I don't fear Zeus' wrath in saying such things. He's a pillock anyway and he's dead. (If you can't tell this entire series is just a long con to let me insult Zeus as much as possible).
Athena is the third born child of Zeus, after Ares and Hephaestus, and hers is where the origin stories get buck wild!
Athena is NOT a child of Hera. Which, since she is a child of Zeus, and Hera is Zeus' wife, caused no little amount of tension. She might have been the first in this regard, but she is far from the last. Athena is sometimes said to be the daughter of Zeus alone - who conjured her as it was from his mind. Like some kind of backwards immaculate conception. But there’s nothing immaculate about Zeus. More often Athena is known as the daughter of Zeus and his first-love-but-not-wife, Metis, the Titaness you may remember who helped Zeus defeat Kronos. Hera knew that her husband was sleeping with Metis though, and she was not. Having it. So Zeus needed to hide Metis away where Hera could not find her (this is like. The theme of Zeus' life). Metis was proud, though, and did not wish to hide, so Zeus decided to trick her.
According to some stories, Zeus' fear was not of Hera, but rather that any child he sired by Metis would eventually overthrow him, as he had Kronos, and Kronos had his own father Ouranos. In those stories, Zeus tricked Metis out of fear of her unborn child. I guess he thought that Ares and Hephaestus were too wimpy to overthrow him, but Metis' child wouldn't be? In any case...
One day after he had been with Metis, Zeus proposed they play a game. Zeus was a master at changing forms, and invited Metis to a small competition. He shape-shifted into an animal - a cow maybe, or a horse, I don't recall - and Metis would follow suit, shifting her form to match his. Zeus next transformed into a mighty eagle, and Metis did as well. Finally Zeus transformed himself into a tiny little fly. And so did Metis. Once she was a tiny fly, however, Zeus changed the game. He transformed back into his normal form and before Metis could follow suit he... swallowed her. Because… because he could, I guess. Because he’s Zeus. You’ll see that this is far from the last time that Zeus turns himself or a lady into an animal to hide her from Hera. It’s a whole kink of his, I swear.
Anyway so Zeus swallowed Metis - not unlike how Kronos had swallowed his own children, just this time Zeus managed it before the kid was even born by swallowing her mother whole. But somehow instead of taking up residence in his stomach, you know, like how the digestive track works? No, Metis set up shop in Zeus’ head. She was the wisest among the Titans after all. And she got to work. You see, Metis was already pregnant. And she took this whole being swallowed thing pretty well in stride. She decided to go ahead and prepare for her child’s arrival by making them a set of clothes. I don’t know where she got the materials, but she spun and wove and sewed clothing - adult sizes because gods age differently, you know. And then she crafted armor - a huge, shining shield and a brilliant helmet. And a spear, to arm her child. She made them from scratch, I guess, all inside of Zeus’ head, and all while pregnant. Metis is terrific.
If you’ve ever watched a blacksmith at work, though, you know that there’s a lot of pounding hammers and heat and noise. Metis' diligent work gave Zeus a terrible, terrible headache (serves him right for swallowing a woman). The pounding, piercing pain in Zeus’ head grew worse and worse day after day as time went on, until he could no longer stand it. His head was in such pain that he asked his son, Hephaestus, to take a chisel and a hammer and just split his head open, to let the terrible pain out. With the help of his Cyclopes to hold his father down, Zeus’ son did as he was told, splitting Zeus’ skull open with one mighty blow. And, miracle of miracles, out stepped a woman! Clothed, armored, and armed magnificently (Hopefully her mother came out too). For it was Athena, daughter of Zeus, ready to take on the world. Gives a new meaning to ‘’Brainchild’ eh? Ok I’ll… I’ll show myself out.
Ever since then, Athena hasn’t stopped being awesome, and everyone loves her. And when people love a god, they give them many, many names. Athena has a lot of them, and they all have some stories. Pallas is one, meaning either ‘weapon brandisher’ or ‘young woman’. Or both! There are lots of stories about how she got this name, some sadder than others, but she definitely took it from someone. Sometimes Pallas is the name of a man who tried to assault her, whom Athena killed and took the skin and name of as a trophy. In another myth, Athena and Pallas were childhood friends, and Athena accidentally killed Pallas during a sparring match, and was so distraught that she took on Pallas’ name, to honor her friend, that the name Pallas might live forever (and it has). Other names for Athena include “Grey-eyed goddess”, which is pretty self explanatory, and “Aegis-bearer” - which is from a story I will tell later, but has to do with a unique piece of armor Athena always wears. It's why one of her symbols (which I failed to include on the earlier list) is the Gorgoneion (like a medusa face, normally worn on the chest). These are just a few of Athena's names.
