About Those Gods

Dear friends,

I sometimes wonder how much the Greeks believed in their myths. The stories are not particularly edifying, and they do not give good examples of moral behavour, so they must have been doubted.

But they still believed in the gods. They did not turn to Atheism. Cicero's book The Nature Of The Gods, consists of a group of intellectuals discussing the principles expounded by the various schools of religious thought. None of them mention a principle justified by the myths, and none of them mention Atheism.

This is a difference between the Greek religion and Christianity. When people stop believing in the Gospel story, they stop believing Jesus was God, and very often stop believing in any kind of God whatsoever.

The reason is that they are sources of spiritual energy, manifestations of Celestial Archetypes. When the Greeks performed their sacrifices to them, they became sensitive to this energy.

It works though the use of the name. This is something that we find difficult to understand in the modern world, because we cannot see a word as actually being real in the way that all the things of the world are. When a host invites you to have a chair, you sit on the material chair, and not the word chair. Obvious, you think. This is why the Buddhists teach us not to use words. They tell us that the use of the word attaches us to the word we use for a thing, and this prevents us from understanding the thing. This means that anything expressed in words in meaningless, which is why they have used their words to tell us this - but that means it is meaningless to tell us not to use words! That means words must mean something! That's logical!

Where do words come from? Since it is clear from the Buddhists teaching that they are material things, they must be solid lumps of matter, but I have difficulty understanding this, so you must be patient with my stupidity.

A word is an expression of an idea, and all ideas come from the expression of primordial consciousness in the Mind of the Mother. A word is the highest nature of a thing. The word chair is a higher manifestation of the chair than the one we sit on, which is the reason why magicians can achieve effects by incantations. The reason why we cannot sit on the word chair is because we are material beings. We live on a low and highly consolidated level of reality. The Buddhists are drawing spiritual principles from observations of the material world.

When we speak a word, we invoke spiritual energy into a manifestation formed by the nature of the word. This is why the name of the god is so important in deciding the nature of the god.

You may, at this point, be curious about the name Christos. Now, if this was an archetypal name, there would have been a god called Christos before Jesus was born. Christos actually means annointed, and, it is argued that, since the Judaic kings annointed themselves, the name denotes that Christos was a king. Now, the fact that the Judaic kings anointed themselves, which, as far as I know, was never practiced by any other kings, does not make christos a synonym for king. They probably did it to perfume themselves, and, if they thought this made them more popular, it must have been a widespread practice, and not a specifically regal one. Perfume is a manifestation of any archetypal state, but the act of rubbing it on is not. The name Jesus means nothing. It was not actually his name, but a Latinised version of his name which historians think was either Jeshua or Jehesthua.

Now, concerning the Greek gods, there is a curiosity about the Greek language. It is based on something called declensions. This means that every noun has a case ending which varies according to the grammatical function of the sentence it is used in, so, if I want to say that Plato was a philosopher, I call him Platonos. If I want to say he lived in Athens, I write Platonou.

The declension I'm interested in is called the second declension, and the case I'm interested in is the masculine vocative. This is the case used when addressing someone, and, in this case the vocative of Plato is Platone. Now, the vocative is used when we pray. When we talk about the existence of a god, we use the nominative. The feminine nominative in this declension is the same as the masculine vocative, giving us the familiar names of Athene and Aphrodite. What this means is that, in praying to a male deity, the nominative form of a female deity would be used. Such a form would sensitise a devotee to a female spiritual energy even when praying to a male deity. The male deity was originally female.

At this point, anybody knowledgeable about Greek will be ready to accuse me of talking nonsense, because of principles this argument ignores. There was not just one declension, but a number, and many of the gods' names were not second declension names, so this argument does not apply. In addition, I ignore the fact that the Greeks had two forms of the letter e, long e and short e. The nomitive form of the goddesses was long e and the vocative masculine was short e, so they are not the same. Let me consider these points.

There was a change in Greek religion. The simplest way of illustrating this is the name Kirke, often translated as Circe. She was a sorceress in the Odyssey. The name Kirke means hawk, which is more appropriate to a warrior than a sorceress, but, when the Odyssey was written people would be unable to imagine a woman who was a warrior. The only way they would be able to imagine a woman being powerful would have been as a sorceress, so Kirke became a sorceress. The original form must have been a direct expression of the spiritual nature of the Archetypes expressed, and religious change must have involved a degeneration of the myths to suit a more violent age, which accounts for the unedifying nature of the stories.

Imagine a matriarchal religion. All the deities would have names in the feminine form. A transition to patriarchy would face a problem. The forms would have to be changed, but it is difficult to change a language. A lot of people cling to old ways out of habit, and there would have been some opposed to the change. The patriarchs would have to resort to contrivances, and one of them would be the invention of new declensions, invented by people working independantly of each other and largely not knowing what each other are doing, which is why the Greeks had more than one. The patriarchs would have tried to suppress the second declension, but a language is a very complicated thing, and they would not have been able to suppress every use of it. There is the effect of conservatism, which maintains the old through habit, but there would also have been people determined to keep the use of the old up because of old religous beliefs.

Now, someone praying to a god conscious that he was using a feminine nominative form, would be inhibited in pronouncing the name, and, when we are inhibited in speaking a word, we tend to shorten vowels, which is way the long e was reduced to the short e.

You may think that what I am arguing could easily be accounted for by coincidence and the careless use of language, but people don't want language to be confusing, and this case will have been a source of confusion. In addition, there is the inhibiting effect it has on prayer, which would stop it coming into use as a result of carelessness.

May She be with you,

David.