Session A: Religion of Ancient Greece

Ancient Greek Religion

The earliest known population to enter Greece arrived around about 3500BC. There were no Paleolithic or Mesolithic settlements on the peninsula. They arrived from Asia Minor by the sea, bearing a developed agrarian pastoral culture of high Neolithic style; fine ceramic wares, polished stone tools and weapons, knives of the Poseidon and the usual female figurines. They built small, rectangular, flat-roofed homes of brick on stone foundations on the plains of Thesali and Boeotia, some moving north to Macedonia and others into Attica - the Peloponnese and into Argalise, Arcadia and Laconia.

Around about 2500BC another culture appeared of a completely different and crude type with ornamentation on its pottery including incised parallel zig zag lines and the moulding of beaded and arcaded patterns. There were violent destructions in eastern Greece and the rise of a powerful dynasty at Mycenae. Having reached the southern shores of Greece and established contact with the elegant civilisation of Crete, they received and submitted to its cultural influence. However, by 1500BC Mycenae became dominant over Crete, there was a strong fusion of Mycenean and Minoan art forms and Mycenae began to trade throughout the sea to the detriment of Knossos who was circulating merchandise from Nubia (gold), Cornwall, Hungary and Spain (tin), Sinai and Arabia (copper), Baltic amber, European hides, timber, wine, olive oil and purple dye and Egyptian rope, papyrus and linen. In 1400BC Crete was conquered by the Myceneans and the Palace of Mycenae was greatly enlarged with the building of the famous Lion Gate and the Treasury of Atrias. And in 1300BC we have the phase of Homer's Troy, the seventh city of the name, a mighty and wonderful city, wealthy and with flourishing trade and so we arrive at the epic date of the deeds of Homer's Heroes. There had been a long period of interplay and adjustment between settled agricultural and intrusive pastoral warrior peoples but now there were overwhelming onslaughts of fresh pasture warrior folk, the Dorians, which precipitated the end of the world age of the people of bronze.

Great Goddess

The Great Goddess of Minoan and Mycenean Crete was not lost with the final disintegration of Minoan and Mycenean culture in 1200BC. After a Dark Age of some 400 years she re-emerged in Greece, not as the supreme power she once was but as an underlying reality whose presence in many spheres of life could not be ignored. The destruction of Minoan and Mycenean culture in Crete and mainland Greece was the work of the Sea Peoples, the Ionians, Achaeans and the Dorians followed, eventually gaining supremacy over the whole of Greece and the surrounding islands. They brought with them a patriarchal social order, a cosmology of sky, sun and storm whose ruler was the great Father God Zeus who hurled the lightning and the thunderbolt. What they found was a deeply rooted religion of Goddess worship that had evolved peacefully over the Millennia from the Neolithic past. It was the old tradition of songs and story telling that kept the tradition alive which is why the original Goddess culture has to be pieced together from later fragments. In the classical Greek myth of Theseus and the Minotaur the older, much longer lasting pre-Hellenic civilisation can be glimpsed, informing, complicating and disrupting the Olympian Myths.

The myths in Homer and Hesiod characteristically place the origins of the Greek Goddesses and Gods in Crete. Either they were born there as Zeus and Dionysus or came from there as Demeter or lived there under a different name as Dyktenna and Brytamatis for Artemis.

The original Great Mother Goddess became many separate Goddesses related to each other, the snakes fell to Athena, Demeter, Hera and Hygeia; the corn and poppies to Demeter and Persephone; the birds to Athena, Demeter and Aphrodite; and the dove to Aphrodite and Persephone; the lions, stags and animals of the wild belonged to Artemis and the dog to Hecate; the olive tree was Athena's gift to Athens; the fruit bearing trees and corn were the province of Demeter. All the Greek Goddesses are moon Goddesses, Persephone the maiden and Artemis the virgin personify the new moon; Demeter and Hera as mother, fulfilled wife, the full moon; and Hecate of the underworld the waning and the dark moon. The Bee Goddesses of Crete are found in the three bee maidens, the seers who taught Apollo to prophecy. The grape and vine are taken over by Dionysus. The Minoan Sacred Marriage between the Lunar Cow and the Solar Bull are re-enacted in Cow Eyed Hero with her consort Zeus the bull. The difference is Zeus who is no longer the child on the mother's knee or the young God saluting the Goddess but now the Great Father of all the Goddesses and Gods.

At its finest, Greek mythology can be seen as the working out of a right relationship between the dynamic sky and sun Gods and the older lunar agricultural stratum. At its less fine however, with its emphasis on conquest and war, classical Greek mythology displays a displacement and trivialisation of the vision of the conquered culture. The Great Goddess Hera becomes a vengeful wife; Aphrodite, the awesome Goddess of Fertility becomes a frivolous winner of a beauty contest; Athena, Goddess of the Snake and Shield, becomes the masculinised daughter of intellect born through the forehead of Zeus as though she were exclusively the product of his own creative mind; Pandora who rose from the earth with gifts for all becomes like Eve, the source of human toil, pain and death; and Artemis shrinks in stature beside her brother, Apollo.

Looking more closely however, the powers of the Goddesses are not to be dismissed so easily. To restore the balance between the pre-Hellenic and the Olympian mythic visions, it is essential to discern the different layers of thought that composed the finished version of the stories we know.

The Greek Tradition

The two main works from which we elicit our information on the Greek Tradition are the Iliad and the Odyssey, attributed to Homer and clearly deriving from orally transmitted traditions describing the events of the Trojan war around 1200BC and its aftermath. Later in their history the Greeks thought it proper to write their Gods genealogy and history. Hesiod's "Theogony" written in the eighth century BC is the oldest Greek attempt at mythological classification. A sea theme appears to predominate in keeping with early Egyptian depictions of the birth place of the Gods as being some watery Eden to the west. From the sixth century BC onwards however, other theogonies which departed from the Hesiodic traditions emerged under the influence of the Orphic Mysteries. There are therefore three main creation myths:

I. The Homeric Creation Myth. Oceanus (the river between this world and the next) and Tethys spawned both Gods and mortals, otherwise it is the same as the Pelasgian Creation Myth.

The Pelasgian Creation Myth has Eurymone, the Goddess of all things, who rises naked from chaos but finding that she has nothing on which to rest her feet she divides the sea from the sky and sets the winds in motion and commences the work of creation. The great serpent Ophion was her first effort and after coupling with him she assumes the form of a dove and lays the universal egg. Ophion coils seven times around this egg until it hatches and out tumbles Eurymone's children, the sun, the moon, the planets, the stars and earth. On Mount Olympus where Eurymone and Ophion made their home, Ophion upset Eurymone by claiming that the universe was his creation so she bruised his head with her heel, kicked out his teeth and banished him to the dark caves below the earth (shades of the Virgin Mary crushing the head of Lucifer in serpent form). Eurymone next created seven planetary powers, setting a titan over each; Theia and Hyperion for the sun, Phoebe and Atlas for the moon, Dione and Crius for mars, Metis and Coeus for mercury, Themis and Eurymedon for Jupiter, Tethys and Oceanus for Venus, Rhea and Cronus for Saturn. The first man was Pelasgius.

II. According to the Orphic tradition Black Winged Night, a Goddess who even the major Gods held in awe was quartered by the wind and laid a silver egg in the womb of darkness. From this egg Eros emerged to set the universe in motion. Eros was double sexed, golden winged, had four heads and sometimes roared like a bull, hissed like a serpent or bleated like a lamb.

Eros, also called Phanes, created earth, sky, sun and moon but the triple Goddess Mother Rhea ruled the universe and her sceptre then passed to Uranus. (Note that Eros is dually sexed, holding the anima and animus in balance, has four heads realising the four fold elemental nature of a spiritually ascended being, and is represented to have the love principle in its higher pure octaves. Note also there were currents of the cosmic egg theme).

III. The Olympian Creation Myth originates from Hesiod. In the beginning was Chaos, vast and dark, then appeared Gaia the deep breasted earth and finally Eros, the love that softens hearts. From Chaos were born Erebus and Night who, in uniting, gave birth to Ether and Hemera. Gaia bore Uranus, the sky crowned with stars whom she made her equal in grandeur so that he entirely covered her, then she created the high mountains and the sterile sea with its harmonious waves. Prior to the establishment of the Olympian Dynasty Gaia reigned supreme. Not only did she create the universe and bear the race of Gods, she also created man. All that remained was for the Gods to reproduce.

Gaia united with her son, Uranus, to produce the Titans - a name that derives from the Cretan word for king, that is they were the sons of God and daughters of men. There were twelve Titans in number, Oceanus, Croyus, Hyperion, Kryus, Iapetus, Cronus, Thea, Rhea, Mnemosyne, Phoebe, Tethys and Thenus. Uranus and Gaia then produced the Cyclops who resembled the other Gods but who had only one eye in the middle of their forehead. And finally three monsters whose horrific appearance so disturbed their father that as soon as they were born he shut them up in the depths of earth. Gaia resented the restriction of her offspring and fashioned a sickle but her children refused to cooperate, apart from her last born Cronus, who agreed to carry out the dastardly deed and thereby castrated his father, throwing his testicles into the sea. From this terrible wound black blood dropped, fertilising earth which gave birth to the furies and the ash tree nymphs. The debris that floated on the surface of the waves became a white foam from which Aphrodite the beautiful Love Goddess was born.

The Titan Iapetus had four sons, Menoetius, Atlas, Prometheus and Epimetheus. Following the Titans later revolt against the Olympians, Menoetius was dispatched to darkest Erebus (the Greek hell), while Atlas was condemned to stand before the Hesperides on the edge of the world and bear the vault of heaven on his shoulders. Prometheus, using clay and water, fashioned the first men into the likeness of Gods into whom Athene breathed light. He stole fire from the forge of Hephaestus or from the sun's fiery chariot and gave it as a gift to mankind. For this theft and gift Zeus, the father of the Gods. was outraged and he imprisoned Prometheus by chaining him naked to a pillar in the Caucasian mountains where a greedy vulture tore at his liver all day, year in and year out. In addition Zeus ordered Hephaestus to fashion clay and water into a body of great beauty that would equal an immortal Goddess called Pandora who was sent as a gift to Epimetheus' brother. She then opened the box which contained all the dreadful afflictions which effect us on earth, leaving only kindly hope in the box.

The metaphysical inferences in the Prometheus story consist of an ever-recurring theme of those who possess advanced technological and metaphysical knowledge that is bestowed upon people that are not advanced enough to handle it, or have not obtained it. The wisdom deity who provides this knowledge suffers there for the redemption of mankind but in addition gains knowledge for themselves and furthers their own spiritual evolution.

