Myths to Live By, Part 4

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© Davidson Loehr 2005

16 January 2005

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

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Prayer

We pray that we can find a way to fit all our parts together into a coordinated whole.

We are such complex creatures. We have so many voices inside telling us what we should do or be.

One says, “Work harder; earn more; provide for your family.” Another counters, “Spend more time with your family, your partner, your friends.” One voice says “Obey authorities, serve your nation.” Another says, “Question your leaders to insure that they are serving your nation.” One voice wants us to get to know ourselves better, to go deeper into who we are and what we should do. But another voice urges us to be sociable, to look outward rather than inward, to become working parts of a larger world than just ourselves.

Socrates once said “The unexamined life is not worth living,” and we still try to examine, to know ourselves, to know our souls. But the unlived life is not worth examining! And so we are pulled outward again, to spend time and energy experiencing rather than just contemplating.

And there are many more voices than these. We each have our own personal pantheon of gods, giving us orders, as we struggle to pull them all together into a whole. Our quest is for nothing less than the lost Atlantis of the coordinated soul.

It is the quest that makes us most fully human, most nuanced. We pray for the insight, the vision, and the will to listen to the best voices, and learn to blend them all together.

It is a noble goal. Let us persist. And let us be patient with ourselves.

Amen.

SERMON:

“Myths to Live By,” Part Four: The Gods of Men and Societies

This is the third sermon I’ve done on the Greek gods and goddesses, and it’s such a rich field that each time I’ve been led to places I hadn’t expected. This morning is the first of two sermons on the Greek gods – the second one will be in two weeks, on January 30th.

This business of gods is more complex than you might think. For instance, when we talked about the Greek goddesses, I was just using them to see different archetypes of behaviors that are still familiar to most women in our culture. But we could have used them to understand the values of many families or public schools or good nursing, since these are areas often defined by women. So you find more feminine values in these areas, concerned with relationships, nurturing, treating everyone with respect regardless of their status, and so on.

When we study the male gods, we have to talk about how they define the areas of the world that men control, because it’s most areas of the world.

But first, if we’re going to talk about Greek gods, we need to take some time to understand what gods are. Different cultures have produced very different kinds of gods. The main Hindu god, Brahman, is the biggest and most abstract of all gods, I think. Brahman is a symbol for all the creative, sustaining and destructive forces in the universe. Then all the different gods the Hindus have created give form to one or more parts of these universal forces.

Yahweh, the god of the Hebrew scriptures, the bible, was created in the image of ancient Hebrew tribal chiefs, and was given the powers of tribal chiefs. So Yahweh sets the rules for behavior, promises rewards to the good and punishments for the disobedient, just like a powerful tribal chief. Biblical scholars have found that the covenant between that God and his chosen people was modeled on ancient Hittite treaties between a sovereign and his subjects, for instance. Yahweh told us what we could and couldn’t do, and those who spoke for him were always writing commandments they insisted that this God meant for us to follow – as they still are. Yahweh also had a lot of sexual hang-ups compared with the gods of the Hindus or the Greeks, and those hang-ups have tainted almost all of Western civilization – you think gods aren’t powerful?

But where Yahweh was an autocratic rule-giver who didn’t much like sex or independent women, the Greek gods could hardly forbid many behaviors, because they did about everything themselves. They were certainly much more comfortable with sex than old Yahweh was. The Greek gods were made as imaginative images of the psychological dynamics they saw within human nature. So, while the ancient Greek gods and goddesses aren’t worshiped any more, they are still worth studying because they are about us, about human nature, and that nature hasn’t changed much in the past ten thousand or hundred thousand years.

You could spend years of study just on the four gods I’m talking about this morning. These are about men, but since men control the power of states, armies and most organized religions, they also show us a picture of our world, the world of Western civilization that has half its roots deep into the soil of the ancient Greeks. It also shows us the kind of balance – or lack of it – that we have, both individually and as a society.

One more word about gods, since it’s hard for most of us to understand what gods are. The study of gods is not like a manhunt or the search for a missing person. There are no fellows, no critters, no Big Guys hiding somewhere behind a cloud or up a mountain that we’re planning to find, then sit down and talk with. That’s not what gods are. The study of gods is a discovery of the human soul in some of its most powerful and imaginative projections. We create our gods to preserve and teach our vision of who we are or aspire to be, and the powers or mysteries we see as most significant in life.

There’s a Theology 101 course in just one paragraph.

So. We’ll take two weeks for the Greek male gods. We’ll talk about four of them today, and four more in two weeks.

While most of the gods are psychological archetypes of styles we men can still find in ourselves, the three most powerful Greek gods were quite profound psychology about styles of being that apply to both men and women. I want to begin with those three gods, who were brothers. I’ll back into it.

