/lit/ - Literature

>>21785857
To the ancients, the Gods represented forces of nature. It wasn't until Plato and Christianity that God as a force of good took root.

>>21785857
to me he seems to represent the bipolar nature of fate

>>21785915
No, there were actually three sister godesses who represented fate.

>>21785922
hence the "to me"

>>21785857
He was literally the least asshole god in the Iliad

>>21785857
It's a strange mix of giving heroes and seemingly divine people an even greater air of divinity.

For example, Heracles, Perseus, Aeacus, Argus, and Minos, just to name a few.

Heracles and Perseus speak for themselves, being heroes. Aeacus, Argus, and Minos, all being kings, would logically seem to be descended from Zeus, himself the king of the gods.

The most likely reason is that there are just so many myths of Zeus being a cheating fuck that they all simply coexist and paint a portrait of Zeus as eternally horny. But it's not like Zeus is the only one guilty of this, since tons of gods in Greek and other mythologies just fuck like crazy.

TL;DR Zeus fucks a lot because claiming descent is good for PR and because there's a lot of myths about Zeus from all over Greece.

>>21785874
>Christianity that God as a force of good took root
Did you even read the Old Testament?

>>21785857
He is a Jealous God and He hates with a perfect Hatred.

Zeus is the orginal scumbag Demiurge. Greeks already knew this with the Prometheus bound myth and tragedy. Prometheus is the first tragic hero that revolts against the injustice and capricious Olympians.

>>21785874

Its a little more complicated that that and the mythology is quite convoluted but it predates Plato who essentially took far later developments in talking about the immortality of the soul like all comsogenic literature like in Hesiod and the Orphics. However Greek and Semitic religion basically have almost the same roots and main narrative skeleton of the myth can be reconstructed.

I'm simplifying but in a renewed Hellenistic and Judeo-Christian context it goes like this:

Zeus/ Baal/ Yahweh / Demiurge
Athena/ Sophia / Astarte / Shekinah
Prometheus/ Lucifer /Mithras / Tawûsî Melek

Though this is a somewhat arbitrary comparison, it does follow the same mythic schema of the mythic personages that was common in both Greek/Anatolian mythology and Semitic. Another similarity is the case of cosmogeny and that of the reign of Cronus.

Because life is irredeemably harsh, and anyone who says otherwise is lying to you

>>21786868
>>21786892
Zeus can not be the demiurge since Zeus is not the creator of the universe. Gaia is iirc. She predates even Cronos and Uranus.

>>21786948
I agree I think the demiurge is an egregore and is represented by the God of the Bible who is both God and Satan. Insofar as Yahweh is cognate with Zeus I see that as a usurpation of the role of Zeus to direct human worship away from Zeus and to the demiurge.

>>21786948

Zeus is litterally reffered to as the Demiurge in both middle-Platonism and neoplatonism like that of Iamblichus. Zeus is the divine mind, that orders the cosmos. The Demiurge is not the arche in gnostic cosmogeny either.

>>21786508
that's an ancient Jewish book you fucking retard, not created by Christians

>>21785929
"to me the sky is green"
Do you see how that is nonsense?

>>21785857
Technically speaking Jupiter-Zeus did nothing wrong at all in the classical mythos:

1) Prometheus really was the bad guy because he tricked humans into breaking the first commandment (prometheus, in the name, not meaning 'knowledge' but "at first impressions, this is a good idea" pro+met),
1.1) Pandora (false hope as an evil, portrayed by an innocent looking pretty girl, who is completely evil through the deception of false hope) was made as the punishment for humans because of Prometheus (or Pandora is a monster made to test us to make us immune to Prometheus's deception)

1.2) but humans are still fucked in this life because they break the first commandment all the time; eating of rotting flesh and going insane

this is the original anyway to the hebrew creation story, eve and adam, etc., the debilz and the treeg

2) Jupiter-Zeus put the monsters into the world for good reasons, as demonstrated in the "Apollos mortal year" story, when Jupiter is furious with Apollo (who thought he was doing good) for killing the Cyclopes, and sends Apollo to earth to understand why humans are so bad that they need brutality.

i realize this is just the pagan forerunner to the christian "god is not bad when god is bad but YOU are bad and deserve the bad!" but it's a little bit different; there's more Tabasco in this version of the drink

>>21787447

Your posts is literally bootlicking. The uber-chad Greeks respected the Gods but knew that the Gods were also malevolent assholes and had to struggle against fate like Achillies and Odysseus. Athena is the only good Olympian in my opinion, the others are Archonic figures.

oh i always forget,
>>21787059
>>21787434
>>21786948
>since Zeus is not the creator of the universe

3) Jupiter-Zeus is the ... "New King who took power in a revolution or rebellion against the Old King", according to the mythos anyway, so he's like a young guy when he seizes power, all idealistic, then gives up and retires to brood about it all.

>>21787447 >>21785857

It's a little different because Zeus is a subject of the universe's creation, just like we are. The tension in greek mythology is therefore vastly different from Hebrew. In the Hebrew mythos, we err in obeying a perfect creator God. In the Greek mythos, Zeus usurped rulership of the universe from earlier rulers, none of which are responsible for the primordial nature of the universe, fate, or justice. Zeus' role is to uphold justice in the universe in his relatively limited capacity, but he is, like his father, by no means perfect in this capacity.

>>21787454
You should have realized I wasn't interested in the Greek interpretation by my use of the word Jupiter. I mean, you can understand:
>Jupiter-Zeus put the monsters into the world for good reasons, as demonstrated in the "Apollos mortal year" story, when Jupiter is furious with Apollo (who thought he was doing good) for killing the Cyclopes, and sends Apollo to earth to understand why humans are so bad that they need brutality.
why a ruling King would appreciate this message as he ponders how to deal with rebellious people and barbarians.

>the only good (gods)
It's not that simple as "this one is good, this one is bad," but I know what you mean.

Artemis-Diana murders children one day to hurt their mother, for example (see: prev.img.), and she's usually considered as a kind of passive powerless friendly girl who can do no wrong.