After Cronus had reduced his father, Uranus, to impotence, he liberated his brother Titans and set himself up as chief of the new dynasty. Cronus mated then with his sister Rhea who gave him three daughters, Hestia, Demeter, and Hera and three sons, Hades, Poseidon and Zeus. It was predicted that one day Cronus would be overthrown by one of his children and so he swallowed each one as they were born. Rhea, his wife, was overwhelmed with grief and seeking the advice of her own parents, Uranus and Gaia, she travelled to Crete and brought forth her son in a deep cavern in the forests of Mount Ageun. Gaia looked after the child while Rhea wrapped a large stone in swaddling clothes and presented it to Cronus who swallowed it. Gaia carried Zeus to Mount Ida or Mount Dicte where he was cared for the nymphs. There he grew to manhood and later vanquished his father who was forced to vomit up the stone and all the children he had previously swallowed. Cronus was then exiled and the Olympian period began. Zeus then had to face the revolt of the rest of the Titans whose chieftain was Atlas. Prometheus and Epimetheus had remained neutral along with Oceanus but the rest were jealous of the Olympians but were defeated and largely cast down into the depths of Hades, the region of Erebus where they were made to suffer greatly. Atlas, as mentioned above, was condemned to bear the weight of the sky upon his shoulders. Zeus now set up the Olympian pantheon. First came the twelve Gods and Goddesses who dwelt in Mount Olympus - Zeus, Poseidon, Hephaestos, Hermes, Aries, Apollo, Hera, Artemis, Hestia, Athene, Aphrodite and Demeter. Other divinities also shared the Olympic heights, Helios and Semele, Leto, Dione, Dionysus, Themis and Eros. Hades dwelt with Persephone and Hecate in the subterranean underworld. Zeus ruled the sky, Poseidon the waters and Hades the underworld. The Olympians were credited with human passions and qualities, love, hatred, anger and envy, and they cruelly punished anyone who questioned their authority or stepped on their divine toes.

The Gods

Zeus

The Olympian Zeus conquered the serpent son and the consort of the Goddess Mother, Gaia, in the legend of Typhoon. His behaviour towards the numerous pretty young Goddesses he met was worthy of the worst sort of womaniser. He turned himself into bulls, serpents, swans, and showers of gold. Every Mediterranean nymph he saw set him crazy. The particular problem faced by Zeus in this period was simply that wherever the Greeks came, in every valley, every isle and every cover there was a local manifestation of the Goddess Mother of the World whom he, as the Great God of the Patriarchal Order, had to master in a patriarchal way.

This is the archetypal, patriarchal father, ruler and king. He rules over the sky and all atmospheric phenomena are under his command. Despite the fact that he was married to Hera, he had several other unions, Metis (wisdom) who gave birth to Athene. However Gaia and Uranus had warned Zeus that were he to have children with Metis they would be more powerful than him and would dethrone him so Zeus swallowed the mother and her unborn child who then later was released from his brain. Athenis, daughter of Uranus and Gaia gave birth to Horae (the hours or seasons), Eunomia (wise legislation), Dike (justice), Eirene (peace) and the Fates who are after dallying with Zeus.

Poseidon

Poseidon is the archetypal serious old man enthroned beneath the waves. His nature emphasises the element of water manifesting through the deep unconscious and the strong emotions. The fact that his kingdoms were subject to the ultimate authority of Zeus, lord of air, seems to be the Greek way of saying that intellect is a stronger force than emotion.

Hermes

Hermes is the archetype messenger, the archetype trickster, the archetype magician. He was another son of Zeus begat on the nymph Maia, daughter of Atlas, and his symbol is the caduceus.

Apollo

Apollo "shining", greatest of the Gods after Zeus, is the archetypal, beautiful golden haired God of the sun, music and healing. He is above all a God of Light, he is the twin brother of Artemis and associated with the sun. His chariot was pulled by golden horses. He used the bow and lyre with skill. His arrows brought illness or death. Pictured as extremely handsome, perfectly built, he was bi-sexual, a possible result of his worshippers overrunning and absorbing a matriarchy, such as at Delphi.

He represented lawful punishment of crimes, not revenge; justified revenge. He demanded tolerance from his followers. The laurel was sacred to him. He was patron of priests, God of prophecy, poetry, music, medicine, oracles, healing, reason, inspiration, magick, the arts, divination, harmony, spiritual goals gained through use of the arts, ravens, earthquakes, woodlands, springs.

His is the way of Beauty and Harmony together, the ennobling inspiration of all the Arts. His rituals were known for their appeal to our aesthetic sense, and were strictly ordered. There was no place for the chaotic excesses of his colleague, Dionysus. Yet this can be often the way to worship Form for its own sake - learn the lesson of the God when He was rebuffed by Daphne, that Love is not just about Beauty, and Life is more than Form or Harmony.

Hades

Hades, brother of Zeus, snapped Kore, or Persephone, while she was out picking flowers and claimed her as his bride, Zeus having apparently given his permission for this deed. Demeter sought to regain her daughter. Because of her distress she withdrew her energies from the earth so that nothing would grow. Gods and men pleaded with her to restore her bounty but Demeter would not, until she was reunited with her daughter. Zeus eventually sent Hermes to Hades with a request to return the maiden. Hades grudgingly complied but managed to persuade her to eat a few pomegranate seeds, the symbols of marriage, beforehand, thus sealing the union. Demeter questioned her as to whether she had eaten any food while in Hades domain because "if thou hast not eaten thou shall live with me on Olympus but if thou hast thou must return to the depths of the earth". Poor Persephone admitted to eating the pomegranate seeds but as a compromise Zeus decided that Persephone should spend part of the year with her husband and the remainder with her mother. Once more the earth produced fruit in abundance but when Persephone leaves each time to be by the side of her husband, Demeter withdraws her gifts from the earth and thus the season of winter is upon us.

Ares

Ares is the archetype tough, macho, strong but insensitive God of War. He represents blind and uncontrolled passion in contradistinction to Athene who is his natural enemy.

Hephaestus

Hephaestus is the archetypal broad-shouldered smith. Although Homer says Hephaestus was born lame, others state that he was so ugly at birth that his mother, Era, threw him from Olympus, thereby laming him. His skills were so great that his mother restored him to Olympus and gave him the beautiful Aphrodite as his wife.

Pan

Pan is the symbol of the universe, the personification of nature, representative of all the Gods. His parentage was Hermes or Zeus. His colour was royal purple. He was a dark wine red, sometimes called moon blood. Knots were used to bind up the spirit and immobilise sexual function to close up throats and other parts, untied during childbirth to make free for delivery. Pan was equivalent to the Egyptian Aman Ra, Bacchus the Roman God name for Dionysus, Adonis and Dionysus whose emblem was the thyrsus - a phallic sceptre tipped with a pine cone.

A magickal invocation of Pan:

I am she who e'er the earth was formed rose from the sea
O first begotten love come unto me
And let the worlds be formed of me and thee

Giver of vine and wine and ecstasy,
God of the garden, shepherd of the lea -
Bringer of fear who maketh men to flee,
I am thy priestess answer unto me!

Although I receive thy gifts thou bringest me -
Life and more life in fullest ecstasy.
I am the moon the moon that draweth thee.
I am the waiting earth that needeth thee.
Come unto me great Pan, come unto me!

(from The Rite Of Pan; Dione Fortune from The Goatfoot God)

To reach through time and space, break the bonds and ties of karmic law through light and flamed pentacle, read through the levels of the conscious and subconscious, tread the paths of levels on the astral, remember for every open gate there is one to close and thank the guardians.

Pan - his energies are radio-active but they should not be called unless genuinely needed for healing of bacterial or virus or where growth stimulus is needed.

He is the sacrificed God. In Greece he was the king died at full moon after the shortest day.

Pan is the king of the Arcadian Satyrs mated to Athene, Penelope, Selene and other forms of the Great Goddess. The Horned One was as archaic title of Mother Hera. Horns and hair on male heads were common symbols of sexual energy, hence the fertility magick of horns. Pan, the pastures, the old God, the goat lascivious, could never get enough of copulation. Pan's the Greek for all, the personification of all nature. The Capricorn sign is not a goat as such but Pan. A love of nymphs and music. Invented the reed pipes (pipes of Pan).

Enjoying himself in the company of other Gods on the banks of the River Typhoon attacked them. This hundred headed monster was not afraid to fight those of high rank. To save their lives the entire group of divine revellers jumped into the water and, to make sure of their escape, took on other shapes. Pan distinguished himself as a dual being. In his lover part he became a fish, for the rest of his body he was a goat. That is how Pan was first ever to 'act the goat', though his actions in so doing were completely different from what we mean by the phrase.

Pan - the face and legs of a goat, called by the Arcadians Lord of the Wood. Hermes was the father of Pan. Pan was the God of green, sex and love is therefore the colour of green, passion is red.

Pan was son of Hermes and Rhea or the goat Amaltheia. He was a half man, half goat God of the wilderness and the wild beasts. His cult was later suppressed by the Christians who used him to epitomise their concept of evil.

Dionysus

Dionysus in many ways is the Krishna of Greece. He had a prodigal son nature and spent many years of wandering, plunder, destruction and suffering along with having been reborn after being torn to pieces by the Maenads, or wild women.

Dionysus is etymologically Zeus of Nysa and is the Greek form of the Vedic God Soma. The cradle of his cult was Thrace. The figure of primitive Dionysus was complicated by trades borrowed from other Gods, notably the Cretan God Zagreus, the Phyrigeun God Zebazeus and the Liddeun God Bassareus. In origin he is simply the God of Wine but afterwards became the God of vegetation and warm moisture, then God of pleasures and God of civilisation and finally, according to Orphic conceptions, as a kind of spring God.

