Acceptance

One of the deepest things Mythology has taught me is acceptance; acceptance of the real, of how things are, of what is right in front of me.

For familiarity/accessibility, I’ll be using Greek examples. In The Republic, Plato expresses discomfort at Homer’s depiction of the gods, accusing him of misrepresenting them as changeable, quarrelsome, and immoral. Plato seems to be advocating for a more abstract and aspirational understanding of the divine. Plato wants a story-world in which you could ask yourself “What would Zeus do?” and not come up with a horrific answer.

But what if we looked at the stories themselves, without needing them to be different than they are, what can we discover? Homer offers a story-world in which we can ask ourselves “What does this depiction of Zeus tell me about the Sky, or life-force, or power?” Sky rains, bidden and unbidden upon the earth, without regard for the weather I want or if I have my umbrella; that’s how Zeus shows up. When Zeus has sex, it’s never recreational, it always produces a hero; then that hero is then tested by Hera, and fulfills a certain culture-building role. Or on another level the generative power and the adversarial power insure the strength and contribute something new to the world. While they have harmonious moments, Zeus and Hera, by and large, are not meant to be role models for human marriage, they are profound cosmic forces.

Recently I heard someone talking about the roles of Athena and Poseidon in Odysseus’ story; they considered Athena the force of Wisdom and awareness, emerging as she does from the head of Zeus; and considered Poseidon, lord of the sea, as the force of instinct and emotion and depth; working in and through the life of a man whose access and control of these powers is, not surprisingly, quite limited. This made me wonder about their adversarial roles in other stories, like the founding of Athens and the origin of Medusa. If we see these stories literally and then interpret what we see through the lens of social justice, ethics, or even basic decency everyone comes out looking like a monster. But this was never their function(!), a fact that was self-evident in Homer’s Archaic Period of Greece, but was already lost by the Classical Period, even among the wise! So no wonder people are confused today. 

And that brings us back to acceptance; trusting the story is telling us something just as it is, on its own terms. Accepting that life-giving rain and storm floods have the same origin, or that plague and cure have the same source feels like wisdom. It is so different from imposing human morality on these greater than human forces and then finding them wanting for not reflecting back what expected to find there. Sky, Love, Death, etc. are as they are, not as we’d like them to be. The old stories have taught me that.