Athena-Minerva is a unique god in that she represents idealism, in a way, that is: how men want women to be (she's born from jupiters brain, she's his ideal), so she doesn't do bad things. But once you know the story of Jupiter making monsters then you revise your Apollonian view of good and bad.

>>21787460
>The tension in greek mythology is therefore vastly different from Hebrew. In the Hebrew mythos, we err in obeying a perfect creator God.
Yeah, I don't mean to say that pandora 'is' eve (or that the stories had anything to do with each other), only that the elements of the two stories are the same: Eve, in this version, is "the devil", so to speak, whereas Adam "taking the apple" is Prometheus himself.

>In the Greek mythos, Zeus usurped rulership of the universe
exactly, see: >>21787456

>fate
Although it's worth bearing in mind that 'the fates' were considered to be the only force that Jupiter himself could not overcome.

I urge fellow anons to drop the archetypes of the Apollonian and the Dionysian, though I have no particular argument against their use.

>>21787446
There's redundancies in the pantheon and some gods are older than others. For example Apollo is the god of the sun/light and Hephaestus is the god of the forge fire and flames generically speaking, but the sun is fire, and also Hestia is goddess of the hearth/altar fire. So I would argue that while the Fates are specifically, explicitly symbolic of what they're named after, Zeus's aspect as the Lord of Heaven and thus storms is deeply symbolic of many things including fate as expressed by sudden and unstoppable change in circumstances.

>>21787489
i gots arguments:

Apollonian is like "naive idealism" of a young person; it's bad because we know the stories, Dionysian is the same and it's bad because we know the Romans outlawed this cult very early on - getting slaves drunk and telling them they can be free (narcotic false-enlightenment) is harmful to those slaves as it results in their deaths.

>>21787454
>It's not that simple as "this one is good, this one is bad,"
ed. i mean that the gods represent certain things; jupiter is the father/king/boss, vulcan is the eldest son who does all the work, mars is the angsty younger son, hestia is the wise aunt, juno is the vain mother, etc.

i.e. they're your parents/family/state

>>21787502
I think it's important to consider the domains of each god as not being conceptual, but more so as literal places/territories. Though fire is in each of those places, they are different insofar as their usage goes. I can imagine that a hearth being used as a forge would cease to be hestias, for example.

This mode of thinking also gives Hermes his proper role: a messenger God that governs and can cross these divine boundaries.

>>21785857
discussion about the ancient gods seem inevitably full of projection and putting the cart before the horse i.e we want to tell bronze age Greeks that what they described with θεός is AKSHUALLY not what gods are supposed to be like......whereas they could reasonably say that it's those that came after them that slowly imprinted onto these figures/being/words their own image and that of the civilization around them in the direction it was heading
the gods are super-human, yet finite beings, I wouldn't even say super-natural because once again this distinction I don't think would make any sense to a late bronze age Greek except I guess that gods aren't bound to one particular husk
in a way, I can feel how for these early Greek the gods were both far more real than how we can imagine them yet also, maybe because of that, far more down to earth, finite, with their own Ate and unpredictable nature

>>21787515
>>21787502
>fire
You're both being too literalistic; Hestia is the Kitchen; the Family Home, Vulcan is the workshop, Apollo could be considered to be the daytime as opposed to night time or representing rising and falling - they have 'fire' in common only peripherally to their real attributes, which are not even hidden.

I mean, we could say, with the same logic, that they're all aspects of "wearing clothes" since they all happen to wear clothes.

>>21787524
Perhaps you're right, but I guess I don't want conflicts between domains. Then again, that's what Zeus is partly for: conflict resolution.

Interesting that the Greek polytheism demands a lot of metaphysical work where the Hebrew God demands a lot of moral justification above all else. Though Kabbalah would shift the moral work into the metaphysics.

>>21785935
He started the whole thing to kill as many people as possible to solve the heroic age overpopulation problem
Wake up sheeple the trojan war was an inside job

>>21785857
Dont question the gods anon
They will kill you by flaying you alive and then will make you push a rock up a mountain for eternity in the afterlife

>>21787544
Hahah sounds like me wife!! LOL

>>21786892
>Hesiod
He starts by saying that everything was born of chaos and night
Hence the horrible state of life and the cruelty of the gods

>>21786948
The creators of the universe are chaos and night

>>21787555
Well, chaos first above all, then its progeny, darkness and night.

>>21787536
>Perhaps you're right,
Thank you, humility is a beneficial virtue that pays off: a good experiment to consider how the gods were taken is to consider their actual verbatim names;
vul+canos (scary/ugly dog), min+nerva (snowy mind), iu+no (????), iu+pater (the father), vesta (literally. clothes), iu+venta (breeze)
in order to figure out where the ideas came from as to what their social and familial aspects were in the beginning; it's perhaps at the most verbatim in the Latin.

People will quibble over this these days but I think it's the biggest missing piece in our comprehension of what the gods were in the first place, as to say "Hestia-Vesta" is to say verbatim "woman wearing clothes" to the Latin mind, etc.

>>21785857
The Greek gods weren't about morality. They were raw passions and raw natural forces. The Greeks looked to philosophers for their morals and the gods for the primal aspects of themselves and their environment. Furthermore most Greek myths are codes for something. Usually each character and event represents something. It's the same for most mythologies. The Wendigo for example at it's core is a metaphor for conquest. The monster that comes in and devours the people so as to incorporate them into itself and grow larger. It is rather complex and difficult for us to understand because a lot of the background for these stories is long gone or almost unknown today. If anyone is interested this guy explains the meaning behind mythology pretty well. He has a great video on Hermes. I'd recommend a book and probably knew one about this once but I learned about this in college and that was a couple years ago now and the knowledge is just there at this point.
https://youtu.be/vYMhcEFrzrU

>>21787547
You should get a misstress
Zeus got away with it

>>21787524
No anon the gods are literally real
Everything bad that happens is because you dont honor them
Coronavirus happened because people dont make libations to apollo and dont burn goat legs in his honour anymore

>>21787454
>Athena is the only good Olympian
Is she?
Her nature is the same as ares, she delights in war and slaughter
In the iliad the made her mind about the destruction of troy and no amount of sacrifices to her helped the trojans

>>21787611
well technically.... we can't win wars quickly because we don't follow mars gradivus and train troops according to His will...