And Athena has, of course, also given her name to others, including Athens itself. That too is a tale. For when great Athens was built - an as yet unnamed city on a hill in wild Attika, overlooking the Saronic Gulf - both Poseidon and Athena wished to claim it for their own. The people of the city honored the gods, and Athena and Poseidon agreed that whichever of them could give to people a better gift, would claim patronage of the city. Poseidon for his part struck the ground with his mighty trident, and a spring of water welled up from the earth! The people praised Poseidon, but when they came to the new spring in their city, they found that the water was not the fresh water they had imagined, but salty water from the sea, of which Poseidon was God and King. Next it was Athena’s turn. She, unlike Poseidon, knew what a people needed to grow. They needed lumber, strong wood to build and to keep them warm. They needed oil, and industry, and FOOD. And so Athena created the world’s first Olive Tree, domesticated and ready to sustain all of Attika with its wealth. This was a fine gift indeed, and the people agreed that they would be Athenians - named for Athena - and she would be their god.
What other tales can I tell of Athena? Not all of them end so happily. You mad have heard the tale of Arachne (Not to be confused with Ariadne). Arachne was a mortal woman, and was an artist and weaver. in some stories, she was in fact a student of Athena herself, whose domain of craft includes weaving. Arachne is a classic tale of hubris and pride, as she proudly claimed that she was the best weaver in all of Greece - and was in fact greater at the art than Athena herself! A god cannot ignore such a claim. Athena came down and at first she gracefully allowed Arachne a chance at redemption, to take back the foolish things she had said. The goddess arrived disguised as an old woman and told Arachne not to dishonor the gods. But Arachne would not recant. She repeated her blasphemy and wished to prove her skill. And so Athena revealed herself, and accepted the challenge with Arachne had laid down. The two would both weave a tapestry each, and weave all day long. At the end of the day, whoever had the better tapestry would win.
Athena wove a tapestry of the utmost quality, a beautiful depiction of her victory over Poseidon and the founding of her city, Athens. And Arachne, for her part, wove a tapestry just as well made, her technique flawless. But the scenes she chose to depict were just as dishonoring of the gods as her words: scenes of Zeus' many scandals and indecencies. Twenty-one of them, in fact. True or no, the depiction of the gods - and Athena's father - as lewd and base enraged Athena, who destroyed the blasphemous work and cursed Arachne for her insolence, striking her with the butt of her spear. Arachne finally relented before the goddess, and it is said that she attempted to kill herself in her despair at being forsaken by the gods. But Athena took pity and brought her back to life as the world's greatest spinner of webs and tapestries - a spider. Thus derives the names Arachnid. (If I get into Ovid's Metomorphoses you will see that this is a pattern in Greek/Roman myth, that of someone who dies or almost dies but is instead changed into an animal, plant, river, etc. More on that later.)
So yes. Athena is not above vengeance, especially on those who claim her glory as their own. But her patronage is something which should be sought, for she gives good gifts. Another famous hero who gained Athena's favor was the famed strategist Odysseus, who will need his own post eventually.
Athena is a defender of women, a master craftsman, the goddess of strategy, and of wisdom. She was claimed by Athens, who valued democracy and rational thought, philosophy, and politics. And Athena lives on to this day. She is one of the longest lasting symbols of the Greek world, largely become Christendom also fell in love with her.
A few summers ago, I got the chance to travel around Europe for about a month. I did not unfortunately visit Greece, but I did visit Rome. It was a terrific trip, but one of the things that has stuck in my mind the most was my visit to St. Peter's Basilica in Vatican City. It is a really wonderful place, with so much astounding art and beauty inside. Most people remember seeing Michoangelo's Pieta when they think of art inside the Basilica, but the one that caught my eye the most was this:
It's a statue of... some Pope. I don't know which one. There is text underneath but it's not in the picture I took. As you can see, though, there are two people backing this Pope up. And they appear to me at least to be the Virgin Mary, mother of Christ (or some other female saint?), and across from her, Athena - or at least, the embodiment of Wisdom, who looks just like Athena. Gorgoneion and all! It really stuck me, seeing an actual carving of an actual pagan god inside a church building - THE church building as far as some people are concerned. Of all of the Greek gods, Athena was found to be the good one, the safe one, the clean one, the acceptable one. She is Wisdom, which is important to all things, including the pursuit of Theology and of God. St. Thomas Aquinas does not, to my knowledge, mention Athena by name, but his work - in which Philosophy stands hand in hand with Theology - works along this same vein. The same could be said of Boethius, if I am recalling him correctly.
