existential level, the pagan pantheon was (and still appears to be in the case of Hinduism) a highly sophisticated attempt to understand the universal forces of reality through archetypes and mythos. To understand the pitfalls of the human psyche through deified projections. In modern society, millions of people deify sports stars as human yet herculean reminders of our triumph over the thresholds of physical existence and our vulnerability to the trappings of success and vice.

Through humanising the elements of reality and elements within our psyches, these cultures created a plane where individual and collective consciousness was intimately connected with the mystery of the universal life principle.

Therefore, a deeper, more subtle (whilst seemingly denser) perception of the multitudinous facets of reality could permeate the daily lives of a population.