>>21787624
>ares
Honestly I don't think we know much about Ares. Apparently he wasn't very popular and when sacrifices were made to him, they were done at night, and we're usually hounds. Obviously Athena doesn't have a normal origin, but Ares is just mysterious.

>>21787645
Among the olympians hes clearly that uncle nobody likes but has to keep inviting to thanksgiving because hes family

Maybe hera likes him

kinda related but is there really any good philological reason to not obviously link Ἄρης, ἀρείων and ἄριστος as well as ἀρετή (Arēs, areiōn, aristos, aretē) and thus make the obvious connection of excellence with the military prowess of powerful warlords?
I can see how later on Ares became somewhat "looked down" especially among Attic-Ionians(which represents almost all of what survives written from back then, being the quintessential wordcels of ancient Hellas in contrast with Laconians) in favor of Athena as the goddess of somewhat more "civilized" war but going back at the time when Greeks were essentially vikings of the Aegean I could see that being the case

>>21787434
>Platonism
S*crates and pl*to ruined greece
They were not even greek, probably pelasgians or semitic illegals

>>21787475
>Artemis-Diana murders children one day to hurt their mother
All im saying, you dont disparage the ayatoll... I mean the gods

>>21787777
Nice numbers. Ares is not really the god of war but really of battle. He brings along fear and wrath, his nasty little pals. He also is taken to be sort of accompanied by the personification of the push or flow of battle, enyalius.

Ares' weird troupe illustrates why Greeks don't like him: he brings terror and anger. Basically, he is not just, and compounding this idea, the just Zeus never seems interferes directly with battles.

As for the linguistics, it is hypothesised that many gods names actually are false friends in Greek, taken from pre Indo-European names of deities.

>>21787797
I understand this objection but I really wonder if it's not something that ultimately developed at a much later stage of Greek social order and mentality, when they were essentially starting to be less like pirates and more like sedentary civilized people, and when seeking etymologies that formed perhaps even before the Trojan war and that later Greeks simply took for granted, this is important to consider.
Hypothesizing false-friends from pre-IE roots should be the last resort, but in this case the association of this root ar- with war and excellence seems to me like it can't be discounted so easily, especially given the regularity of its forms(e.g the goddess Atē being the personification of the word atē meaning fault, blemish, "sin", likewise Arēs could be the male personification of an old word *arēs meaning battle/struggle and the adjectives and nouns «regularly» built from it becoming linked with excellence, seeing that in the Trojan and even pre-Trojan period Greeks were pirates/warlords)

>>21787812
Iliad is obe of the oldest greek poems
Already it disparages ares as the hated god of slaughter

>>21787821
meh, I don't know about being wholly hated yet, the Greeks themselves are often called with the epithet of servants/attendants/comrades of Ares and going by memory many individuals or people are positively associated with Ares
it was still written by Ionians/Aeolians in ~800BC at the end of the day

>>21787524
>Apollo could be considered to be the daytime
And yet he’s also associated with the moon. Real head scratcher

>>21787812
>something that ultimately developed at a much later stage of Greek social order and mentality, when they were essentially starting to be less like pirates and more like sedentary civilized people, and when seeking etymologies that formed perhaps even before the Trojan war

I would hesitate to buy into the sea peoples / Dorian invasion theories. The Greeks, like all civilised people, had lived agrarian, hierarchical lives for hundreds of years. Warbands and raiding parties were balanced out by walled cities and the need for booty to give to underlings. So seiges and organised battles are more the Greek thing, especially given how easy it is to make a stone hillfort overlooking the sharecropping, small scale farmland in Greece. What I'm trying to get at is that the ancient Greeks were not like the archetypical Germanic or Celtic warbands, and not like slavers in later antiquity. They were more like Knights in the Frankish feudal systems.

>>21787841
>it was still written by Ionians/Aeolians in ~800BC at the end of the day
A common misconseption
It was written around 8000BC by atlanteans and actually took place in the baltic

>>21787914
if you read Thucydides' account of Greece during that period he precisely addresses this, they were not "civilized" yet in the sense of later Greeks of his time, which he considers clearly a following development, the cities were most often not walled and built mostly far from the sea, being a pirate was not only not looked down but something to even look up to, etc....
what Thucydides himself tells you is that actually they really were sort of Viking like people before they started getting more into trading, etc... and giving in to the more civilized life

>>21787914
>seiges
Greeks literally couldnt into sieges
Athens survived for years in the pelloponesian wars because of the long walls

>>21787880
You just made that up fr

>>21785857
Zeus = Dzeoos = Deus

> Did the Greeks think he was an asshole too?
This is just ancient pagans being edgy atheists.

>>21787934
Of course, seiges of landlocked forts are just a matter of starvation until battle or surrender. Athens, being smart cowards, undermined the normal strategy. One which was used at ilion.

>>21787933
This contradicts the general pattern of the neighbouring civilisations. In fact, it makes you wonder how and why their famous maritime contemporaries, the Phoenicians, were so successful in sailing through Aegean waters, even in spite of the nation of pirates next door. The archaeology of course doesn't tend towards either direction due to the perishable nature of whatever might evidence widespread systematic piracy. Thucydides be damned anyway, the fellow is not a specialist on that archaic era.

>>21787624
Important to consider the Iliad may be a “fan fiction” to the true Greek myths in the same way that Dante’s inferno is a “fan-fiction” to Judeo-Christian truths. The actual representations and meaning of the Greek gods may have been different from what is found in the Iliad and literary works like that.

>>21787934
daily reminder that Sulla burned Athens to the ground using trees from the groves of athena to build siege weapons and fortress.

>>21787988
Dorian hands typed this
Sphacteria, ( when stratocles was archon never forget)

>>21787555
So Chaos would be the demiurge , for anon's parallel.
It fits, I guess.

>>21787880
No, he isn't, his sister Artemis is associated with the moon, together with Selene and Hecate. Moon tends to be a female thing, cause they both have cycles.

>>21788024
One of many reasons the Romans were barbarians. However this was the beginning of mass hellenisation in Rome via the slaves taken.