Think of our world as having three different levels, three different realms, and three different styles of living. The first level emphasizes clear thinking, cool and impersonal rationality; it takes the long view, sets goals, and works to achieve them. You could think of bright sunlight on a clear day for this level. The job of the god at this level is to harness all of our different gods into an integrated and productive whole.

The second level is as deep as the ocean, and as turbulent. Here it is not clear thinking, but powerful emotions that rule. There is no long view, no overall plan, though both desire and rage may last a long time, and a grudge can be carried forever. There are deep feelings here that would frighten most people, but to those who live in this realm, the deep and powerful feelings are home. They are seldom, however, a comfortable home: their turbulence short-circuits nearly all efforts to put a life into order, and you are tossed about on the waves of an overwhelming sea of powerful feelings.

The third realm is in the underworld. Cool, dark, dispassionate, removed from the worlds of both the first two levels, this is the realm of the suppressed and the unconscious, of convoluted ambiguities and dark doubts. This is the underside of the bright and clear world, its other half. It is always beneath us, this underworld, though few can live in it, or would want to.

You could call this third level the realm of Hades, for that is what the ancient Greeks called it – or you could call it Hell, after the Norse goddess of the underworld. The Greek mythology is very telling here, for Hades was almost never seen, though he was always there. He had a cap of invisibility, making him an unseen presence, just as modern psychologists have shown us that the realm of the unconscious and of the shadow sides of our psyches is an unseen presence within our lives and our world. Hades people can often be found leading lives of quiet desperation, aware of the shadow sides, but unable to integrate them into a well-rounded life.

And that second level, the style of living where deep and turbulent emotions rule, you could think of as the realm of Poseidon. Like Hades, his was the realm of inner realities rather than outer ones, but here they have a terrible force. They carry grudges, they seek vengeance, and like the sea they often have a calm surface hiding a terrible power raging underneath. To take the most violent examples, think of the number of times that mass murderers have been described as calm and quiet people. And those of you who have spent time studying the Greek classics will know of the awful power, rage, and grudges carried by Poseidon. The whole book of the Odyssey was driven by Poseidon’s rage at Odysseus for killing his son Polyphemos. He pursued Odysseus for ten years, until Athena – always the protector of the great male heroes – intervened to let him go home.

Neither Hades nor Poseidon ever accomplished much that was constructive. Poseidon was as much a victim of his fury as everyone else was, because he could not escape its pull on him. So Poseidon remained mostly trapped within the depths of his feelings, as Hades remained mostly in the dark depths of his shadows and abstractions.

Both ancient myths and modern experience say that few people would want to have to live in those depths, and those who do are not people you would want to invite to a party. Both in Greek mythology and in our western cultures, which have been so heavily shaped by that mythology, we choose to live above the ground, in a world of clarity and light. That realm reigns supreme now as then. And that first level, the realm of clarity and light, was the realm of Zeus, the number one god of the Olympians. Zeus’s job was to coordinate our passions into a working and integrated whole. He was so different from Yahweh, who tried to deny or suppress our passions. Zeus embraced them – they were also gods, after all, meaning they are enduring parts of human nature and the human condition. But he wanted a clear rationality to rule the whole.

I was struck several times while working on this sermon just how much our world really does echo the old mythic realm of Mt. Olympus. The world that they and we recognize as normative, healthy and sane is the realm of Zeus’s clear-thinking, of rational behavior and a life where dark doubts and powerful emotions are kept in line through the training and education of unclouded, well-ordered minds. As individuals and as a society, we are not comfortable with introspection or deep doubts. And, since we insist that everything lies on the surface, knowing what to do is just a matter of gathering the necessary facts and then taking decisive action. This is the style of life that the Greeks exalted in their myths, and that western culture has exalted for more than 3,000 years.

Zeus was the god of lightning; his symbol was the thunderbolt. And to this day, when we dare to go against an authoritative prohibition handed down from above, we speak of “waiting for the lightning to strike.”

These first three gods – Zeus, Poseidon and Hades – show us the major parts of our psyches, all of our psyches. Women can recognize them as well as men. But I want to go back to the Alpha Male, the Main Man, the top God, Zeus, and his Number One Son.

