/lit/ - Literature

>>13251921
I'm going to let you in on a little secret. One of the most important aspects of religion is how it forms an image of Man caught between the created world and that of gods. This is something of a third-space between heaven and earth, what is often referred to as the Fall.

Without this, we tend towards being nothing but beasts. And our ability to test the gods is what makes us human, what allows us to live at the forest's edge, along still rivers, half submerged in the ocean - one may even say that this is a necessary element of religion, as without it we fall into being passive material receptacles. We exist tentatively, between the beauty that was given to us and the brutal laws that may destroy us even in piety. And so it is where nature falls away that we fall into conflict with the gods, where we find ourselves cultivating a dark territory between human and divine sovereignty. Such fateful judgement may reduce us to mere survival, but it is also where human strength releases its full potential, and where we sense the form of divine power. The gods may hand over dominion to us in trust when we prove that their authority is total, for they have freed our spirits into a greater being.

If we are not attempting to carve out our domain, becoming worthy of the gods, then we are forced to retreat. It is as if our rightful territory has been polluted and we enclose ourselves into ever smaller spaces of human imagery. The gods take from us what we fail to fight for and offer in return, for they have seen our betrayal of justice and weakness before the laws of dominion. A clear trajectory can be seen from the shrines on mountain passages to cult temples, to the enclosed churches, their being dwarfed beneath towers, and finally being abandoned or demolished - even in lands closest to the forest. We have cast ourselves out of our own being through a betrayal of the ineffable strength of humanity, through fear of those darkest pools amidst shadowy nature. Living tales were never meant to become hardened laws.

The void is really the opposite end of this human dominion, a space of negative forces where we are pulled from our bodies and souls, after we have finally polluted the last place. It is our weakness before the darkest reaches of the forest which petrifies us along the edge, until the entirety of the forest is consumed by darkness. Nihilism is nothing more than the desire for our return, a natural force being made into an impossibility after thousands of years of desecrating our rightful dominion.

Everything human is betrayed when it is unwilling to risk hubris, and so the gods take even more from us. This is what the Greeks understood so well.