>>21788024
Literal animali

>>21788045
You cant really interpret the greek myths in a gnostic way
Cristianity is just very different and nongreek

>>21785857
It's tough to say what the original gods were like, because almost everything that is known about them dates from the Homeric epics or Hesiod, or the capeshit fanfics of the playwrights and poets from MUCH later, and there was at least 1000 years of Greek religion before Theogeny and Iliad, and possibly as much as 2500.
I have suspicions (though this is purely speculative and has no empirical basis) that the religion of the Greeks prior to the Greek Dark Ages (roughly 1200-800 BC) was much more traditionally similar to other, relatively benign Indo-European religions, like the Etruscans and Latins and Celts, and that the Bronze Age Collapse itself influenced archaic Greek culture in such a way as to make them vastly more cynical and grim in their outlooks, and concomitantly degenerated their religion into one of mindless and petty cruelty in a way that few other pantheons emulated. Compare for example the relatively inoffensive Mayans to the almost comically evil Aztecs that succeeded them - something had to happen there to elicit that kind of topsy-turvy social change.

>>21787446
>turning mythology into capeshit
yea no

Can athena in the iliad be considered a manic pixie dream girl?

>>21788258
Get serious

>>21787957
>>21788066
Then why did they name the moon missions after him? Fun thing about ancient myths is that they’re fluid, even to this day

>>21788269
I mean she does make diomedes embrace life and adventure

>>21788273
Really makes you think

>>21788273
From wikipedia (with cited sources)
>The program was named after Apollo, the Greek god of light, music, and the Sun, by NASA manager Abe Silverstein, who later said, "I was naming the spacecraft like I'd name my baby." Silverstein chose the name at home one evening, early in 1960, because he felt "Apollo riding his chariot across the Sun was appropriate to the grand scale of the proposed program."

>>21788152
And what happened to the mayans to turn them into aztecs?

>>21786508
What is this childish notion of god that is so prevalent?

The Christian / Islamic God is omnipotent and atemporal and necessarily good by definition. A priori.
Zeus is a temporal diety and is not necessarily good.

In Buddhism Zeus would be a Demi god

>>21788446
The Mayans didn't exactly "become" the Aztecs any more than the Hittites became Hebrews, but it's significant to point out that Mesoamerican cultures were not fixated with cannibalistic mutilating mass-sacrifice to devil-gods like Huitzilopochtli throughout their entire history, and that the ascendancy of the Aztecs corresponds to a several century long "Dark Age" within the Mesoamerican civilizations and hitherto unseen amounts of military conflict and expansionism. I can't explain why this is, I only see a correlation.

>>21788464
I agree, the ebean (or platonic) monotheoi notion of 'god' is a fucking nonsense;
>God is omnipotent and atemporal and necessarily good by definition. A priori.
it's got more, technically, in common with aztecs or molochites sacrificing people to appease this suddenly literal god of their own invention, whereas compared to the original polytheist culture of the world we understand the gods as representative of things, and therefore having something to teach us (maybe as conduits between time and space to pass along universal lessons of nature and being), which doesn't even register to a literalist who is a stones throw away from being a full blown death cultist and has, anyway, made their faith upon ignorance to studying the universe as it actually is.

>Zeus is a temporal diety and is not necessarily good.
>In Buddhism Zeus would be a Demi god
in that warped understanding, sure, as Zeus-Jupiter isn't claimed anywhere to have literally "invented the world" with his hands and is therefore, technically, beneath whatsoever smurf creature you want to invent and call "the creator" (and you don't even need to prove the smurf did it, just say that it did).

>>21787988
I don't think there were many interactions with Phoenicians at the time Thucydides is describing especially around mainland Greece, e.g before the foundation and expansion of Corinth which is dated to the 8th century BC. I think during that period Phoenicians would be mostly dealing around Crete, hence the spread of the alphabet from the south.
In any case to the risk of being pedantic I'm really talking about prehistoric Greece when it comes to the formation of words like Ares and aristos/arete(Ares apparently appears even in linear B tablets already in e.g ~1200BC Knossos), even the proto-Greek phase before the beginning of the differentiation into dialectal areals

Uninformed question here: is the “Platonism predicted Christianity” idea or “the good=God” stuff just the result of Greeks trying to interrogate the ultimate origin of their gods? I can see how a thought convergence would happen with Judeo-Christian cosmology where their God “just is, and is good”. It seems to answer “who is Zeus’s daddy” you would have to go down a monistic or monotheistic route

>>21788520
All this guff. Monotheism is a powerful idea compared to polytheism because it doesn't make sense for an omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent god to have a twin who might contradict 1) what they can know re de se knowledge 2) might perform deeds that the other god cannot counteract 3) might have self interest to the exclusion of the other god.

>>21788521
Greeks waged war with phonenicians all the time, for example in sicilly
If i remember correctly athenians invaded carthage once, even

>>21788529
>Uninformed question here: is the “Platonism predicted Christianity” idea or “the good=God” stuff just the result of Greeks trying to interrogate the ultimate origin of their gods? I can see how a thought convergence would happen with Judeo-Christian cosmology where their God “just is, and is good”.

It is not the result of that. God=good is not a view the Greeks had. It is much more similar to Manichaeism, which would influence Judaism. The Greeks had a full cosmogony.

>It seems to answer “who is Zeus’s daddy” you would have to go down a monistic or monotheistic route
Why? We know who his father was: kronos

>>21788534
Not that guy but I agree that it’s a powerful idea for that reason. Why would a god *have to* be omnipotent and omniscient though, is it because it has to be assumed that some central thing created the universe intentionally?

>>21788553
as I said I'm talking about Greece even before their colonial and magnagrecian period, pre 800-900BC, dark-ages and Mycenaean Greece

>>21788562
I meant when Christians claim that “the form of the good” from Plato is actually their God. And yeah I should have phrased that last part better: who is the daddy of all daddies and what is his nature and intentions if he has them?

>>21787454
>Athena
Athena is bitch who couldn't handke that a human was better than her at weaving. So after she lost in a fair battle she destroyed the human's and her descendant's lives.