The Legend of Dionysus is as follows:

Semele, daughter of Cadmus King of thieves, yielded to Zeus and became his lover. At the suggestion of the treacherous healer who assumed the guise of a nurse, Semele begged Zeus to show himself to her in his Olympian majesty. She was consumed by flames by the dazzling brilliance of her divine lover and the child she carried would have perished had not a shoot of ivy suddenly wound around the columns of the palace and made a green screen between the unborn babe and the celestial fire. Zeus gathered up the infant and enclosed it in his own thigh and when it came time for it to be born he was gone forth again. It is this double birth that Dionysus earned his title 'twice born'. Dionysus then passed his childhood on the Mountain of Misa in Thrace. With his head crowned with ivy and laurel the young God wandered the mountains and forests with the nymphs. He was inspired with the love of glory and the meaning of virtue by old Silenus. When he reached adulthood Dionysus discovered the fruit of the vine and the art of making wine from it. To cure himself of the resultant madness he went to Didona to consult the oracle there and was subsequently cured. He then undertook long journeys across the world to spread the inestimable gift of wine among mortals. In Attica he was welcomed by the King, Ecarius, to whom he presented a vine stock. Ecarius gave his shepherds wine to drink but when they became intoxicated they thought they were poisoned and slew the King. His daughter, Eregone, found his tomb thanks to her dog and in despair hanged herself from a nearby tree. In punishment for this death Dionysus struck the women of Attica with raving madness. Ecarius was carried to the heavens becoming the wagoner, his daughter became the constellation Virgo and her faithful dog the lesser dog star. On the Isle of Maxus Dionysus found the daughter of Minos, Ariadne, who Theseus had abandoned, despite her helping him escape from the Minotaur in the labyrinth. Ariadne and Dionysus were married thus drawing together a representation of the old Cretan/Sparta Goddess and the new Greek dying and rising God. After these glorious expeditions throughout Asia he returned to Greece where he was treated with hostility and distrust.

The retinue of Dionysus consisted of the men and women called the Bacchantes or maenads with satyrs, the God Pan, the God Chreapis, centaurs and nymphs. Because of Hero's jealousy she caused Dionysus to be driven mad hence the ensuing years that he spent roaming the world in the company of his tutor, Silenus, and band of wild satyrs, maenads and other fabulous beasts. After many years of wandering, plunder, destruction and suffering, Dionysus finally regained his sanity and was established as divine and welcomed into Olympus by his father, Zeus.

The character of Dionysus has a prodigal son interpretation representative of those who have overcome an uncontrollable urge or desire or a weakness of character and emerged, albeit somewhat scarred, having transmuted their negative tendencies into a more disciplined mode. During the restructuring process the Dionysian person may descend to the depths of physical or even mental degradation only to rise from that abyss to become a pillar of a society. Dionysus' symbol is the thyrsus, or ivy twined staff surmounted with pine cone.

Prometheus

After thirty years of suffering, or some say thirty thousand years, he was rescued by the divine Hercules who slew the eagle and broke the prisoner's chains. Prometheus in turn revealed to Zeus his famous secret, warning him that the son of Thetis would be greater than his father. Zeus abandoned his amorous enterprise and allowed Thetis to marry a mortal, Peleus, to whom she bore the son Achilles.

Prometheus could not acquire divine immortality unless some immortal consented to exchange destinies with him. The centaur, Chiron, whom Hercules had struck with a poisoned arrow was in despair lest his wound never be healed. To end his suffering Chiron begged to be allowed to descend into Hades in the place of Prometheus and thus the son of Iapetus took his permanent place on Olympus. The Athenians who saw in Prometheus the benefactor of mankind and the father or all arts and scientists raised an altar to him in the gardens of the Academy.

Here we have the legend of the serpent and the Garden of Eden only here the villain is quite clearly Zeus and the hero is quite clearly Prometheus who suffers on behalf of his proteges, mankind, and is eventually rescued by the other divine hero who is also made to suffer by jealous Gods and Goddesses, the divine Hercules.

Asklepios

Coronus, daughter of Phlegyas king of Lapiths, had yielded to Apollo and conceived a son. However, before she was due to give birth she married Ischys the Arcadian. A crow informed Apollo that Coronus was unfaithful to the God. Apollo in his rage cursed the crow whose plumage turned from white to black as a result and he put Coronus and Ischys to death. The two bodies were on the funeral pyre and Coronus had already been half consumed by fire when Apollo arrived just in time to rescue the infant she had been carrying, to bear him to Mount Pellion where he was passed to the care of the centaur Chiron. The child became Asklepios, God of Medicine. He was taught by Chiron all there was to know about the art of healing and he began to effect miraculous cures. He even succeeded in restoring the dead to life with the help of the gorgon's blood that Athene had given him and with the plants, the healing properties of which a serpent told him. Hades felt cheated of his prey and complained bitterly to Zeus. Asklepios was seen as guilty of thwarting the order of nature and Zeus struck him dead with a thunderbolt. Apollo avenged the death of his son by exterminating the Cyclops who had forged the thunderbolt and for this massacre he was banished from Olympus for quite a considerable period of time. He was later restored to life and to the Olympian company. He was often represented as a serpent or as a man of middle-age with a benign expression. His cult was both a religion and system of therapeutics and his priests were all well aware of the specific nature of earth energies. His schools were known as aesculapiums and the aesculapium of Kos was famous because it was here that the great physician Hypocrates founded his first school of rational medicine. In the aesculapea special rites were observed, these involved purification with baths, fasting and sacrifices, after which the patient spent the night in the temple where he slept on the skin of a sacrificed animal or a couch near the statue of the God. Most famous of the rites were those of incubation which was calculated to render the patient open to suggestion. The serpent has always been associated with healing. Homer's famous staff, the caduceus, consists of two serpents entwining around a central pole surmounted by a winged orb. The serpents are said to represent the forced of chaos and order that need to be kept in balance if a good state of health is to be maintained. The wings represent the mind's potential ability to control these two opposing factors, in other words self-healing is the ultimate goal of mankind.

Hippocrates referred to these body images as emormon and physis which he believed governed both the body's physical force and the sex drive and its ability to heal itself (the kundalini serpent power ascended to the higher chakras). Although the medical profession has ignored these energy concepts, preferring to focus more on the scientific attitudes and astute observation, in modern times with the growth of alternative therapies doctors and scientists are at last coming round to the fact that both body and mind are somehow part of the intricate web of energy exchanges, just as Hippocrates and Greek physicians believed.

The Goddesses

Gaia

Gaia from whom orphans issued had been the great deity of the primitive Greeks. This is confirmed by the Homeric king in which the poet says "I shall sing of Gaia, universal mother, firmly founded the oldest of divinities". Gaia, "the deep breasted" whose soil nourishes all that exists and by whose benevolence men are blessed with her children and all the present fruits of earth was thus at one time a supreme Goddess whose majesty was acknowledged, not only by men but by the Gods themselves. Later when the victorious dynasty of the Olympians was established Gaia's prestige was not lessened. It is still she whom the Gods invoked when they made Oaths "I swear by Gaia and the vast sky above her"; here are proclaimed the many Iliads she answers Zeus' accusations.

Gaia, the omnipotent, not only created the universe and bore the first race of the Gods, also gave birth to the human race growing the first man forth from her bosom and offering him to Athene as the first inhabitant of Attica. The power of Gaia was also manifest in her gift of foretelling the future, the Oracle of Delphi, before it passed into Apollo's hands had originally belonged to Gaia. The cult, although it became gradually less important, always continued in Greece. She presided over marriages and was honoured as pre-eminent among prophetesses. At Patris the sick came to consult her. She was offered first fruits and grain and when she was invoked as the guardian of the sanctity of Oaths a black ewe was emulated in her honour. She was commonly represented in the form of a gigantic woman.

Hymn to Gaia

Gaia
Mother of all
Foundation of all
The oldest one

I sing to the earth
She feeds everything
That is in the world

Whoever you are
Whether you live upon her sacred ground
Or whether you live along the paths of the sea
You that fly

It is she
Who nourishes you
From her treasured store

Queen of earth
Through you
Beautiful children
Beautiful harvests
Come

The giving of life
And the taking of life
Both are yours

Happy is the man you honour
The one who has this
Has everything

His fields thicken with ripe corn
His cattle grow heavy in the pastures
His house breams over with good things

These are the men who are masters of their city
The laws are just the women are fair
Happiness and fortune richly follow them

Their sons delight
In the ecstasy of youth

Their daughters play
They dance among the flowers
Skipping in and out
They dance on the grass
Over soft flowers

Holy Goddess, you
Honour them
Ever flowing spirit

Farewell
Mother of the Gods
Bride of heaven
Sparkling with stars

For my song, life
Allow me
Loved of the heart

Now
And in my other songs
I shall remember you.

(By Jules Cashford)

The name of Gaia is now heard everywhere. There is the Gaia hypothesis by the physicist James Lovelock which proposes that the planet earth is a self-regulating system; there is Gaia consciousness which urges that the earth and her creatures be considered as one whole; and there is simply the term Gaia which expresses a reverence for the planet as a being who is alive and on whom all other life depends. In the west the last Goddess of earth was Gaia and although in classical mythology she no longer held the status of the Supreme Mother of all living, as she did in Minoan, Sumerian and Neolithic times, earth remained a living being. This is the consciousness that was lost with the Judeo Christian heritage which is seen obviously in the way we treat the earth as if it were dead matter. Less obvious, but nevertheless crucial, is the fact that Mary, the unrecognised Mother Goddess of the Christian Church, has formerly acquired all the attributes of the old Mother Goddesses except that of Goddess of Earth. She was the bride of starry heaven and her consort was Uranus Heaven who was once her child as was, indeed, everyone else whom she brought forth from herself. Although formerly she was subject to the Law of Zeus, in practice her oracles were consistently consulted through her priestesses. The priestess of Apollo, Pythia (named after Python the he-dragon that Apollo slew) would always open the Delphic rituals with an invocation to Gaia:

"I give first place of honour in my prayer to her

Who of the Gods first prophesised, the earth".

Note that Hesiod's The Story of Creation is amazingly similar to the Sumerian story where Apsu, the original Father, once the son and now the husband of Tiamat, was disturbed by the clamour of their children and plans to destroy them. No reason is offered for the fact that after creating so many beautiful things, Gaia and Uranus and before her in Babylon, Tiamat, give birth to ugly, destructive beings. In both myths however the arrival signals the end of the old order with a significant difference that the Mother Goddess, earth, is herself not destroyed in the Olympian myth whereas she is in the Sumerian and Babylonian myth. In fact it was Gaia who in Hesiod's version, assisted Rhea the mother of Zeus to outwit Cronus and so inaugrate the next stage of creation. Consequently Gaia's Law is related in Greek thought to the moral life of human nature. The order of nature was, for the Greeks, a moral order and could be disturbed by immoral behaviour of human beings. Nature protests when Oedipus kills his father and lies with his mother, the land of Thebes he rules begins to die, a human crime against the divine order had been committed. When Oedipus discovers that he is himself the unknown murderer of his father and leaves the city the land starts to live again. The symbolic relation of this story to the plight of our earth must be obvious. Perhaps the Greek conviction that nature is a moral being suffering under human ignorance is one that the return of Gaia to our language will help us to reconsider.

