MYTHOLOGY IS ALIVE AND WELL

MYTHOLOGY IS ALIVE AND WELL

• Introduction

Mythology Is Alive And Well is a two-part program which introduces, in a lighthearted way, the major figures of the Greek and Roman pantheon. The program sorts them out and clearly shows their relationships to one another and also what they meant to the men and women who created and worshiped them.

As the title suggests, the program also shows that the ancient gods and goddesses, viewed as the natural phenomena and the social or individual behavior patterns which first evoked them still exist and always will. It is in this sense that the gods are indeed, “alive and well” –immortal.

Part One begins with what looks to be proof that the ancient gods are dead. Ruins mark the places where they lived in men’s imagination. But at once we are told that the gods were only names for aspects of nature which are as important now as they ever were—sky and space, earth, sea, sun. The gods’ “death” came when men ceased to personify nature in order to explain the mysteries of life. Modern man builds no temples to a god of the sky. But he sends voyagers to the moon, makes films about imaginative “space odysseys,” and almost without thinking names a missile “Zeus.” Today, men try to answer the same old questions, finding within themselves the same old unexplained affinity with the alternate storm and calm that is the sky.

After Zeus (Jupiter), we meet the other major gods, and learn that Zeus and his brothers replaced Chronos, the timeless Time that preceded man’s awareness of its passing. Reserving all space for himself, a magnificent height from which to rule, Zeus gave his brother Pluto care of earth and all it contained, his brother Poseidon (Neptune) all the seas and waters on earth.

Each of these gods is seen to have been at once beneficent and fearsome. Pluto might give man the means of abundant life through husbandry or luck (Pluto was keeper of hidden gems and minerals), but he was also god of man’ inevitable end—death and return to death, the same earth that had given him life.

Poseidon might bear a man up on gentle waves that took him halfway around the earth, or offer him the peaceful company of a mermaid beside a quiet pool—but he could also destroy a man with fierce gales or mighty earthquakes. Tide and tidal wave were born of the same element.

To account for the seasons of the year, we learn next, the ancients told the story of Demeter, earth mother and grain goddess, whose only daughter, the beautiful Persephone, was secretly loved by Pluto until he could bear it no longer and kidnapped her to take her down with him to the realm of the dead. Merciful but just, the other gods decreed that Pluto must return Persephone to her mother for eight months of the year, but might have her as his wife the other four. Demeter mourned through for long months of winter, but made up for it with her joy at Persephone’s return in spring.

Part One concludes with the introduction of the sky’s twin children: Apollo, the sun, god of health, ordered learning (made easy by the light of day), truth, and certainty; Artemis (Diana), the moon, goddess of darkness and uncertainty, protector of the animal kingdom to which man no longer quite belonged. At the end, we are left with the provocative reminder that the vehicle which carried man to the moon was named “Apollo.”

Part Two introduces the gods and goddesses of behavior—individual and social. A social (or one might say anti-social) god comes firs. Ares (Mars), god of war, answered for the ancients what is still a vexing question: how is it that most men as individuals denounce war, but as a society (of individuals), support it?

Ares’ brother, the clever Hephaestus (Vulcan), is the next god of society introduced, and we are told that the taught man the creative uses of fire, as well as the other mechanical arts. We are also told that, at insistence of Zeus, who was unhappy with man at the moment, Hephaestus created man’s tormentor: woman.

We next meet Hermes (Mercury), god of communication, commerce, and sport, a lesser dominion in ancient times, perhaps, but increasingly important today. We also meet Hermes’ prankster so, Pan, the god of what would now include airport stack-ups, misdialed telephone numbers, traffic jams, and whatever other mischief is afoot.

Part Two continues with the introduction of the awesome Athena (Minerva), goddess of wisdom. Hers was the judgment that could construct a theory to account for all the facts gleaned in Apollo’s light. We learn that she was also a goddess of peace and of war—defensive war to protect the city which bore her name.

Next, we meet one of the goddesses that many may say never died: Aphrodite (Venus), goddess of love, presented here as the instigator—with the help of her little boy Eros (Cupid) – of everything from the entanglements of teenagers to the devotion that keeps a man and woman happily together through their diamond jubilee.