Athena came to represent an idea which I definitely stand for - that sometimes, by God's grace through his general revelation, that is, his creation of this world and of mankind, the pagans Get Something Right about God, and their powerful mastery of image and imagination makes this POWERFUL in a way that the Christian tradition often lacks. I said last time that the gods are shadows of God. The real God has all of their goodness and more beyond. Well, Athena is one of the best of these shadows the Greeks have to offer. She is beauty, grace, truth, wisdom, virtue, strength, intelligence, power, safety, purity, she is war and peace, she is Athena.
But again, as with all gods. The worship of Athena herself - either as a person or as an ideal - is folly. Athena is an excellent example of virtue, but she is not Virtue itself. She is not Wisdom itself, but merely the best of man's wisdom. She may be a Paragon, but she is a human paragon, a paragon made by human hands. And that paragon may reflect something truly divine, greater than humans can reach, but it is still a reflection, it is still not whole.
Where is the danger of Athena today? Hers may be the most insidious and hidden of all. The Idol of Athena is an idol of relying on one's own reason and wisdom. Of believing too strongly in one's own rightness, and of thinking that mankind's wisdom is all that there is. Anyone who says that Science is the only authority - that if you cannot prove it empirically than it does not exist - may have fallen into this trap. Anyone who believes that Mankind can Save Themselves, and that Progress is the Answer. It's very Existentialist in a way, and Romantic. People like Rousseau were of the cult of Athena. Even Nietzsche. In everyday life Dark Side of Athena is pretension, exclusion of others, the assumption that one knows what is right, and the unwillingness to entertain other opinions. It is a violation of the Ethics of Debate. It is Pride. It is reading the Truth of Scripture and thinking you know better than what you read. Another Dark Side can simply be intellect used for the wrong ends. Or Intellect allowed to take control of one's time and effort, to the expense of life and love. There are a lot of ways that all of this can go wrong, some more subtle than others. All come back to the order of things: If the love of Athena is put anywhere other than BELOW and a part of the love of God - the TRUE font of Wisdom, the True Warrior, the True Defender of Women, the True Holy One, the True Creative Genius, etc. - then it is in vain.
Have I fallen victim to all of this myself? Almost undoubtedly, yes. I am quite sure that I have, and probably continue to in ways I don't even see. But I do not conflate my love of the character of Athena with the ways in which I have fallen victim to all of this. I should have made this more clear in my Ares and Hephaestus post but the two are quite separate these days. Athena is the best and I will fight anyone who says otherwise. And I don't think that my taking that stance is morally bad or dangerous. But at the same time, analyzing Athena as a deity can help point out things in my own life which have gone wrong, priorities and beliefs I have which may be perverted, etc.
I'm going to try to give the good and bad of each god I touch on, and sometimes there's gonna be more or less in each degree. I hope that I do not tarnish your view of these characters through this analysis, for that is the opposite of my goal. There is so much of Athena which reflects the truth about God in so many ways.
This is as good a time as any to get into some of my Philosophy of Mythology, I think. I started writing this up as it's own thing, but I want to put it here.
This bit is a Long. Time. In the making. (To be read in Treebeard's voice). And it is a culmination of MANY attempts to explain my thoughts on this subject - or maybe less of a culmination and more of the most recent attempt in a long line which are hopefully improving each time.
There are many, many different reasons why I love mythology, and if you've read any of these posts hopefully you've gotten a taste of that. But I want to put some language behind my thoughts. Mythology deals with big idea, and what it does is "incarnate" them.
I said a few posts ago that "In Greek, every noun is also a Proper Noun". But what does this actually do for us, besides get confusing? To answer this, I want to share an idea from - who else? - C. S. Lewis.