Hera

Hera was related to the Sanskrit Svar, meaning the sky. She was originally the queen of the sky, the celestial virgin, and quite independent of Zeus at first. The marriage was arranged afterwards in order to explain the fusion of two cults that had first been distinct. Some authorities even see in the hostility of Hera towards her husband a vestige of resistance in which the worshippers of Hera opposed the rival cult of Zeus. She soon lost her cosmic character and was thought of as woman deified and represented the idealised wife.

In Olympia the temple to Hera existed long before the temple to Zeus where, reminiscent of the Minoan seals, she stands in the form of a bearded and helmeted warrior beside the Goddess and throne, suggesting that the God is the chosen one of the Goddess rather than the other way around. Although they were officially married in the Bronze Age, her origins are far older than Zeus'. The name which means 'mistress' is of more ancient lineage than the Indo European lineage of Zeus. The images of snakes, lions, and water birds also point to this. Hera nearly certainly reaches back to the Neolithic Snake Goddess who ruled the heavenly waters. In the Iliad she is called the Queen of Heaven and Hera of the Golden Throne, the white armed Goddess, a romantic image of moonbeams spreading out through the night sky. She is referred to as Cow Eyed, suggesting that she was also Goddess of the Earth, similar to the Sumerian Nin Hur Sag and the Egyptian Hathor. Hera became the Goddess of weddings and marriage.

The Great Goddess functions were split up. Hera became the Goddess of weddings and marriage and rulership; love and beauty and desire fell to Aphrodite; the tending of the home to Hestia and childbirth and motherhood as well as maidenhood to Artemis. You lie in the arms of Zeus became an emblem of Hera's authority, an ambivalent source of satisfaction for one who used to be Goddess in her own right as her tales of her rage at Zeus' freedom imply. However, although they were wedded it was Zeus' rule that prevailed and she who belonged to him, which is true of most of the Greek Goddesses except, perhaps, Gaia and Demeter. It was by marrying or fathering the Goddesses that Zeus appropriated their powers to himself. The structuring of the world became patriarchal; Zeus the sky, Poseidon the sea and Hades the underworld like An, Enlil and Ea in Sumeria.

The difficulties of the relationship between Hera and Zeus may be understood as symbolising at the deepest level the labour of uniting the lunar and the solar traditions within the human psyche. Even when both are honoured as valid metaphors for distinct ways of 'being' in life the task still remains as how they are to co-exist in harmony and how their union may bear fruit. The solar heroic mode with its clarity, direction, particularity and will to change and the lunar cyclical mode of transformation of the whole through the phases of feeling and intuition are only apparent polarities in the soul, rather, their right relation is inherently creative in the sense that it has to be continually sought and found, lost, mourned and then glimpsed anew and recovered in new form.

Artemis

Artemis became the Goddess of wild animals in inheriting her role from the Paleolithic Goddess of the wild animals of the hunt. As the least civilised of all the Greek Goddesses with the oldest lineage, she reflects backwards into the ancient time before the cultivation of land and construction of cities. To a 20th century sensibility she embodies a wisdom that has been largely lost, both of outer nature and that of untamed animal region of human nature and the necessary relation between them. The name Artemis is not Greek but first occurs in the Linear B tablets linking her through the Myceneans with the old Minoan Goddess of Crete where legends of the Goddesses, Dyktina, Brytamatis and Ilathea, are transferred to her. At the springtime festival at Ephesus in Anatolia her sacrificial rites included a bull fight, reminiscent of the Minoan bull festivals. She is also the Goddess of hunting and hunters and so the myth asks us to understand how she, who is mother to her animals, is also the one who slays them. As Goddess of the animals she walks with a stag or a doe and yet is pictured with the bow.

In Paleolithic times the killing of an animal was a disruption of the sacred bond, primal unity had to be restored for people to live in harmony with nature and therefore their own being. The ritual of restitution for a life taken, either through sacrificing some part of the animal killed or through reconstituting the animal throughout is a very ancient one. However, if both hunted animal and the person who hunts it are under the protection of the same Goddess then the sacred border cannot be truly violated; it is ultimately she who give and she who takes away so the human animals can take away only on her behalf and with her consent.

Artemis was also the ruler of childbirth, teaching the women in labour to give up their cultural identity and allow the deeper wisdom of the body to lead. As the chorus in Euripides sings: "Once I fell this thrill of pain in my womb. I cried out Artemis in heaven who loves the hunt and whose care relieves those giving birth, she came to me then eased me". Young girls danced to Artemis' bears, wearing masks of bears and the costumes of bears exploring the freedom of their own 'bear' nature and were accordingly called Arktoi (she bears). Even today, in modern Crete, Mary is still worshipped in her role as Virgin Mary of the Bear. The bear mothering her young is the fiercest animal in the world and in all but human animals this act of suckling makes the difference between life and death. Yet Artemis was herself no mother but the inviolate virgin whose short tunic and practised strength gave her the aspect of a young boy. At her festivals girls often wore phalluses to celebrate a containment of her masculine nature within herself. As the Goddess of unmarried girls and of mothers in childbirth she once again united in herself to otherwise opposing principals by mediating between them. This is an expression of a genuine ambivalence at reaching a turning point in life from the untamed, unaccountable freedom of the 'tomgirl/boy' to the constant dedication required to care for a child. Young girls considering marriage came to dance at her festivals and then the night before marriage they consecrated their tunics to Artemis.

Artemis was the one who received the bloodiest sacrifices. All kinds of wild animals were thrown onto a fire and burnt at the yearly sacrifice at Patrae and the same at Messeme near a temple to Eileithyia, the old Cretan Goddess of Childbirth associated with Artemis. Proptiation of the Goddess may appease her revenge upon the ignorance of those who violate the wildness of nature. In the Iliad Agamemnon kills a stag in a grove sacred to Artemis and as retribution she demands the sacrifice of his daughter Iphigenea. A doe is substituted in her place but Artemis still requires human blood. Artemis of Ephesus was an immense statue, a huge blackened figure covered with heads of animals and massive egg-like breasts all over her body at a magnificent temple there. It is likely that she was originally a local manifestation of Cybele who was renamed Artemis by the Greeks. It is not without significance that over one thousand years later Ephesus was also the place where Mary, mother of Jesus, was declared to be Theotokos, Mother of God. Artemis as the soul of the wilderness gives expression to the place in the psyche where humanity feels itself to be free from human concerns so at the same time open to the immense, untameable powers of nature. She is the figure who came alive in the Greek imagination confirmed an absolute sacredness from the wilds of nature and the wild place of the human heart that perfected them.

Artemis -Virgin Huntress; goddess of wild places and wild things; the Huntress; Maiden; Bear Goddess; Moon Goddess; Hunter of souls; shape-shifter. In Ephesus she was called "many breasted" and was the patroness of nurturing, fertility, and birth. Her chariot was pulled by silver stags. She roamed the forests, mountains, and glades with her band of nymphs and accompanied by a stag and the Alani (her pack of hounds), she carried a silver bow. Her priestesses did not consort with men, but the goddess helped women in childbirth. The Amazons, who were loyal to her, worshipped one aspect of this Moon Goddess (the New Moon phase). Acorns were the symbol of her association with forests and the woodlands. Her animals were guinea fowl, dog, horse, stag. Her symbols were the sickle, bridle, spinning distaff, hanks of wool. The sixth day from the New Moon was hers. She was Defender of Women who were harassed or threatened by men; Patroness of singers; protector of young girls; mistress of magick, sorcery, enchantment, psychic power, women's fertility, purification, sports, exercise, good weather for travellers, countryside, the hunt, mental healing, dance, wild animals, forests, mountains, woodland medicines, juniper, healing.

Artemis has shot her arrow into your life to help you focus on yourself. Now is the time to pay attention to the whispering voices of your own needs - men as well as women. Now is the time to take yourself back.

Celebrate and strengthen who you are. Wholeness is nurtured when you honour, respect and give time to yourself.

Athena

In classical Greek art there are two different images of Athena. The more familiar figure is of a severe, helmeted, girdled Goddess with firm stride and massive shield, the unvanquished virgin warrior as Guardian of the City. The old image is of a wild, awesome Goddess wreathed in snakes winding around her head, hair and crown. Even the Warrior Goddess has the head of Gorgon hissing with snakes on her shield. We see the direct descendant of the Minoan Snake Goddess who, over one thousand years earlier, held the snakes of life and death in both her hands. Both Athena and Eve are associated with the serpent and we have the birth of Athena from the swallowing of the pregnant mother Metus and birth through the head of the father, comparing to the birth of Eve from Adam's rib. In the Linear B script in Knossos there is an explicit reference to Athena Atana Potija (meaning mistress of Potana), In Greek her name is simply A Thea (meaning the Goddess). She is the pre-eminent Goddess of the city, guarding it from enemies without and organising it from within. Pallas, her other name, means maiden and she served as foster mother, friend and counsellor to male heroes but never a natural mother. Her association with the owl is also ancient, revealing her descent from a Neolithic bird Goddess. The result of the fusion of her matriarchal character with patriarchal ideals, fusing them into the protectress of the city, can be seen to evolve into the Goddess of wisdom uniting her to virgin spheres of influence, weaving, wool working, carpentry and handicrafts. She invented the bridle and the chariot for the horse, she helped construct the wooden horse that defeated Troy, she built the first ship. It is good counsel thinking through a practical foresight that she offers to her proteges, this is called Metis after her mother of the same name, translated as practical wisdom with overtones of shrewdness and craftiness. She is the inspiration and guide of Theseus, along with Hermes, from beginning to end, he who is called Polymetis, he of the many counsels. It seems that the myth of Athena explores above all the quality of reflection, the stories often compose a meditation on the value of thinking something through or seeing beyond the immediate response to an event. This is seen in so many heroes that this quality is thereby recommended for those on the heroic journey for self-mastery and understanding.

Aphrodite

Aphrodite originated as a fertility Goddess like the great Asiatic Goddesses whose domain engrossed all nature, vegetable and animal as well as human. Afterward she became the Goddess of Love in its noblest aspect (Aphrodite Urania, or celestial Aphrodite) as well as its most degraded (Aphrodite Pone, the Goddess of lust and venal love and the patroness of prostitutes). She was also Aphrodite Tenetrix who favoured and protected marriage. The chief centres of the cult were in Pathos in Cyprus and Cythera in Crete. She also became Aphrodite Pelagia in marine deity under the influence of the legend of her origin.