Zeus was like the CEO of the Olympic deities, or at least tried to be. And in our own culture, CEO types operate much like Zeus. They give the orders, they have the vision, and their anger can make heads roll. But they need lesser people to get the work done. Not these highest-level gods, but slightly more subordinate ones. CEO’s don’t hire people who will go after their job. They hire people who will follow orders: brilliant functionaries. So around them, these Zeus people will assemble a string of second-in-command people. Not the ambitious kind who will be fighting them for control, but the auxiliary kind, who work toward the goals the leader has set, with the same kind of clear-thinking and dispassionate genius that the leader displays. I think of generals’ aides or presidential press secretaries here: public spokesmen whose job and whose talent is to diffuse or redirect all criticism of the boss, to dismiss doubts, to look only on the optimistic side of things, to be can-do men who act like the favorite sons of their leader. These are people acting as functionaries. They are people in the mold of the god Apollo, who was the second most important god of ancient Greece, after Zeus.

Others say of these people that they are emotionally distant, and have little real personal passion. Their ex-spouses say they are lousy lovers, technical and impersonal; that they can’t express feelings and don’t care to get into the murky depths where doubts live, or into the shadow sides of their bright optimism. Others may say that their focus and their clear vision are achieved at the cost of being stunted in other areas, and while they attract admiration, respect, or envy, these people seldom inspire love or passion. They are clear-sighted and far seeing like eagles flying high above it all, and will often sacrifice their children, their friends, and their personal lives to get power, consolidate it, and keep it.

But while people may admire or fear Apollo types, they seldom love them. The Greeks noticed this, too, and you can see it in the stories they told about Apollo. Women didn’t like him. You might think if you’re a god, that’s like even cooler than being a rap singer or a pro athlete, but it isn’t true if you’re Apollo.

One of the most famous stories about Apollo shows just how much women didn’t like him. It is the story of Cassandra, one of my favorite characters.

Apollo was trying to seduce Cassandra, who wasn’t interested in him, even though she was a mortal and he was a god. So he tried to bribe her by giving her an amazing gift. She would be able to see clearly into the future. She alone could know in advance what was going to happen. After he gave her this great gift, he tried again with her, but she wasn’t interested. She liked the gift, but not the giver. Apollo couldn’t take back the gift – this must have been some rule of godly etiquette – so he added a strange curse to it, which gave Cassandra her unique character. She would be able to see what was coming, and to tell people about it in advance – but nobody would ever believe her! Something essential is lacking in Apollo people, and women sense it immediately. I’ve had several discussions with women in this church who say that when they’re in a bar and see a guy who looks to good to be true, it gives them the willies. Apollo was the handsomest of the gods, and in his mythic days he gave women the willies, too.

We train these Apollo people in our schools, where clear-thinking and dispassionate rationality are prized, where knowledge is quantified and those who best learn the rules and have the self-control needed to play the game are the ones who get the best grades, earn the respect of their classmates, are elected class presidents, win scholarships, and go on to college, where they continue to shine. In fact, the most common image of the Good Life held out for children by their parents may be this image of an efficient, orderly and successful life where both doubts and passions are controlled or suppressed so they can not sabotage our long-range plans.

It is no surprise that Zeus’s symbolic creature was the eagle, for that far-sighted and dispassionate view is still the ideal in our world. It is still what our education trains us for, still the path that leads to success in business and politics. It is also reflected in Freud’s psychology, where sanity and health are achieved when the rational ego can control and organize the passionate and potentially destructive forces of our Id, like a well-trained rider controlling the more powerful but more primitive horse that he rides.

What we consider both reality and sanity are models of this kind of rational control, of “delayed gratification,” of working together, following the legitimate authority passed down from above. It is the world of modern commerce and competitive markets, where only the most efficient and far seeing will survive, and the others will be dictated to by those at the top. Our dominant American myths are inextricably bound up with this picture of being number one, being on top, controlling the weapons, controlling industry, and having the most clout. Apollo reminds us of America.

But there’s a human dimension that’s absolutely lacking, isn’t there? Where is warmth, compassion? We could perhaps admire or fear the kind of impersonal and objective power that our American leaders are modeling, but could anyone really love it? Something is missing. And what’s missing is essential, if we are to try and become more complete human beings.

And, since these old gods also show us what we are worshiping as a society, there is something terribly essential missing in our society now, and it feels a lot like what’s missing from Apollo. It’s all very efficient, quite powerful, but without relationship, without compassion, without warmth. You can admire or fear it, but you can’t love it. And this is what so many writers in the foreign press have been saying about America for several years now.

The goal, both in the ancient world and in our own, wasn’t to be the most powerful, angry or intimidating. The goal was learning to become a whole person and a healthy society, able to integrate all the varied voices of the many gods that are always a part of us.

When people are out of balance, it’s usually because the wrong gods are running the show. The wrong gods are running the show when a society is out of balance, too.

Joseph Campbell was the one who said that the task of modern people is the quest for the lost Atlantis of the coordinated soul. It is also the quest for the lost Atlantis of the coordinated and humane society.

Suddenly, these old Greek gods seem very modern, don’t they?