I stumbled upon this passage several years ago, and even though for Lewis it seemed a comment made in passing, the idea has not let me go. It's from a chapter of his The Four Loves which isn't even about one of the titular loves. The chapter is on "Likings and Loves for the Sub-Human", specifically his section on the love of nature. I'm just going to quote from it (emphasis added):
What nature-lovers--whether they are Wordsworthians or people with "dark gods in their blood"--get from nature is an iconography, a language of images. I do not mean simply visual images; it is the "moods" or "spirits" themselves--the powerful expositions of terror, gloom, jocundity, cruelty, lust, innocence, purity--that are the images. In them each man can clothe his own belief. We must learn our theology or philosophy elsewhere (not surprisingly, we often learn them from theologians and philosophers).
But when I speak of "clothing" our belief in such images I do not mean anything like using nature for similes or metaphors in the manner of the poets. Indeed I might have said "filling" or "incarnating" rather than clothing. Many people--I am one myself--would never, but for what nature does to us, have had any content to put into the words we must use in confessing our faith. Nature never taught me that there exists a God of glory and of infinite majesty. I had to learn that in other ways. But nature gave the word glory a meaning for me. I still do not know where else I could have found one. I do not see how the "fear" of God could have ever meant to me anything but the lowest prudential efforts to be safe, if I had never seen certain ominous ravines and unapproachable crags. And if nature had never awakened certain longings in me, huge areas of what I can now mean by the "love" of God would never, so far as I can see, have existed.This is the passage which has in a way changed my life. And to which I keep returning again and again. Because I think Lewis hit something right on the head here. And I think it's bigger even than nature. I've tried putting this into academic writing but it has never turned out. But the idea I want to get at is that Nature is not the only one who can do this kind of thing. Fiction can be just as if not more effective a teacher, and functions as a pseudo-experience of nature.
What do I mean by that? I mean that just how Nature never taught Lewis that God was glorious, so Nature never taught me. We both had to learn these elsewhere. But just as Nature gave the word "glory" meaning for Lewis, so Athena has given the word "glory" meaning for me. And she's not the only one, of course. I have encountered many incarnations of Glory, and of Wisdom - countless, even, all of which help combine into my own understanding of what the word means. When I apply the word "wise" to God, I mean something by it - and what it means to be is shaped by my understanding of Wisdom. Which in turn has been shaped by my experiences, including of Athena. Do you see?
Perhaps Love is a better example. My understanding of Love is shaped by SO MANY different things in my life. From the love I myself receive and experience and give, to the love I see in others, to the love I read about in stories. And all of this feeds into my understanding of what "Love" means. So that when God says "I love you", I know what love means - what it looks like, feels like, smells like, tastes like, etc. (I don't mean that just in a physical sense. I mean it in the way you recognize something by smell or by taste, because you've smelled or tasted it before. So with things like Love).
Of course it's possible for these understandings to get messed up - for instance, if I allowed Zeus or Aphrodite to shape my view of love, I would have a skewed understanding of it. There is a measure to which I can give my assent - or withhold it - from the stories which might shape my understanding. But it is stories which shape our ideas. So we need to be careful of what it is we accept.
When I say I love Athena, it is because she helps incarnate to me certain aspects which she has in common with both myself and with God. She is not the be all and end all of these things. God is. She is not an Incarnation of God Himself - Jesus is. But she is a reflection that is tangible to me. In the same way, Aslan is more tangible to me. And Saint Joan of Arc is more tangible to me.
In his play Saint Joan Bernard Shaw has this line, "Must then a Christ perish in torment in every age to save those that have no imagination?" - and while I do not agree with him about everything this entails (one may be saved without relying on imagination. It is not, as Shaw seems to think, the strength of one's faith that saves them, but the strength of their Savior, the one whom that faith is in.) But there is weight to this idea. That one of the reasons God wishes his children to emulate Christ, to be Christs to each other, is to constantly help Incarnate himself to us in more tangible ways. It is why we the Church are called the Body of Christ.
I could go on and on about this. But the idea I want to share is that in a similar way, fictional characters - like Athena, like Aslan, like Samwise Gamgee, like Wonder Woman, etc. - can play a part in "incarnating" certain things to us, like Wisdom or Compassion or Bravery or Sacrifice - in a way that we might not ever encounter elsewhere. And of course we don't worship these incarnations. They are human and incomplete. But we can love them, and love the one whom they reflect and teach us of.
All truth is God's truth, all goodness God's goodness, all beauty God's beauty.
Praise God from whom all blessings flow. Praise him all creatures here below. Praise him above ye heavenly host. Praise Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. Amen.
Thank you for reading. I am sure I will continue more of this soon.
R
No comments:
Post a Comment