Aphrodite is the archetype beautiful, seductive Love Goddess. She was worshipped elsewhere under the names of Astarte, Ashteroth and Ishtar. She was married to Hephaestus and gave birth to Eros (although others see Eros as epitomising the erotic principal that came from the beginning of time).

As an image arising in the human heart, Aphrodite comes alive when the animal nature of humanity is experienced as divine. She is there whenever life sparkles with beauty and joy. The graces who attend her, weaving her robes and plaiting her crown of violets are called joyous, brilliance and flowers, all that makes for sweetness in life. When she steps out of the waves onto the shore grass and flowers spring up beneath her feet, desire and love follow her wherever she goes. As she walks up the mountain the animals are filled with longing for each other. It is the same with the Goddesses and Gods. Only Athena, Artemis and Hestia can withstand her power, those with sharply defined spheres of action and even Zeus cannot resist her when she has made up her mind. A fact which Hero uses to advantage in fooling Zeus. Aphrodite's embroidered girdle in which all her magick resided, love and desire and the sweet bewitching words that turn a wise man into a fool was one of the irrevocable forces in life, whoever was given it to wear became irresistible. The Greek myth of her birth records her dignity, where love belongs to the original nature of things, for she is born of the moment when heaven is separated from earth and creation arrested till then by the weight of heaven is suddenly set free. By imagining Aphrodite at the very beginning of the process of creation, when heaven and earth are parted, as the Orphic myth does with Eros, love is drawn into the greater perspective of humanities longing for reunion with the whole. She is no longer the one great Mother Goddess who is the origin of all things but as daughter of the sea she is the child of the beginning who brings back together the separate forms of her creation. Every year in the temple of Pathos in Cyprus Aphrodite was bathed and her statue washed clean of the winter in the waves. The moment of drama is the return of the maiden from the depths as a re-birth so she is again a virgin. Aphrodite was often in the guise of a bee, inherited from the Bee Goddesses on the golden seals in Crete. She brings the honey of life to all she touches and renders the person or the occasion luminous and incandescent.

Aphrodite came to Greece from Cyprus and Mesopotamia. In Homer, however, she has lost all but her sphere for one human passion. But when she is seen in her sculptures and paintings with her animals and birds, the dolphin, goat, goose, swan and dove, her older lineage shines through. As Goddess of the sea she skims on the backs of dolphins; as Goddess of animals she moves them with longing; and as Goddess of earth she gathers heaven to earth as falling rain and impels the sea to the moistened earth to open into roots and shoots; as Goddess of heaven she rides through the air on chariots of swan and geese. She was embodied in the brightest star in heaven, the morning and evening star which we now call Venus, her Roman name. She is primarily a descendent of the Mesopotamian Goddess, Inanna, who became Astarte in Phoenicia, Ashteroth in Canaan. Inanna's consort Demuzzi and Ishtar's consort to Tammuz became Aphrodite's Adonis, the dying and resurrected son/lover of the Goddess in a new form. The name Adonis simply means Lord. It was initially a title of honour conferred on the early deity, Tammuz. It is similarly Adonai, Lord, the title given to Yahweh the Hebrew God. Adonis grew into a beautiful young man who was loved and protected by Aphrodite but one day, against her advice, he goes hunting and a wild boar gores him to death. Aphrodite hears him groaning, only to find him lying dead in a pool of blood. The blood is so bright she transforms it into a flower, the anemone, which grows on hillsides in Spring. Note the resemblance of this legend to the Inanna/Tammuz/Demuzi when like Adonis he is hunted down as a gazelle.

Hestia

Hestia is the archetype reserved maiden lady who was the Goddess of the Hearth and well protected the home, ensuring continuity and stability therein.

Demeter and Persephone

Demeter is the Mother Goddess, the Goddess of Fertility and patroness of mysteries. The story of Demeter and Kore constituted the basis for the Eleusinian mysteries.

Demeter is the Corn Mother, Goddess of the golden harvests and fertility of the proud earth and Persephone, her daughter, is the corn maiden, the seed in which the corn, her mother, is continually reborn.

It is likely that Demeter's name came from the Cretan word for barley grains, Dyai. For Demeter is not the Goddess of the whole earth as Gaia is, but only that aspect of earth which gives food or which human beings can transform into food. Once more she represents a part of the original great Goddess, and like most of the Greek Goddesses she came across the sea to Eleusis from Crete, where she had joined in love with Iasion, the Hero, on the Isle of Creek to give birth to Ploutos whose name means 'wealth'. Note that Hades, the Olympian God of the Dead, whose latinized name is Pluto, is also interesting because what was buried beneath the Earth was the great treasure of regeneration. In fact we get the word plutocracy, meaning rule by the wealthy, from this very tradition. The King of Eleusis, Triptolemos, meaning thrice ploughed, was the foster son of Demeter. Calypso, in the Odyssey, tells the tale of the death of Iasion in the tradition of lovers who have to die after a sacred marriage with the Goddess, killed by Zeus' lightning.

Demeter's daughter, Persephone, was also born in Crete, fathered by Zeus in the form of a serpent.

Demeter initiated the kings of Eleusis, including Triptolemos, into her mysteries and the art of agriculture which they then imparted to the rest of the world.

The story of Demeter is inseparable from that of her daughter Persephone, also called Kore which means 'maiden', the two faces of the Goddess, maiden and mother, younger and older, living and dead; recalling the two Goddesses of Catal Huyuk in ancient Anatolia and the Sumerian Goddess as Innana of the upper world and Erishkigal of the lower world.

Hecate

Hecate, originally a Scythian Moon Goddess, was seen as the third member of the Triple Moon Goddess Unit or the Crone, Artemis being the maiden and Selene the Mother (or else Demeter or Aphrodite depending on the specific triplicity). She was always the ally of Zeus and aided Demeter in the search for Persephone. Dionysius was the son of Zeus and Semele.

Mystery Rites

The 'mysteries' constituted one of the most important features in Greek religious life - Samothracian, Bacchic, Eleusinian and Orphic being the best known. Each mystery had its own sacred emblems and involved different sets of trials that varied according to the 'degree' of the initiate. The public rites carried none of the inner meaning and simply provided the general populace with an excuse to let their hair down and have a generally good, if somewhat libidinous, time.

Greatest of all the sacred rites of Greece was undoubtedly the Goddess orientated Eleusinia based on the Demeter/Persephone drama and incorporating the characters of Asclepius and Dionysius, both of whom had visited the dark regions of Hades, although it is likely that the incorporation of Dionysius among the Eleusinian Gods occurred at a later time as it was not mentioned in Homer's celebrated "Hymn to Demeter". The inner rites of Eleusis were secret and their esoteric content is unknown, in fact the disclosure of their secrets was punishable by death according to Athenian law. It is a safe assumption that the Greek rites, like those of many other early cultures, were composed of a mixture of totemistic practices and ancient primitive ceremonies into which a shaft of truth penetrated. This was subconsciously recognised and followed by those whose soul age rendered them sufficiently sensitive to perceive and acknowledge its purity and wisdom. In general the Eleusinian rites were orgiastic with riotously overt devotionalism and of a sacrificial nature. In particular, not only was the Demeter/Persephone legend important but so was the resurrection theme from the story of Dionysius, the bulk of whose followers considered that drunkenness equated with divine possession. This analogy was seen in the life of Dionysius himself whose purification by way of madness and suffering finally gained him admittance to Olympus. By descending into the depths of Hades and savouring the nature of death itself, ones fear of the unknown is automatically lifted. Clinical studies of 'near death' experiences has established that once the abyss has been crossed, however briefly, all fears of the inevitable departure vanish, leaving those involved with a sense of inner peace and security.

The Eleusinian orgiastic rites were balanced by the Orphic mysteries experienced by small groups of women and men who gave themselves over to holy and disciplined living. To the suffering fashion and resurrection of Dionysius the Orphic added a new mysticism and the character of the God underwent a profound modification. Out went the wine, orgies, hedonism and delirium and instead there emerged the God who is destroyed, who disappears, who relinquishes life and then is born again. Orpheus was married to Eurydice whom he loved above all else. His wife received a mortal wound from a serpent and heartbroken the bard descended into the infernal regions where he so charmed Hades and Persephone with his music that they allowed Eurydice to return to him but on the condition that at no point from the journey from death to life should he turn and look at his beloved. Eurydice begged him to turn and face her but when he refused she took this as a mark of rejection. She informed Orpheus that unless he made this obvious gesture to reassure her she would assume that his love had died in which case she would prefer to stay with Hades and Persephone. Being moved by her impassioned plea Orpheus turned to her, an act which cost him his love for ever. The Thracian women at the time did not understand this kind of single-minded devotion and they tore him to pieces in their anger and cast his head and lyre into the River Harpis. Later the head was caught between some rocks where for a long time it delivered oracles. Taking this story into account, the fact that the Orphic cults carried strong musical connotations is hardly surprising. At first glance Orpheus and Dionysius appear strange bedfellows, the one representing the faithful lover and gentle musician whose power lies in the manipulation of harmonious sounds while the other as God of wine and abandonment appears initially in a less favourable light. The mysteries are telling us that although wine and other drugs may loosen the mental barriers between the material and subtle world sufficiently if we are to negotiate them successfully it is via the path of suffering we will eventually gain sufficient mastery of the self to secure a safe passage through the altered states of consciousness. Orpheus shows us an alternative way to beauty, art, gentleness and fidelity, yet in spite of his basic goodness he too was obliged to descend to hell and face the loss of that which he loved most.

The other rites that dominated the Greek culture are those rites of frenzy or divine possession, specifically known for their orgiastic and ecstatic content. These form part of the cults of Dionysius, Bacchus and Cybele. There were also the public rites which involved the general populace at an emotional or instinctive level while initiates negotiated their mysteries within the context of the intellectual and contemplative mode.

And finally there were the rites of purification and dedication which involved which involved any of the other ritual codes.