The last important god is presented in all his ambiguity. He is Dionysus (Bacchus), god of unbridled emotion as exemplified in the behavior of men drunk with wine. We learn that without Dionysus, the god of feeling deeply, there might have been no advantage taken of light of Apollo. It is only in the grip of half-blind Dionysian emotion that man has been able to take the rules learned in the well-lighted Apollonian classroom and create a “Sonnet to a Dark Lady,” or a Pieta, or a Fifth Symphony.

Part Two concludes with the merest hint of caution to today’s youth to beware the dangers of Dionysian emotion ungoverned by Apollonian knowledge and Athenian order. Today’s society, in which “mythology is alive and well,” is seen as a new “age of Aquarius”—embodying along with emotion, knowledge, and order, some of the best of Hephaestus’ technology, of Hermes’ swift communication and wealth of commerce, of Aphrodite’s love. In today’s society, it is suggested we may have the beginning of an answer to the age-old ecological question: how can man live in harmony with the rest of creation?

PRESENTING THE PROGRAM

Mythology Is Alive and Well may be presented simply as a way to familiarize the student with the more common mythological allusions of literature. Certainly the poetry and prose of all but the most recent times were often enriched with references to the old mythologies, and the student who wishes to find in this literature what the authors intended, must know these stories.

As the program makes clear, allusions to the gods are also made every day in non-literary areas, often it seems, without much knowledge of the mythology.

In The Age of Fable, Bulfrnch seems to feel his work had only this job of familiarizing to do, since he dismisses at the outset any possible validity of pagan thought by saying that the ancients labored under an ignorance which has since, happily for the world, been dispelled by holy scripture. But these “delicious fables,” as he called them, do embody a philosophy, and every generation seems to find it necessary to confront this philosophy in some form, to compare it with the modern orthodoxy, and to confirm or deny it. What better way to confront it than in it’s original form, the mythology of the people who created it?

The difference between the pagan and present-day philosophies might be said to hinge on the resolution of the problem of evil. The ancients, surrounded by a world over which they felt themselves to have less control than we feel we have over ours, were less demanding of themselves and of their gods. The gods they created were fallible; the gods’ capriciousness accounted for evil, everything from thunderstorms and winter to war and drudgery and the less lovely forms of “love.” A man who feels himself at the mercy of his environment will resign himself to its evils. But if he can fell that some intelligence directs it, he will also try to win the favor of the intelligence, the go. If this go is fallible, the man will feel more puzzled than guilty if he finds himself the unhappy victim of evil.

Modern man, often more confident that he shapes nature to his own ends and understands his own behavior, may say he worships an infallible god, thereupon assuming guilt himself for the evils around him, looking on them as the consequences of his own failure, either to obey or to exercise his intelligence. That this state leaves him still vaguely troubled by his infallible god’s allowing a fallible creature—himself—to exist, is evidence that not all the eternal questions have been answered to everyone’s satisfaction.

Some of the questions in the following section are intended to lead naturally to discussion of philosophical ideas. If they are not presented to the student in this formidable dress, if he is not told that bottom here is many, many fathoms down, hem may find himself swimming easily in some of the deepest water in the world.

QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION

Part One

1. When you saw the ruins of the old Greek temples and heard it said the gods were dead, did you agree at first? Do you see now why we can say the gods live? When we say ideas are immortal, such as the ideas of Greek religion, what do we mean?

2. If you saw the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey, try to tell why it may be a “modern version of the story of Zeus.”

3. Have you every been terribly upset about something and then calmed down after a “good cry” or after yelling at someone? How is this like the myth of Zeus?

4. In the days before modern chemistry, it was thought that all the world was composed of earth, air, water, and fire. The Greeks had no “fire god” but they had gods who were concerned with light and heat. Did these gods take the place of a fire god? Explain.

5. What are some of the “strange delights” the sea is filled with? Have you ever heard the expression “sea change”? What do you think it means?

6. Socrates, a great Greek philosopher, said he did not fear death because he knew nothing about it and neither did anyone else. He said for all he knew it might turn out to be a great blessing. What do you think he meant? What do people think they know about death? Why do they fear it?

7. Why was the cycle of the seasons so important to the ancients? Are we as dependent on agriculture as they were? Why?

8. How do you account for the fact that the moon, the cold goddess of uncertainty, is so often used in literature as a light for lovers?

9. How do we “worship” the sun?

10. Try to make up a fable about Apollo in which men are warned about the danger of blindness if they look directly at the sun during eclipse.

