Grim's Hall

"That Old Time Religion"

Scotland on Sunday has an article on the revival of Greek paganism in Greece itself. The Volokh Conspiracy is against it:

Sure, take the "world view, concepts, ideas, . . . and values" of the ancient Greeks -- or, more likely, a select subset of that world view, for instance eliminating slavery, and the subordination of women -- but why the "religion," even with "each god represent[ing] a natural phenomena or human value" rather than a person who was screwing around and fighting with other people? If you want "a scientific society," do you really need Zeus, whether you think he's real or metaphorical, to do it?

Do you need Zeus? The question ought to be, should it not, "Do you believe in Zeus?" It doesn't look like they do: "Buschbeck explained that Hellenes do not worship the pantheon of 12 gods as deities. Rather, each god represents a natural phenomena or human value[.]"

Ah, gods as metaphors. I've heard that before:

For Wagner, as for the Greeks, a myth was not a decorative fairy tale, but the elaboration of a secret, a way of both hiding and revealing mysteries that can be understood only in religious terms, through the ideas of sanctity, holiness and redemption....

The gods come about because we idealise our passions, and we do this not by sentimentalising them but by sacrificing ourselves to the vision on which they depend. It is by accepting the need for sacrifice that we begin to live under divine jurisdiction, surrounded by sacred things, and finding meaning through love. Seeing things that way, we recognise that we are not condemned to mortality but consecrated to it.

There is something to be said for that position, I suppose. Certainly I can't agree with the Conspiracy's alternative, which is to reject myth altogether. Nothing could be less wise, or reasonable, than that. It is a denial of human nature, and that always ends in sorrow.

But I do have a challenge to the boys at Volokh: it may be that you can do without Zeus. But don't you need Woden?