One of the most ancient festivals was that of the Agreonia, first celebrated in Boeotia, where the Bacchantes immolated a young boy. Later this was replaced by flagellation. At the end of February there was the Anthesteria, floral festivals which lasted three days during which the wine of the last vintage was tasted. The most brilliant festival was the Greater Dionysia at the beginning of March where the dramatic representations were given. In addition to these dignified ceremonies, all Greece celebrated festivals of orgiastic character as well. At first Dionysus was depicted as a bearded man of mature age with brow generally crowned with ivy. Later he appeared as a beardless youth with effeminate aspect with his head crowned with vine leaves and bunches of grapes, in one hand holding the thyrsus and the other grapes or a winecup. The Eleusinian Mysteries

The return of Kore was celebrated in the lesser Eleusinia which took place in February, the greater Eleusinia took place every five years in September in honour of Demeter and its principal object was the celebration of the Mysteries of the Goddess. On the first day the youths of Athens would go to Eleusis to fetch the sacred objects kept in the temple of Demeter and bring them back to Athens where they were placed in the Eleusinian at the foot of the Acropolis. The following day the faithful who were judged to be worthy of participating in the Mysteries would assemble at the call of the hierophant. They would go to purify themselves in the sea, taking with them pigs which were bathed and then sacrificed. Finally the solemn procession towards Eleusis took place and the sacred objects were returned with the same ceremonial as before. At the head of the procession was the statue of Iaccus, a mystic name for Dionysus who was early associated with the cult of Demeter.

Although the actual Mysteries are really not known, as far as one can conjecture, after drinking the sacred drink and eating the sacred cakes entered the telesterion where they attended a liturgical drama concerning the abduction of Kore. Those who belonged to the highest grade (epoptae) attended another liturgical drama the subject of which was the union of Demeter and Zeus and which the priestess of Demeter and the hierophant were the protagonists. They nearly certainly had to do with the problem of future life, revelation of which the initiated awaited from the Goddess.

In the Greek world the trend of thought most closely suggesting that of Indian and Eastern mysticism was in the line of the Dionysian-Orphic movement which culminated in the sixth century BC in the militant Puritanism of Pythagoras. In the earlier Orphic system a negative attitude had been assumed towards the world, according to the Orphic myth man was represented as a compound of the ashes of Dionysus and the Titans. The soul - the Dionysus factor - was divine but the body - the Titan factor - held it in bondage. The body was seen as a tomb and a system of thought of practice, paralleling Indian asceticism was communicated by initiated masters to little circles of devotees. The soul returned repeatedly to life, bound to the world of re-birth and through asceticism the body could be purged of its Titan dross and released. Rituals fostering meditation on the godly factor were of help, and when at last in rapture the initiate cleaved to his own intrinsic being, he was divine. The disciplines included vegetarianism and there may have been a ritual eating of raw flesh in the Orphic as well as the Dionysian cult. It also appears that a sacred marriage of some kind was either enacted or simulated. We hear of the veiling of the neophyte as a bride, then of the bearing into his presence of a shovel shaped basket made of wicker containing a valise and filled with fruits, and finally a snake of gold was let down into the bosom and taken from below: the God as father of himself, re-born as the devotee.

In the teaching of Pythagoras the philosophic quest was for the first cause and principal of all things and was carried to a consideration of the problem of the magick of the Orphic lyre itself by which the hearts of men were quelled, purified and restored to their part in God. His conclusion was that it is a number which is audible in music and by principal of resonance touches and adjusts there by the tuning of the soul. Pythagoras rendered this systematically as a principal by which art, psychology, philosophy, ritual, mathematics and even athletics were recognised as aspects of a single science of harmony. Measuring lengths of string of the same tension stopped so as to sound differing notes, he discovered the ratios two to one for the octave, three to two for the fifth and four to three for the third. The Pythagoreans opposed the elements of numbers to the elements of all things, and the whole heaven to be a musical scale and number so that finally knowledge, not rapture, became the way to realisation and to the ancient ways of myth and ritual art there was joy and harmoniously the dawning enterprise of Greek science for the new life.

The Cult Of The Hero

The Greek magickal quest is symbolised by the Cult Of The Hero or the mortal who, in pursuit of his divinity, is subjected to a series of personal initiations that take the form of mythological deeds. These challenges appear in practical, often very earthly forms, in spite of a generous smattering of fabulous beasts accompanying elemental phenomena and some timely help from Olympus. From an occult or psychological standpoint these are purely allegorical and simply represent the trials of the aspiring human soul whose quest takes him into those universes beyond the dimensions of earthly life and experience where he may be eventually reunited with his source. Hercules is the perfect example of the hero Jason, Perseus, Odysseus, Theseus, Orpheus and many others have been named in the myths. The heroic path is the way of the individual, albeit with a little assistance from the inner plains tutor, it definitely does not refer to the group situation. Ultimately, the aspiring hero stands alone and must face and cope with the oncoming tide of monsters, gremlins and treacherous humans, in addition to his own mental weaknesses and spiritual shortcomings, if he is to retain his spiritual goal.

As long as due deference is paid to the cosmic laws and appreciation is shown for their bounty the aspirant will master the ego and receive the well-earned accolades. But should he fail the price could be heavy. "Those whom the Gods destroy they first drive mad".

In spite of the overt predominance of males on the heroic scene in Greek mythology there are also many women who are able to pursue their initiations either by the beastly class as with the pithea and priestesses of the Olympian Goddesses or through more Spartan and Amazonian type activity. In fact the very Gods themselves have the elements of Jungian archetypes in them, particularly the anima/animus and the extrovert/introvert personality types. Note how the animus motivated Goddesses are inevitably virgins, inferring the predominance of reason over emotions, while the other three are emotionally orientated mothers. Among the Gods the artistic Apollo, detached Hermes and deeply emotional Poseidon emphasise the anima while the overtly macho Zeus and Aries join with Hephaestus the artisan to represent the emphasised animus.

Another point is that the male heroes were frequently assisted by Goddesses, that is they were spiritually instructed to balance the animus against the femininity of the Goddess.

Therefore despite the patriarchal conquest of the pre-existing matriarchal Cretan and Mycenean civilisations you will observe that in the Greek Mysteries sages and seeresses were just as venerated as military heroes and the Goddess cult felt a very strong sway, even in classical times, with priestesses being accorded the same status as priests.

The patron God of the Iliad, the epic of the war against Troy, is Apollo - the God of the Light World and of excellence of heroes. Death on the plain of vision of that work is the end. There is nothing awesome, wondrous or power beyond the veil of death but only twittering helpless shades. And the tragic sense of that work lies precisely in its deep joy in life's beauty and excellence, the noble loveliness of fair women, the real worth of manly men. Yet its recognition of the terminal fact, thereby, that the end of it all is ashes. In the Odyssey, on the other hand, the patron God of Odysseus is the trickster, Hermes, guide of the souls to the underworld, the patron also of re-birth and Lord of the knowledge beyond death which may be known to his initiates even in life. He is the God associated with the symbol of the caduceus, the two serpents intertwined, and he is the male traditionally associated with that triad of those Goddesses of destiny, Aphrodite, Hera and Athene, who in the great legend caused the Trojan War. The bone of contention of that war was a golden apple thrown by Eros, the Goddess of strife, at the marriage of Pelleas and Thetis among the assembled Gods. On it was written "let the fair one take it". Three High Goddesses took themselves to the king's son, Paris, for their judgement and to Paris Aphrodite promised the most beautiful woman in the world, Helen, who was already married to Menelaus and so, in choosing Aphrodite, the events of the fall of Troy was set in motion. The Odyssey is a poetical description of the psychological adventures in the mythic realm of the archetypes of the soul, where the male must experience the import of the female before he can meet her perfectly in life.

The first adventure of Odysseus following his departure with twelve ships from the beaches of conquered Troy was a pirate raid. This brutal deed was followed by a tempest set by Zeus by which the sails of the ships were torn to shreds. They were blown out of control for nine days, beyond the bounds of the known world.

And on the tenth day they set foot on the land of the Lotus Eaters. Those of his men who ate of their food never wished to return home. And so he dragged them, weeping, to their ships, bound them in the hulls and rode away.

Odysseus and his fleet were now in the mythic realm of difficult trials and passages, of which the first was to be the land of the Cyclops. Odysseus, again choosing twelve men, left his ships at shore and sallied to the vast cave where it was stocked abundantly with cheeses, lambs, milk, whey. The monster ate two of the men for dinner, two for breakfast and two the following night. When clever Odysseus, claiming his own name to be 'no man', approached and offered the giant a skin of wine the Cyclops went to sleep and Odysseus and his men thrust a huge stake into his eye. Here we have the symbolic penetration of the eye, symbolic name of 'no man' (self divestiture at the passage to the yonder world) and because he did not assert his secular character, Odysseus passed the cosmic threshold guardian to enter a sphere of transpersonal forces over which the ego has no control. And finally by disguising himself as a sheep, he identifies with the ram, - the symbol of the sun.

The ships then sailed to the Island of Aeolus, God of the Wind, and for nine days the ship sailed on the winds and on the tenth were in sight of home. However, while Odysseus slept his men opened up the wallet of the winds and the violent blast bore the flotilla back to Aeolus who this time refused to see them. One can recognise in this symbolic representations of a common psychological experience: first elation and then depression. The manic depressive sequence common to sophomores and saints. While Odysseus, the governing will, slept, his men, the ungoverned faculties, opened the forbidden thing thus the individual achievement is undone by the collective will. Odysseus had not yet released himself from identification with his group, group ideals, group judgements. For self divestiture meant group divestiture as well.

Following this there was deflation, humiliation and the dark night of the soul. They sailed on, stricken at heart, and arrived eventually at the land of the Laestrygons, a rich place of many flocks. Unfortunately the inhabitants were also giants and they raised a war party and shattered all the ships but one with rocks. Thus humbled, reduced and battered, Odysseus put in to the Isle of Circe, a nymph begotten upon the daughter of Ocean by the sun. She turned his friends and companions into pigs. But Hermes met Odysseus on the way and gave him a herb of virtue that would prevent the hero from being turned into an animal. Odysseus went up to Circe who smote him with her long wand but he did not turn into a beast and shrank away from Odysseus' drawn sword. She tried to seduce him, successfully, but Odysseus commanded her to swear a mighty Oath that she would plan nothing else of mischief, which she did, and then turned his men back from pigs into men. This sacred marriage of a hero to a Goddess, who turns men into swine and back again, goodlier and taller than before, recalls the mythology rites of Demeter and Persephone at Eleusis and of the festival of the anthesteria where the pig was the sacrificial beast, representing a theme of death and re-birth. Odysseus had passed to a context of initiations associated with the opposite side of the duplex classical heritage from that represented by his earlier heroic sphere of life. The Goddess in her terrible aspect is the cannibal ogress of the underworld and in her benign aspect the guide and guardian to that realm and giver of immortal life. Circe offers to guide Odysseus to the underworld. Odysseus therefore travels to the city of the Cimmerians shrouded in mist and cloud, where he sees the ghosts of the dead and in particular the Cretan king, Minos, son of Zeus, holding in his hand a sceptre and judging the dead. He then returns to Circe and receives from her further instruction, in particular the way and the dangers of the way to the Island of the Sun, which were the Sirens, the clashing rocks and Scylla and Charybdis. The first is symbolic of the allure of the beatitude of paradise where the soul enjoys its object with paradisial bliss as the end, rather than pressing through to non-dural transcendent illumination. The other two represent the ultimate threshold of unitive mystical experience, leading past the pairs of opposites, beyond all forms of perception to a conscious participation in the consciousness inherent in all things. Odysseus chooses the route between the pair of opposites and passes through.