>>21788566
Basically they are just very good criteria for a creator God. He is very powerful because he caused everything. He is very good because otherwise he would otherwise not be worthy of worship (derision instead, like how Christians treat Satan.) He must be very wise and perceptive or else he would not know what he set into motion, nor could he be all powerful if he could not intercede upon things in any way, at any point in time, anywhere.

This three o characterisation is sometimes called the "God of Athens", compared to the personal God of Rome, i.e., the Catholic church. Squaring the two is a fair pursuit for theologians.

>>21788562
>Manichaeism, a 3rd century gnostic heresy, influenced Judaism, a religion dating from at least 800 BC (conservative estimate)
?????

>>21788578
The daddy of all daddies in Greek mythology is kaos, literally it's name. Here's Hesiod:

>In truth at first Chaos came to be, but next wide-bosomed Earth, the ever-sure foundation of all1the deathless ones who hold the peaks of snowy Olympus, and dim Tartarus in the depth of the wide-pathed Earth, [120] and Eros (Love), fairest among the deathless gods, who unnerves the limbs and overcomes the mind and wise counsels of all gods and all men within them. From Chaos came forth Erebus and black Night; but of Night were born Aether2and Day, [125] whom she conceived and bore from union in love with Erebus. And Earth first bore starry Heaven, equal to herself, to cover her on every side, and to be an ever-sure abiding-place for the blessed gods. And she brought forth long hills, graceful haunts [130] of the goddess Nymphs who dwell amongst the glens of the hills. She bore also the fruitless deep with his raging swell, Pontus, without sweet union of love. But afterwards she lay with Heaven and bore deep-swirling Oceanus, Coeus and Crius and Hyperion and Iapetus, [135] Theia and Rhea, Themis and Mnemosyne and gold-crowned Phoebe and lovely Tethys. After them was born Cronos the wily, youngest and most terrible of her children, and he hated his lusty sire.

As for Neoplatonist Christianity, I cannot say, though early v late Plato is divided on the form of the good.

>>21788006
This is a very cogent point that is important to consider, which probably explains why it's being completely ignored by this thread and anthropologists in general.

>>21788601
Yes. Of course I mean rabbinical Judaism, a religion far removed from 2nd temple days, and one younger than Christianity.

>>21788623
>In truth at first Chaos came to be
>came to be
This implies a temporal entity constrained by time and which was not pre-existing independently of creation. An instigating subcreation, not the creator itself.

>>21788631
Well see that's a very important distinction to make.

>>21788520
>whereas compared to the original polytheist culture of the world
Julianic cope

>>21785857
"Civilized" cultures at the time tended to agree the highest god was a wargod that took power through force. The most powerful forces in their lives were actual warlords that took power through force. The biggest presence on the heavens is the dominant warlord, Jupiter.
The observation that even the greatest warlord has to obey the rules of reality is related to the basic idea that monotheism adds to the picture.

>>21788657
ok that's a nice theory and all, but does it explain why Mycenaean Greeks worshiped Dionysus as the chief of the gods and had never even heard of Zeus?

>>21788640
Sorry, I mentioned Manichaeism mainly because I honestly don't see the view of god = the good identification popularly held anywhere earlier than that.

On the Kaos note, this will also seem wishy washy, but the translation is from

πρώτιστα Χάος γένετ᾽

Which is like saying

Firstly the void was born

Which is like saying the first thing to exist is the void. Nothing was prior to nothing. A metaphysical quandary, but clear enough in terms of priority.

>>21788680
That's even more paradoxically inane than any prime mover reduction I've ever heard. I really wonder where Hesiod got this innovation from, because it sure doesn't correspond to any Indo-European or Semitic religious concepts. I'm not even sure Egyptians were quite so self-contradictorily abstruse.

>>21788668
Everything exploded. Based sea people killed all the decadent hedonists. The Greek written language and myths were reconstructed from the earlier lost Mycenaean culture.
Before the collapse the Mediterranean was apparently relatively peaceful. The most important force in their lives that dictated everything else may have been Dionysian stuff, wine and luxuries. Maybe the meaning behind Dionysus was completely mangled by the later Greeks, they did that kind of stuff all the time.

>>21785935
Apollo was solid in fairness. The Greek side had the most annoying cunts.

>>21788651
This kinda just vividly explains how Christianity prefigured atheism. If you draw such a distinction as this author does between mythology and true religion you have to throw at least half of the OT into the trash as mythology. Then even the NT becomes suspect ad Jesus’s miracles smell of mythology and metaphor. Then you realize that true religion is actually that greatest esoteric secret: the golden rule and other assorted ethical maxims. Turns out you don’t need to be religious in any meaningful way to believe in ethical maxims. This passage is exactly why Christianity degenerated into secular humanism in around the 1700s, modern science mythologized and thus paganized the Bible itself lmao

>>21788694
or perhaps Dionysus and Zeus are the same entity, considering Zeus is occasionally attested in Mycenaean inscriptions as "Zeo" or "Deo" and Dionysus is occasionally referred to without the "-nysus" and just Dio or Dion, and it's also possible that Dionysus means "Zeus of Nyssa"
It's all quite confusing to sort out because the names all mean the same basic thing - "god", scarce different from "theos", and is also used just as non-specifically

>>21788534
>Monotheism is a powerful idea
>>21788566
>a powerful idea
eh, only to the stupid who can't understand that the person in front of them telling them about a literal god is just making it up... as always, there can be no proof for those claims and no way to tell if the person making those claims is lying with malintent or if they're just mentally ill.

>because it doesn't make sense for an omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent god to have a twin
it doesn't make sense in the first place for the being to be literally real; it's a ...stupid but understandable.. way to explain a thing to children, yes, but it's superfluous to a real culture where gods are understood as being representations of this or that.

The Roman Temples are probably the best example of this, where the aspects of the god/s or war/healing/women/farming were only 'sacred' because of the vital information methodology that the Temples were safeguarding and teaching, e.g. temple of Aesculapius was the actual college of medicine and physicians.

My point is that an adult would understand this, but a little kid or maybe a barbarian (still sacrificing to literal gods) would not understand this at all, and persist in the childish view of things.

> 1) what they can know re de se knowledge 2) might perform deeds that the other god cannot counteract 3) might have self interest to the exclusion of the other god.
sure, but this is no more than a glorified fan fic amongst children.

