Course XXVII comparative religion

Teaching 15: Greek Gods

The true worship with gods, images and ceremonies begins in ancient Greece during the period called Mycenaean period. But Greek idols just reach the acme during the Hellenic era.

The Hellenic era is composed of Aeolian, Ionan and Dorian dynasties. By these three forces together, Greece thrives on religion, poetry, sculpture and music, since the Hellenic worship is a consequence of fine arts, and fine arts are not a consequence of worship as in other religions.

Any power, any momentum, any act of bravery joins to arts and creates a god.

One can see this in the birth of popular mythology. Kronos and ancient Titans are a civilization in its cradle, a culture in its beginning, since Zeus, the great god, emerges from this uneducated and strong people. He is already a god that is symbol of strength, order, victory and steady law for progress and magnificence of the Greek.

In the Olympus, site of his reign, he assembles divinities of any kind: of air, sea, earth and hell. He is the Absolute One that contains by iron fist and unyielding will every human and divine power, according with the Hellenic dream: to be the only people that would control and dominate everybody by persuasion, strength and all arts.

As you can see, the empire of Greece did not die in the world.

Zeus divides his heavenly kingdom with his brothers Poseidon and Ares. Hera, wife and sister of the God, is symbol of potential power and manifestation; a multitude of sons and daughters assist these severe gods in their reign.

Pallas Athena is goddess of power and war; she watches over Athens and scholars, since she is born of an inspired thought of Zeus.

Phoebus, god of the Solar light, symbol of the Sun’s vital energy, adorned with beauty and grace, holding an arrow and a lyre, hurts eager people for learning and bewitches them by means of poetry, music and fine arts.

Artemis is the sister of the Sun, symbol of a clear night, of the Moon, countryside and hunters: she protects and regulates physiological life of women.

Hermes, symbol of Christ, symbol of the son of God, is revered as messenger of gods; he protects youth, the future promise of the people, and eventually saves souls and guides them toward the mansion of peace.

Hephaestus is the God of fire; none, except him, is able to work metals, symbol of mystical fire and of the life-giving current of beings, and image of the Indian Kundalini; Aphrodite, goddess of beauty, love and generation, would be unable to give life to men without the assistance and great power of Hephaestus. He is the only legitimate husband, in spite of other lovers of Aphrodite, because generation power is one in its fundamental aspect.

Ares is god of violent war, and hated by the rest of gods. Hestia is a goddess patron of home, like a guardian angel or like the meek Joseph among Catholics.

Poseidon, image of instinctive matter, is sovereign of waters and sea, and of storms and earthquakes; he hold a trident, symbol of power of the elementals or of that of the lower triangle: instinctive mind, original energy and rough matter.

Demeter, sister of Zeus, is mother of earth; she is like the spirit of earth that gives life to Nature, makes trees flower, fertilizs crops and gives abundant grapes.

But Dyonisus or Bacchus is god of wine, symbol of bacchanalia, oblivion and astral pleasure.

Those above mentioned are not the only gods in the Hellenic Olympus, because after them there are a lot of minor gods, namely, the three Parcae, symbol of goddesses of karma; the nine Muses; and the three Charites, symbol of grace and beauty.

The Greeks also deified heroes, but the true worship strove to find the Only God behind every aspect of each divinity.

Xenophanes, a great philosopher, deplored the concept of the common people about worshipping the external symbol of gods and forgetting the Only God, with no body or form, who is pure essence.

Poetry greatly helped by enriching nuptial, funereal and epic songs.

As early as before Homer’s Odyssey, there is memory of great poets such as Linus, Hymenaeus, Museus, Orpheus and Anphion.

As we said earlier, arts of any type created worship and co-operated with it

Teaching 16: Arts and Philosophies

With the exception of the Greek people, in arts and philosophy no people reached such high level, which is difficult to surpass.

This civilization, born between pillars of the seven sciences, touched and deepened any knowledge, discovered and synthesized any beauty, and gave a new sense to life by means of poetry, literature and philosophy.

It is impossible to name every artist of the archaic period, because they are very numerous; among them one may remember Solon that been also a poet, gave laws to Athens, and was one of the seven sages in those heroic times. Even one cannot forget Sapho, a wonderful poetess, who chanted to pleasures of living through such delicate lines that very few could do after her.

Pindar was the greatest Greek poet, but just fragments of his poems came to our days, and the same happened with many of them, i.e., Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Epicharmus and Aristophanes.

Even Aesop, an author of satirical prose, or Herodotus, a historian, should not be forgotten.

But Greek knowledge really increases thanks to that legion of scholars and lovers of the truth –the philosophers.

That pillar of wonderful sages begins with Xenophanes. As early as in his time he wrote authoritatively about the origin of the Universe and the concept of Divinity.

But it is in the Attic period that philosophers flourish.

Thales of Miletos, who based his philosophy on the study of physics, geometry and astronomy, is the oldest thinker. He considered water as the first original principle of every natural thing.

Anaximader and Anaximenes belong to his school, both of them from Miletos, who considered the universe, besides its physical composition, as result of a more subtle and unknown element, which they named “Infinite concrete mass”.

Also Heraclitus of Ephesus belonged to the physical school and attributed a divine spirit to elements.

In those days, Xenophanes, a monotheistic philosopher, hated images and seemingly was a predecessor of iconoclasts.

But the most outstanding philosophical school was the Italic school, under Pythagoras. First of all, he was a great mathematician that applied foundations of mathematics and algebra to the universe and to metaphysical laws. He is one of the first to express the idea of metempsychosis or reincarnation.

Leucipus of Elea founded an atomistic school and held the human soul is a causal and energetic result of an atomic cell agglutination

Empedocles wants to synthesize spirit and matter. So he imagines the universe like two great currents that, as they mix, create manifested life.

Anaxagoras was the first to divide elements into groups, and Hippocrates, a philosopher and physician, did the same.

But Greek philosophies had declined and were more and more materialistic, until the sophists and their school.

Then Socrates emerged –the great philosopher of the spirit.

Plato, his disciple, completed Socrates’ work; he was the founder of the Academy, and left very numerous writings in which one can perceive clearly his deep spiritual and esoteric spirit.

Since then, philosophers begin to fly through spaces of the mind and to look for subtle questions related to imponderable things.

Aristotle is philosopher of ideas, of the mind, of spiritual conceptions, of the static sense of life, and founder of the peripatetic school.

As these spiritual schools expanded, other two centers had come into being in Athens: the Epicurean school and the Stoic school.

Epicurus, founder of the former, taught his disciples that gods do not deal with human matters, and man came into being to enjoy wisely pleasures of life, meeting in a right balance his desires, rejecting pain and anguish, and that one should not fear death because it is just the dissolution of the body.

Zeno of Cippo founded the Stoic school; in his view happiness of man consists just of virtue and complete control of passions. The entire Christian moral is based on this school, and in its view the human soul is not an emanation of the divinity but a part of this divinity, and the summum bonum consists in being able to help our neighbors.

The last Greek philosophers, called “of the Roman period”, quite influenced by the greatness of Rome, were Iamblichus, Heliodorus, Dyionisius and many others. Among them there are certain Christians belonging to the Neo-Platonic school, such as Justin, Origen, Basil and Eusebius.

Ammonius Saccas deserves an especial mention; he was founder of the Neo-Platonic esoteric school and teacher of the virgin Hypatia, that great woman from Alexandria stoned to death by a crowd of uneducated Christians.

Also Basilides belonged to this school; we can conclude that the excellent legion of Greek philosophers has perished with her; they were founders of every school that still are in force in the world.