However on the Island of the Sun his men eat a number of the cattle of the God and they pay for it with their lives at sea. The ship sinks and only Odysseus, who clings to a keel and mast, survives - alone at last - and this is the climax of this spiritual journey. And on to the journey home, the return of Odysseus from the underworld, where he is cast on to the Island of Calypso. The lovely Goddess keeps Odysseus with her for eight years, where he assimilates the lessons learned from Circe. Eventually the time comes for his departure and Hermes bids Calypso to let go of her lover which she does reluctantly. However Poseidon, angry still for the blinding of his son, the Cyclops, (we are now returning through the waters of this deep, dark, night sea of the soul) again wrecks Odysseus' raft and eventually he is cast naked on the shore of the Isle of the Phaeacians. And it is there that he finds the ship and crew to bear him home. Athene now appears as his guide and he meets his son in Odysseus' swine herds hut. Odysseus arrives home in the semblance of a beggar (no-man still) and is able to draw the great bow and pierce the target of twelve axes, which none of the other suitors of his wife were able to do. The solo hero thus demonstrates his passage of the twelve signs and his lordship of the palace and he proceeds masterfully to the shooting down of the suitors. After which "thy bed verily shall be ready" said the wisely, wifely Penelope "come tell me of thy ordeal, for methinks the day will come when I must learn it and timely knowledge is no hurt".

Over the next five hundred years there is a leap from the dark age of this barbaric Warrior/ King/Hero epic to the day of luminous Athens which, in the fifth century BC shone like a beacon, even now to the modern world. The Greeks, after an ordeal of fire such as few could have survived, had beaten back decisively the numerically overwhelming hoards of Persia. Not once, but four times. And they were proud, as well they might be, of being men instead of slaves, of being the ones in the world to have learned at last to live as men might live - not as the servants of God, obedient to some conjured divine law, nor as functionaries trimmed to size of some ever-wheeling cosmic order, but as rationally, judging men whose laws were voted on, not heard, whose arts were in celebration of humanity, not divinity, and consequently in whose science is truth and not fancy was at last beginning to appear.

The Greek Gods were themselves aspects of the universe, children of chaos and the great earth, just as men are, unlike the biblical view where there is a freely willing personal God, antecedent to the order of the universe, unlimited by law.

The Legend of The Minotaur

The classical Greek myth of Theseus and the Minotaur is the first story we have of Crete, although told one thousand years later from a perspective of a culture much changed from the original. Zeus saw Europa picking flowers by a sea shore and fell in love with her, he transformed himself into a bull, the princess climbed onto his back, the bull plunged into the sea and carried her to Crete. A son, Minos was born from this union. Europa then married the king of Crete, Asterios, and in due course Minos became king. Minos then married Pasiphae the daughter of Helios, the sun God. In order to settle a dispute with his brothers, Minos asked Poseidon to send him a bull as a sign that the throne belonged only to him and he promised to sacrifice the animal immediately. Poseidon sent him a magnificent white bull from the sea but Minos could not bear to part with it so he sacrificed another in his place. Unfortunately the God was able to tell the difference and Poseidon, enraged, aroused in Minos' queen a great passion for the bull. She hid in a model of a cow and the bull was able to have intercourse with her. A son was born to Pasiphae with the body of a man but the head and tail of a bull. The great labyrinth was made deep under the ground to hide the Minotaur away.

King Minos had defeated Athens and demanded a tribute every eight years, from the Athenian king, of seven boys and seven girls who were to be given to the Minotaur in the labyrinth. Theseus, the king's son, came to Crete as one of the fourteen in order to slay the Minotaur and set his country free. Ariadne, daughter of King Minos, fell in love with Theseus and offered to help him. She gave a skein of thread to Theseus who, tying one end to the entrance and unravelling the ball as he went deeper and deeper inside, reached the heart of the labyrinth where he killed the Minotaur and, courtesy of the thread, was able to find his way back. Theseus then escaped from Crete, taking Ariadne with him as he had promised, but then deserted her on the Island of Naxos. Theseus sailed away and later became King of Athens. Ariadne was awakened by Dionysus, the Bull God, and they were married and had three sons.

It is clear with our knowledge of Minoan ritual that there is another story here, one older and more complex. A story of sacred marriage rituals of Knossos still abated by a priestess queen and a priest king, wearing the horned masks of cow and bull. Minotaur means the 'bull of Minos' or 'Minos the bull' and refers us to the other bulls in the tale, Zeus, Poseidon, Theseus and Dionysus. We see the sacred embodiment of the life force in the bull, which the king also embodied in his person as the son/lover of the Goddess. At the end of the eight years, when the kings sacred powers needed to be renewed, whereas in other times he himself was sacrificed, the bull took the kings place. An octenial cycle was the shortest period at the end of which the sun and moon really mark time together after overlapping through the whole of the interval - for example it is only once in every eight years that the full moon coincides with the longest or shortest day. It is most probable that the ritual slaying of the bull by the priest took place at the same time as the sacred marriage between the priestess queen and the priest king of Knossos since both were connected with the renewal of life. Perhaps a ritual leap over the bull or a ritual combat with the bull was necessary to bestow the right to rule. The bull would have been slain as the embodiment of the old cycle, allowing the sacred marriage to take place. Pacified the priestess queen, united with the sacred bull, the priest king. This marriage was an imitation on earth of the marriage in heaven when the sun and moon returned after eight revolving years to the same heavenly bridal chamber where first they met.

The bull used to be related to the moon through the crescent shape of its horns as the male form of the Lunar Goddess, but now it seemed as if the fertilising principal embodied in the bull is related to the vital power of the sun, reflecting the growing to independence of the male generative power of the once androgynous Goddess. This generative power imaged first as a horned animal and then as the son of the Goddess, can now encounter her as her lover, and finally as the sacrifice, to be re-born from her as her son in the image of continuous renewal.

The seals and frescos of Knossos suggest that before the ceremony of the bull slaying the bull's magickal power was invoked by young men and women in vaulting over its back. It seem highly plausible then that the ultimate focus of the rituals at Knossos was the Sacred Marriage and this was the underlying meaning conveyed in the story of the Minotaur. What happens in the legend mythologically is a cycle of sacred marriages between the son as the bull and the moon as the priestess. All five marriages - Zeus, the bull with Europa; Minos, son of the bull with Pasiphae; the bull from Poseidon with Pasiphae; Theseus, son of Poseidon the bull, with Ariadne and later Dionysus the bull with Ariadne, symbolise the marriage of sun and moon as an unending cycle. Theseus becomes an image of the questing consciousness, the journeys into the unknown regions of the psyche to seek the treasure of the heart. Ariadne's thread is the intuition that guides the conscious mind through the labyrinth mind turnings, leading to the source which can be trusted to lead us safely back.

Greek Concepts of Death, Resurrection And The After Life.

Early legends were of crossing the River Styx in Charon's Barque with bizarre punishments handed out to the wicked and eternal bliss handed out to the successful hero in the fields of Elysium. However philosophical criticism in the fifth century BC showed the absurdity of these gloomy tales and the Greeks developed a broader and more alchemical viewpoint on the whole process.

Socrates said that the soul of man was immortal. At one time it comes to an end, which is death, and at another it is born again but it is never finally exterminated and on these grounds man must live all his days as righteously as possible for those from whom "Persephone receives requital for ancient doom, in the ninth year she restores again their souls to the sun above, from whom lies noble kings and the swift in strength and greatest in wisdom, for the rest of the time they are called heroes and sanctified by men". Thus the soul, since it is immortal and has been born many times and has seen all things both here and in the other world, has learned everything that is.

Stoicism

The other philosophical school regarded the divine soul, or spark, as becoming merged after death into the cosmic fires from which it originally issued without preserving its individuality. Death was therefore a means of liberation from destiny by whose bonds they were inevitable bound while here on earth.

So it all became a matter of personal choice. There being no hard and fast rules as far as philosophy is concerned. The initiates of the Mysteries did profess definite views as to the destiny of the soul however. They welcomed the idea that there was divine justice somewhere in the universe that would be brought to bear in the next world if not in this. The doctrine of Sidereal Eschatology stated that the spirits of the dead inhabited the moon, planets, stars or other various heavenly locations according to the nature and the deeds of their earthly incarnation. At death the body fell to dust and was reunited with earth but the animating essence ascended to and became one with the subtle ephebe that was the source of all life. Plato saw those souls who had made good use of their lives as returning to inhabit those heavenly bodies from which they had originally emanated to partake of divine bliss. Heroes were traditionally metamorphosed into constellations, Hercules, Perseus, Andromeda, Castro and Pollux being fine examples.

In stoicism reconciled with astrology in the belief that as the stars are the most brilliant manifestation of cosmic fire and the soul if man represented the emanation of this cosmic fire, the two at some point became reunited. Plato dispensed with any ideas of heavenly bliss entailing earthly debauchery, hedonism and the pursuit for purely physical pleasures and saw it in a more sublime and exalted light, having risen above and beyond the planet to the regions of the starry firmament the ascended soul could view all below it and with keener vision enable it to both see and fully comprehend the sidereal revolutions and learn about creation and the workings of the universe.

The Olympians were never confused by the Greeks with the ultimate Being of being. Like men, the Gods had been born of the Great Mother and though stronger and longer of life than men, they were the temporary governors of the universe, which they had wrested from an earlier generation of divine children and they would now lose it, as Prometheus knew, to a later.

In the Hellenistic period when Alexander the Great brought together in one world Greece, India, Persia, Egypt and even the Jews outside Jerusalem, Greek religion advance to a new phase; on one hand of grandiose universalism and on the other of personal inward immediacy. In the west they awakened Rome and in the south brought a new significance to the old cults of Isis and her spouse and they awakened new religious and ascetic forms in India, China and even Japan. An appreciation of the viewpoint of the Hellenistic Greeks towards their religion can be obtained from the Alexandrian mythographer, Maximus of Tyre from the second century AD.