>>21788651
> the original polytheist culture of the world
Ahhhhh but this is actually true; the later religions 'claim' to be universal but the reality proved, as we explored the rest of the world then and later in history, that the real universal culture were 9/10 a set of identical gods with near identical stories, which were practiced moreso in ancestor veneration and spiritualism rather than literal actual (face down anus exposed" worship of 'god/s' themselves, compared shinto to the roman mos maiorum and it's the same thing for instance.

The massive difference between the Romans to the Jews and the Molochites of Carthage, for example, shows how incompatible the societies were who thought and acted in accord to primitive literalism, whilst showing how very easy it was to consider Hades or Teutatis as "the same representation" that the Romans had in the equivalent God or Legendary Figure or Legendary Story; Hercules for example.

It's a far stronger claim for 'some value' to these polytheist ideas that they arose amongst all humans all across the planet independently and were handed down largely identical from one place to the next, barring some outliers. I mean, if you went to Ancient America as a Roman or Egyptian you'd easily understand their pantheon and be able to talk to them on that level.

>>21788521
I think that you fairly well undermine my argument there, re the phoenicians. But on the other hand there's the supposed mass trading of tin from britannia, cyprus, and gallicia, throughout the bronze age. So even if it wasn't the phoenicians, at least the greeks needed to facilitate trade, which runs counter to a policy or culture of widespread piracy.

>In any case to the risk of being pedantic I'm really talking about prehistoric Greece when it comes to the formation of words like Ares and aristos/arete(Ares apparently appears even in linear B tablets already in e.g ~1200BC Knossos), even the proto-Greek phase before the beginning of the differentiation into dialectal areals

Given some navel gazing, I'm willing to buy into a shift from a proposed old word *arēs meaning supremacy/victory (in a contest/conflict)* and built from it becoming linked with excellence. Here's what etym.com has to say about the synonym for victory, nike:

'Nike
Greek goddess of victory (identified by the Romans with their Victoria), literally "victory, upper hand" (in battle, in contests, in court), probably connected with neikos "quarrel, strife," neikein "to quarrel with," a word of uncertain etymology and perhaps a pre-Greek word.'

Perhaps nike is the preIE word, and ar- the PIE derivation.

>>21788729
Sounds like this is how the Greek idea of Dionysus formed. It's the older form of Zeus but one they associate with a utopian romantic past. Their new Zeus may have differed significantly from the old one so a distinction would be needed.

>>21788758
with the use of epithets things become more confused, sadly. Is Zeus Georgos the original zeus, or an assimilation? Zeus Naos, Zeus Boleus? Zeus Agetor sounds promising as the 'ruler' until you find out usually spartans cared about that epithet.

>>21788775
And that begs the question - what if all these epithets aren't different versions/aspects of the same god, but in fact entirely separate and disparate entities who are labeled with the generic epithet of "zeus" in the meaning of "a god"?

Why would a midwit faggot who thinks Zeus is a "an irredeemable bastard" post on 4chan? Just what level of retard are you, honestly? I hope you get raped and murdered today.

>>21788775
Adding descriptions after god names or using the description alone as a reference to the god is common in Norse mythology too .I always assumed it's an aspect of the god that's being emphasized not a separate entity. However consistency was not the goal, communicating ideas was about making poetic impressions that resonate on an intuitive level not constructing logical arguments.
>>21788889
The aspect of Zeus that's concerned with farming is very similar to the thing that's like Zeus and concerned with farming. With use concepts tend to get distinguished from each other so whichever you meant the new commonly used concept becomes thought of as a distinct entity.

>>21785857
>Why was he such an irredeemable bastard?
>Did the Greeks think he was an asshole too? Or am I just completely misunderstanding ancient value systems / morality.

https://repository.upenn.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1142&context=classics_papers

Here u go.

>>21789001
Equal Honor and Future Glory: The Plan of Zeus
> The Plan of Zeus in the Iliad
https://repository.upenn.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1142&context=classics_papers

>>21788891
Good post.

>>21788719
>Then you realize that true religion is actually that greatest esoteric secret: the golden rule and other assorted ethical maxims.
>true religion
>true
>religion

>>21788691
Hesiod resolved the Paradox ; everything comes from Everything , even the Void ; "linear" formulation of where things end or begin is a consecuence of certain technologies on our senses.

>>21789028
very fat fedora tipping at incredible HIHG speed

>>21787502
>There's redundancies in the pantheon
Greece manifests Tammuz twice - once as Adonis and once as Maneros, both instances being manifestations of misunderstanding of the native languages from which they twice adopted Tammuz. So, Tammuz is twice represented in Greece, and never under his actual name.

>>21788320
>>21788420
And at some distant date, our descendants or perhaps their robot overlords will reflect back on the wisdom of the ancients (such as it is) and write their interpretations accordingly

>>21788582
Arachne now lives forever. Every curse is a blessing and every blessing a curse. Read about Midas, just as another fun example. Crafty buggers them Greeks

>>21787517
Frazer hits on this point many times in The Golden Bough with concrete examples.

>>21788891
Thanks for replying buddy :)

>>21788096
>Cristianity
>nongreek
That is not entirely true.

>>21788891
Bro he is not going to fuck you.

>>21789438
He did not sound like he was concerned with consensuality.

>>21789220
Listen, if you worship a greek god in the year 2023 youre a fucking loser

>>21789220
nigger, religion as truth is a distinction from the Judeans you fucking faggot.

You have to un-relate the concept of Truth , and the distincion of False/true "religions" entirely to begin comprehending the Egyptian, Roman or Greek view, pleb.

>>21790685
How can you claim to be apart from Judeans when your entire early history is missing and replaced by a cartoon of a bunch of Jews wandering around with talking animals?

>>21788446
Catastrophic population implosion, famine ect. Amazon basin was likewise extensively populated and collapsed (hence Incan empire in its wake) similar to Yucatan & Olmec et. al.

>>21791310
How do you know he's a Muslim lol

>>21787445
Then why you quote it and still use it? Why even distinguish old and new testament? Dumb LARPer.