Part Two

1. What evidence have you seen (in advertisements or modern literature or art) to suggest that the old gods still capture men’s imagination?

2. Greece, the program tells us, was a society like every society—not all pretty. What things are not pretty in our society? How do we account for them?

3. Do you think some men in ancient Greece worshipped Ares, the god of war? If people did not worship him, what might their behavior toward him be? Why? Do people today “worship Ares”?

4. Hephaestus made woman to make man suffer and repent, we are told. Do you think this is only an ancient joke, or do you think there is some truth in this fable? Explain.

5. Communication is the ancient world was not notably swift. Today’s communications are. Why did the ancients invent a god of communication who was swifter than thought when they did not yet have the means of communication we have?

General

1. Consider the fact that there was a god of offensive war and a goddess of defensive war in the Greek mythology, and that any war is seen from opposite viewpoints by the opposing contenders. (The Japanese, for instance, said they felt they were only protecting themselves from a hostile world when they invaded China before World War II.) Why might a society that was expansive and imperialistic invent a god of offensive war?

2. Why do all mythologies seem to pattern themselves on the human family and a society of such families? Are nature and “human nature” really related to each other in this way?

3. Before we had the science of psychology, people in love were said to be under the influence of the gods. We still love, but today we say it is because of “chemistry,” perhaps, or our “collective unconscious,” or “cultural conditioning.” Discuss what these explanations mean, and the differences and similarities among them. Which explanation seems the most satisfactory to you? Why?

4. Why did worship of the gods end, even though the underlying realities (such as sun, moon, stars, sky) remained?

5. How might the Greeks of the time when the gods were young and alive view the present concern about our polluted environment and our wish for a return to ecological balance?

6. There were other gods and goddesses in the Greek and Roman mythologies besides those mentioned in the program. Can you guess which elements or characteristics of human behavior they must have represented?

7. The functions of some of the gods seem to overlap, for example, Aphrodite/Dionysus, Apollo/Athena. Do you think this is because of careless thinking or is it evidence of great care and precision? Is love the same as emotion? Is knowledge the same as wisdom? Give reasons for your answers.

8. It is suggested in the program that our society is experiencing an “electric renaissance”—a rebirth of Dionysian influence. After the ancient Dionysian orgies, the program says, the people suffered a tremendous hangover. Do you think our society will someday suffer a “tremendous hangover”? Why?

9. Discuss the apparent contradiction of Apollo/Dionysus. This contradiction, or paradox, says that the individual who is wholly devoted to Dionysus can do nothing to make other honor Dionysus unless the individual first gets control of his own devotion (emotion).

10. Discuss the difference between patron saints and patron deities as they were known to the pagans.

11. Discuss the use of evocative rather than literally illustrative visual materials in this program. Do you think pictures which suggest ideas without really spelling them out help you understand that the realities underlying the old mythologies can be expressed in many ways?

12. The Greeks were obviously an imaginative people. You feel that they would have gladly sold their cow for a handful of beans, and if they planted the beans and nothing came up, they might still have climbed to heaven on the non-existent beanstalk. Why do people put their explanations of the world in stories like the ones told in this program? What does this suggest about the never-ending need for fables?

13. Do you think this program makes a judgment about society today? If so, what do you think it is? Do you agree with it?

14. Discuss the dangers of having a pantheon of gods (many different gods) to represent the various aspects of the world. Are there any benefits? What might be the behavior of a person who declared himself devoted only to Apollo, for instance, to the exclusion of all other gods? To Aphrodite? To Dionysus? To Hermes?

15. What kinds of gods would we need to create today for a contemporary Olympic pantheon? What relationships would they bear to the Greek gods?

16. The Greeks said earthquakes were caused by Poseidon, god of the sea, not Pluto, god of the earth. Modern oceanography has confirmed that the sinking of the sea floor accounts for the stresses on land that result in earthquakes. Can you suggest how the early Greeks “knew” this before modern science proved it to be true?

17. One of the Greek poets, Aristophanes, wrote a comic drama in which men made a pact with the birds to erect a fence between earth and heaven. The fence cut off from the gods the sweet savors of sacrifice and the human prayers that were the gods’ heavenly food. In the drama, the starving gods were forced to sneak through the fence and beg men to remove it. At the same time, the gods were forced to promise to help men win a war in exchange for removal of the fence. Discuss the “death” of the Greek gods at about the time Athens began losing wars and became subject to other nations.