"God himself, the father and fashioner of all that is; older than the sun or the sky; greater than time and eternity and all the flow of being, is unnamable by any law giver, unutterable by any voice, not to be seen by any eye. But we, being unable to apprehend his essence, use the help of sounds and names and pictures, of beaten gold and ivory and silver, of plants and rivers, mountain peaks and torrents, yearning for the knowledge of Him and in our weakness naming all that is beautiful in this world after his nature, just as happens to earthly lovers. To them the most beautiful site will be the actual liniments of the beloved but for remembrance sake they will be happy in the site of a lyre, a little spear, a chair perhaps or a running stream that wakens the memory of the beloved. Why should I further examine and pass judgement upon images? Let men know what is divine, let them know, that is all. If a is Greek stirred to the remembrance of God by the art of Phideas, an Egyptian by paying worship to animals, another man by a river, another by fire, I have no anger for their divergences - only let them know, let them love, let them recall".

Alexander gave strict orders that no sacred object whatsoever should be injured on his invasion of Persia. In contrast to the destruction by the Persians of Greek temples and images and shrines when they sought to overpower Greece. The Greeks not only respected the Gods of all religions but began an almost scientific effort to recognise analogy so that specific deities of the various lands began to be identified in worship as equivalent to each other. Isis and Demeter, Horus and Apollo, Thoth and Hermes, Aman and Zeus. The Greeks in Bactria and India identified Krishna with Hercules, Shiva with Dionysus and in the west the later Romans saw, not only in the Greek Gods but also in the Celtic and Germanic, respectable counterparts of their own. This was a transcultural syncretism, systematically cultivated, an extension for the Greek regard for the individual beyond the bounds of Greece itself.

The function of the mystery cults of Greece, including that of Eleusis, Dionysus and Mithras was to bring about, by one means or another a psychological transformation in which the candidate for knowledge would realise the divinity he is in as well as transcends every particle of the universe and all its beings. The realisation that duality is secondary and that man's goal cannot be to make duality disappear at the end of time, as in the dualistic teachings of Zoroaster and Jesus, since time being boundless never ends. The reality is that knowledge is here and now beyond the obscuring veil of duality at the true eternity for us all.

Within a world that is itself divine, where God is imminent throughout and the impulse of the flight of birds, the lightning, the falling rain, the fire of the sun, there is an epiphany of divinity in all cycle, thought and all deeds which, for those who recognise it is a beginning and end in itself, there is for all and within all a universal revelation; whereas with a world that is not itself divine but whose creator is a part the God is made known only by special revelation as in Sinai or Christ or the words of the Koran and righteousness consists then in placing oneself in accord - not with nature but with Sinai, Christ and the Koran. And one lives simply not to play the part well, that is in itself the end, but so that the Father may reward. The goal in the revealed religions is not here and now but somewhere else. In the mystery religions the accomplished initiate recognises both his own divinity and is honoured as a God for what better side of godhood could there be than a human being in whom his own godhood has been realised. All these rites mutually influenced and enriched each other in terms of a common ability to sense and experience the miracle of life itself as divine and wonderfully so.

In the Pagan mysteries the symbolism of the world annihilation always applied finally to a psychological and spiritual crisis in the initiate whereby the shadow play of phenomenality was annihilated as by a thunderbolt and the adamantean Being of beings realised immediately and for ever. But in the orthodox revealed religions from the Middle East the same symbolism of world annihilation was applied historically as referring to a day to come, of terminal doom. And the world and its inhabitants were judged for the most part as being evil, although susceptible to some sort of correction and there was no imminent deity recognised in the material world, even though God was everywhere and yet remained absolute other and apart.

So in the end the Greek religion identified with the individual, with the heroic way of life, with the realisation that not only was divinity imminent but that all could come to realise their own divinity through individual striving and effort. And it is this individual striving, this individual searching for knowledge, both external and of the self, that has warred against the imperative of kneeling to the eternal truths of revealed religion that have shaped the conflicts and the history of the western world. Where the scientists, the alchemist, the philosopher, has forever been seen as the enemy to the keepers of the revealed truths of, in particular, the Christian religion. Elsewhere the particularities of the individual, novelties of thought and qualities of individual desire and delight were sternly wiped away in the name of absolute norms of the group. But in Greece the particular excellencies of each were at least theoretically, legally and pedagogically respected. The human mind and its reasoning were honoured. The norm for human conduct became not the nursery norm of obedience, being good, doing as one was taught and told, but a rational individual development - the good life - and the laws that were not supposed to be from God but were recognised to be the products of purely human judgement. And indeed as far as godhead was concerned, even Zeus could think, reason, learn and improve morally through time from the womaniser to the caring father of mankind. In Greece, with its Apollonian appreciation for and delight in the individual form, its beauty and its particular excellence, the accent of the same basic mythic themes dramatically move from the side of the ever repeated archetype to that of the unique individuality of each particular victim; and not only to his particular individuality but to the entire order of values that may be properly termed 'personal' as opposed to impersonal of the group or the species or of the shiely natural order. It is this dramatic, unprecedented shift of loyalty from the impersonal to the personal that we characterise as the Greek Miracle and which has led to many of the advances both materially, scientifically, philosophically and theologically in the modern world. It was inevitable that where individual excellence was to such an extend revered as in Greece, the force and principal of Eros - love - should be recognised not merely as a God but as the informing God of all things, for no-one achieves excellence in his life task without love in it, in himself without love for himself or in his family without love for his home. Love brings everything to flower, each in terms of its own potential, and so is the true pedagogue of the open free society.

Heinrich Zimmer says Greek sculpture developed to its acme of perfection through a portrayal of the handsome, athletic bodies of attractive boys and youths who won prizes for wrestling and racing at the national religious contests at Olympia and elsewhere. Hindu on the other hand, in its great period, rested on those intimate experiences of the living organism and mysteries of the life process which derived from the inward awareness gained through yogic experiences and had a heterosexual flavour, distilled and refined to a subtle, enchanting fragrance. Greek art was derived from experiences of the eye, Hindu from those of the circulation of the blood.

Socrates tells of love as he learned from the wise woman, Diotama. In his celebration of love we recognise the percolation upwards of an earlier pre-Hellenic wisdom from the world of the serpent queens of Crete, Circe and Calypso. But in the male womb of his brow the law has been transmuted to accord with the inorganic atmosphere of the perfume of the banquet. Diotama says, according to Socrates "the candidate for this initiation cannot, if his efforts are to be rewarded, begin too early to devote himself to the beauties of the body. First of all he will fall in love with the beauty of one individual body so that his passion make his life to noble this course. Next he must consider how nearly related the beauty of any one body is to the beauty of any other, when he will see that if he is to vote himself the loveliness of form it will be absurd to deny that the beauty of each and everybody is the same. Having reached this point he must set himself to be the lover of every lovely body. Next he must grasp the beauties of the body are as nothing as to the beauties of the soul. So that whenever he meets with spiritual loveliness, even in the husk of an unlovely body, he will find it beautiful enough to fall in love with and to cherish, beautiful enough to quicken his heart along with such discourse as tends towards the building of a noble nature. From this he will be left to contemplate the beauty of laws and institutions and when he discovers how nearly every kind of beauty is akin to every other, he will conclude that the beauty of the body is not after all of so great moment. And next his attention will be diverted from institutions to the sciences so that he may know the beauty of every kind of knowledge. Then turning his eyes towards the open sea of beauty he will find in such contemplation the seed of the most fruitful discourse and loftiest thought and reap a golden harvest of philosophy until, confirmed and strengthened, will come upon one single form of knowledge, the knowledge of the beauty I am to speak of. Whoever has been initiated so far in the mysteries of love and has viewed all these aspects of the beautiful in due succession is drawing near the final revelation. It is an eternal loveliness which neither comes nor goes, which neither flowers nor fades, for such beauty is the same on every hand, the same then as now, here as there, this way and that way. Nor will it take the form of a face or hands or anything that is of the flesh. It will be neither words nor knowledge, nor something which exists in something else such as a living creature or the earth or the heavens or anything that is; but subsisting of itself and by itself in an eternal oneness. If man's life is ever worth the living it is when he has attained this vision of the very soul of beauty; and once you have seen it you will never again be seduced by the charm of gold, dress, (sounds like coamie boys??) who care nothing for the beauties that used to take your breath away. It is when man looks upon beauty's visible presentment and only then that a man will be quickened with the true and not seeming virtue, for it is virtues self that quickens him, not virtues semblance. When he has brought forth and reared this perfect virtue he shall be called the Friend of God and if ever it is given to man to put on immortality it shall be given to him".

The two points about this exposition about the way of beauty and love are:

(i) the accent on the body. The Greek mind was focussed almost exclusively on what is present to the senses. The Greek concept and experience of Eros is locked firmly to the body and all penetration beyond to beauty's very sense. Self must not only begin with bodily specificity but must also remain in the end with beauty's visible presentment;

(ii) the idea of beauty everywhere and love of and as beauty has become the prime substance of all things. Plato identified this principal with the earlier principal of number, harmony and the music of the spheres which, as we have seen, is linked to the mystery of the magick of the music of the Orphic lyre and song that quelled even the heart of Hades and the animals of the wild, and behind the Orphic figure looms the figure of Dionysius, the mighty Lord of Death and Resurrection.

We see in Hesiod's Theogony the God of Love, Eros, had been one of four separate deities named as original, one was Chaos, the other Gaia (Mother Earth), Tarterus (the dark pit of Hades beneath the earth was third and the fourth was Eros who is love, handsomest among all immortals who breaks the limbs strength, who in all Gods, in all human beings overpowers the intelligence in the breast and all their shrewd planning. He derives from the old pre-Hellenic Aegean stratum of mythological thought. He is linked to Aphrodite as her child who, in the pre-history of the Aegean, was the great cosmic mother with her son, the ever-dying, ever-living God. He is the issue of Chaos hatched from the egg of night, the son now of Gaia and Uranus, now of Artemis and Hermes, now of Iris and Siphyrus. All transformations of the same mythological background, pointing to the themes of the willing victim in whose death is our life, whose flesh is our meat and blood our drink. The victim present in the young, embracing couple of the primitive ritual of the love death, who at the moment of ecstasy are killed, to be roasted and consumed. The victim present in Attis or Adonis, slain by a boar or Osiris slain by Set, Dionysius torn apart, roasted and consumed by the Titans. The God is in the role of the dark enemy, the Russian boar, the dark brother set, the Titan band and the lover is the incarnate dying God. But as we know in this mythology the secret of the two partners, the slayer and his victim, though on the stage appearing in conflict are, behind the scenes, of one mind as they are two in the life-consuming, life-redeeming creating and justifying dark mystery of love.