>>21791690
if he was then that's about 1% less ridiculous, as arabs at least are semites, ...i'm thinking of the comedy of a celt who gets ht on the head one day and wakes up believing they're a chinaman.

idk it always seemed to fucking stupid to me the european christian claim to 'come from' the hebrews.

>>21792192
You're an absolutely mindless idiot. The worst kind of retard in history. Commies and trannies don't come close to your level of mindlessness. You will never say anything that's not based on some meme designed to confuse you.

>>21792216
>F-FF-F-FCUCCKN NO YOU!! YOU!!!
hahaha yeah, truth stings. there there little celtic boy, it'l; get better for you some day.

>>21792216

>>21792242
>>21792310
What compels retards like you to post? You're not taking part in any kind of discussion, all you can do in every thread about any subject is repeat the same tired propaganda memes over and over without adding anything. How can anyone be this fucked in the head? You're too dumb to even notice what you're doing?

>>21792327
What compels retards like you to post? You're not taking part in any kind of discussion, all you can do in every thread about any subject is repeat the same tired propaganda memes over and over without adding anything. How can anyone be this fucked in the head? You're too dumb to even notice what you're doing?

>>21785857
At the end of Everlasting Man Chesterton finally gets it - all gods are rumors whereas Jesus Christ and the trinity is Truth. Zeus is a rumor of the father and as such is a demonic lie. In other words, Zeus is dead.

>>21792334
You can't even come up with your own insults. As if to prove the point you just keep regurgitating things other people have said. Every time retards like you post you need to be reminded what you really are, completely mindless. You will never post something even slightly interesting until you realize how mindless, naive and easily controlled you are.

>>21792327
>What compels retards like you to post?
jeez idk, it's fun to point out hypocrisy I guess.

>You're not taking part in any kind of discussion,
AHEM may I remind you, Lord Fussmuffin, your first post to me was this: >>21792216 where was your intellectual case for that torrent of reactive verbal abuse?

>the same tired propaganda memes
niga i know u lyin for reals cos i just fucking made that picture myself

> over and over without adding anything. How can anyone be this fucked in the head? You're too dumb to even notice what you're doing?
IKR

>>21792354
You actually typed this shit out and thought it contained some kind of point? Read the fucking thread and then SAY SOMETHING you mindless piece of shit.

>>21792340
>all gods are rumors whereas Jesus Christ and the trinity is Truth. Zeus is a rumor of the father and as such is a demonic lie. In other words, Zeus is dead.
within Judaism, yes. Since Jesus came to Jews to help them overcome their primitive theology. But a non-jewish christian has no reason to.. e.g. be warned against believing in torah/OT hebrew theological constructs.

e.g.
Make a case for me why I, who does not believe in Eden or practice genital mutilation, should not believe in Eden and top practicing genital mutilation. Because if I don't believe in or do those things then you're goig to have to convert me to Judaism, to get me to start to Sin, before converting me to Crustynanity to save the 'from' the Sin.

thas whur im coming from on this niga

>>21792354
>just fucking made that picture myself
What does it say? Does it reveal anything to the reader other than the fact that its author is an illiterate brainwashed idiot? Do you really lie to yourself that there's some kind of sincere observation in there?

>>21792364
>URGH WARRGHHH WAHGH1!! NOO YOU
I was talking quite a lot on here yesterday actually, >>21787447 >>21787456 >>21787475>>21787484

Go ahead, I'll be here for a while if you want to discuss the topic, my little celtic friend who I will n call by your Jewish name of JOSHUA or ZEKE whatever but shall call SEXRED in stead.

Go ahead, Sexred, let us converse as if you were sober and intelligent.

>>21792369
>I am already perfect and have no need to become better in any sense
Fine, you're a retard not interested in trying to understand anything. Why would someone not interested in thinking or learning come to public forums supposedly focused on thinking and learning?
>>21792375
You're too dumb to say anything on any subject. The maximum value you can add to a thread is by listing some basic wiki summaries.

>>21792377
lawl, how do you not think, Sexred, that replying to me several times with nothing but verbal abuse is 'not' proving this point about the character of religious people to be true? >>21792310

I'm speaking normally to you and am happy and able to explain what I think, and show evidence, etc., yet you think that I'm the one who has something to learn about Good Character and Virtue from (you), who is demonstrating a total absence of good character.

I mean, I'm not convinced by your words and actions that the path you took to arrive where you are is somehow... of any worth whatsoever..

>>21788066
>Moon tends to be a female thing
Funny how the only religions in modern day with moon gods have male moon gods. (Hindu and Shinto)

I was reading this thread and suddenly a bunch of anons started fighting for no apparent reason instead of actually futhering the discussion. Almost everything they say is also completely incomprehensible- or rather, its like they read each other's posts and interpret them in a way that makes no sense so they send a nonsense response and so on and so forth.

Good job, niggers.

>>21792467
Happens every thread. I tried to engage in a logical debate the other day and when I could find no worthy challengers and abandoned the thread it turned into a standard shitflinging match. See you again tomorrow!

On topic(ish): Zeus did absolutely nothing wrong

>>21792467
it's always a christian who does it when they notice something "not praising their religion", it's expected and I understand your frustration (we'll get rid of them for good one day) but it's fine as it demonstrates how morally depraved they are; they are the greatest proof living against their religion.

Opposition to any and all logic comes from having an unprovable (or consciously wrong) belief and needing to prevent discussion about it.

>>21792420
>>Moon tends to be a female thing
>Funny how the only religions in modern day with moon gods have male moon gods. (Hindu and Shinto)
"If a Man believes the Moon is female he will be ruled by Women,"
proverb relating to Emperor Caracallas pilgrimage to the Temple of Lunus

>>21792622
>believing a giant chunk of silicates has a gender, any gender
Oh jeez, here we go

>>21792632
ha,i hate to sound like a fucking level 2 cross-hanger, but it's an allegorical thing; it's not literal, i.e. if a person believes X is a feminine thing then that person considers everything that stems from X is a feminine thing.

It's also notably backwards, the contemporary or even old world consideration of the Moon as a female thing; since, e.g. the Roman God Consus (god of government business) was represented with the Moon and the Lunar Calendar is obviously The Moon, etc. ... as well as Haides-Serapis, etc., whilst the Sun was represented with Proserpine-Isis.

>bickering and fighting
stay on topic!

>stays on topic
oh jeez here we go

>>21792653
I understand anon, it’s just silly is all. The ancients were quite wise given their understanding of human behaviour and psychology (which hasn’t really changed) but woefully ignorant in terms of the material nature of the universe (the understanding of which has changed quite dramatically)

>>21792665
The material difficulty, ... I don't know. It seems fairly obvious that the first shaman or divinators were more like scientists in the beginning; they were studying natural phenomenon to figure out what was going to happen (weather patterns, birds migrations, etc.), it's more that the literalistic conflation of nature 'with' gods is the handicap as it's easily downhill-into-idiocy just based on a simple conflation like that to forget that nature is the point of the whole thing.

Still, the material sciences of the temples themselves; understood as being guilds or colleges (medicine, agricultural, ship building, military training, government admin, banking, etc.) would have lays forced them to stay anchored in reality - I think, for that reason, that the btter comprheension of things was always known even if at times even a majority of people would be thinking in literalstic terms.

e.g. "faith" in Mars, is not to sacrifice a pig to Mars, but to train as a soldier and obey the rules of honorable conduct; success stems from pleasing the gods in that way (in this instance, because it inspires loyalty and not enmity), not from petty prayers to a priest.

In fact, maybe revise this: literalism is an easy error to correct, but an entrenched priesthood who want to be given money as intercessors for the gods... this is the problem in any religion.

>>21792715
I don’t disagree at all but will point out (not for the first time) that we’ve developed as far as we have largely on the basis of our pattern recognition abilities. We’re so good at it that we’ll see them or construct them when no such patterns actually exist. Not to open a can of worms but I think of the Pythagoreans and their insistence that math is the basis of reality: perhaps it is and it’s certainly integral (har har) to the nature of reality but the interrelationship is too complex for our little monkey brains to grasp. Doesn’t stop us from trying, mind, nor should it necessarily but it’s a little silly too.

>>21792960
>pattern recognition
That's got a lot to do with it, it's difficult to filter out confirmation biases for a lot of people it seems.... actually it's a good point there: if astrology as we understand the stars now couldn't possibly be true then what's the reason why zodaic traits can be observed and predicted in peoples behavior? If the pattern they found to explain XYZ wasn't correct then that doesn't mean the entire thing is incorrect, rather that we just haven't found the cause of a thing yet. Being able to be open to that is, I thin, the difference between dogmatism and true logic.

On that side note, personally I agree that the numeracy stuff is ridiculous, numerology is a lot like false enlightenment; a man-made framework hoisted up over something real and making it harder to perceive the real ting... in this case, e.g. magical numeracy hides real sciences like artillery and rocketry, cartography, etc. It's cute and, you're right, also very silly, when people put more wonder into those numbers than the sciences themselves.

>>21792610

>Opposition to any and all logic comes from having an unprovable (or consciously wrong) belief and needing to prevent discussion about it.

how is christianity unfalsifiable you dumb fucking retard? it's just a retelling of the prometheus story combined with hellenic philosophy. are you fucking stupid?

>>21793979
This post made me realise, though im not aware of its context, that if pattern recognisition is proportional to iq then having too great a iq can pose a difficulty. If normal people sometimes see pattern where there is none, then smarter people would see them much more often, reminds me of Kurt Gödel and his subsequent suicide.

>>21785857
Behead those who insult zeus(swt)

>>21795548
I was referring more to ... well, many things to be honest, ... 1) the literalism; the god/fables being demanded to be taken to be true, 2) the verbal profession of faith being "more important" than good deeds (living virtuous life) and avoiding vice, 3) the paradox of jesus and paul obviously coming to save the jews form abrmaic theology and ame abramic theology, inc. priests, being adopted without question by gentile christians, 4) the massive oppositionalism to logic inherent in the eden/creation story, ... . there are more ...oh yes, 5) the despicable character of the thousands of christians like you who've demonstrated themselves as possessing no grasp of the most basic of virtuous conduct,
>you dumb fucking retard
lol

For the reason that the latter, the fifth, is caused by the first four it is my view that the ancient romans were correct about this 'religion', it's death cult of nihilism toward reality and enmity toward humanity.

but, hold onto your fedoras christcucks, the whole thing can be understood via pandora; where "false hope" is the cardinal and first Evil; your 'hope' for immortality, 'hope' that your verbal proclamation of 'faith' in jewish messiah matters to God who will excuse your evil character, etc., is all Pandoric. The way we see it, anyway.
deus vult.

>>21795668
perhaps so, but are those supposed 'high iq' people really intelligent at all? seems to me that intellect takes the back seat to dogma and crowd mentality in most times and places, that is: a person may have a mind for logic (i think this is natural to the species) but it's easily distracted by local cultural absurdities; peer pressure to go along with whatever it is, etc.

>>21795927
in nomine augustae, spirito maiores

>>21795999
>1) the literalism; the god/fables being demanded to be taken to be true

They're mathematical allegories, you dumb hylic

>2) the verbal profession of faith being "more important" than good deeds (living virtuous life) and avoiding vice

It's because positive thinking affects reality because the universe is mental

>3) the paradox of jesus and paul obviously coming to save the jews form abrmaic theology and ame abramic theology, inc. priests, being adopted without question by gentile christians,

"Abrahamic theology" is just gnosticism instead of worshiping aliens

>4) the massive oppositionalism to logic inherent in the eden/creation story

the garden of eden is literally just a historical record of admetus and ivi. it's not even a story, those niggas are literally buried somewhere

>5) the despicable character of the thousands of christians like you who've demonstrated themselves as possessing no grasp of the most basic of virtuous conduct,

how am I a christian for understanding what a metaphor is? do you go around mocking JRR Tolkien fans for believing in a magic ring?

>>21796673
That is poppycock, verbatim*.

the point of literal belief in 1) cannot be refuted by a claim of allegory and metaphor only for 2) 3) 4) to be expounded upon in gross literalism; whereas the point of 5) is evident, even in this amusing opium addled impotent* attempt to undermine the universe itself.