In the Beginning…According to the Greeks

All societies of man have sought to answer how we came in to being.  It is the greatest goal of man to have an answer to the mystery of life.  It is not enough to simply be alive, we need to know we matter, have a purpose.  In order for us to search for that purpose we need to know where we came from.  All cultures have a creation myth, and to the Greeks everything began with the four great powers, Chaos, Gaia, Tartaros and Eros.  Unlike the monotheistic genesis of creation that the Judeo-Christian faith follows, the Greeks were created out of the void, Chaos. An unplanned void, a void that had a beginning.  Unlike the omnipotent God of Christians, who has no beginning and no end, Greek mythology begins at a beginning, which means their gods and deities had a beginning and if they had a beginning, unlike the Christian God, they have an end.

Chaos is the unfathomable void, from which life is formed, the swirling mass of energy, like the forces of energy that generated the Big Bang.  From Chaos is life and from life was born Mother Earth, Gaia.  Gaia is the womb from which man and gods were born.  The Greeks were an agrarian culture and their life came from the earth, so there was much significance in their creation coming from the ample bosom of the earth.  Life springs from the ground and when we die we return to it.  The opposite of life is death, and Tartaros, though not a being of death, is the depthless prison into which the Titans were thrust, in essence ending their life.  Tartaros is both a place and a being, the inevitable void, the unexplained, the thing to be feared that was even deeper down than the Underworld. Life and death, chaos. These elements bound together, held together for all creation by Eros.  God of love and passion, on him the Greeks placed great emphasis.  Physical love and passion, not the hearts and flowers type, but in the purest most primal essence, for without love and sexual encounters life would not be created. It was from these four beings that all life could grow out of. From creation, Hesiod shows the gods, a mirror image of the ideals of man.  They have the same flaws and desires, simply amplified.  It is from their lives that we can draw an image of ancient Greek life.  How man and woman related, how children and their parents interacted.  We see an idealized, more dramatic version, but it is still a blue print of Greek life.

The Greeks were a patriarchal society in which the father’s word was law.  Women were subservient to men, the vessels of their passions, the wombs for their children.  They were also a society in which social status and achievements were highly valued, sons were desired and yet feared by their fathers.  Desired to carry on the family name, to achieve a sense of immortality, yet feared because the fathers knew that they would someday age and die, become useless while their suns replaced them.  Sons both respected and resented their fathers.  It could have been the competitive nature of their culture that the sons would strive to surpass their fathers, to gain control over them, even in the eyes of their mothers.  There was conflict and pride in every encounter.  The competition so deeply ingrained that the sons sought to replace their fathers in the devotion of wives and mothers.  In a culture where women were not held in as high esteem, mothers were sacred.  Sons were devoted to their mothers and their mothers to them, a strange symbiotic relationship that was not reflected in the relationship men had with their wives.  Mothers were revered, wives were owned. The Greeks were a culture of assorted myths and beliefs, beliefs that came to them from other cultures and were seamlessly integrated into their own.  They were devout in a way our modern society cannot fully understand.  They did not have the prayers and churches like we do.  Their religion was a part of their history and culture.  Gods and man were separate and yet not.  Their gods were not all powerful beings that could not die.  They had weaknesses and mortal flaws.  Jealousies and passions very much life mortal mans. They believed in a universe that was ruled by gods who were not the ultimate, omnipotent creature, where life begins and ends, their gods had a beginning, could be killed and die.  They were called deathless gods, yet they were not eternal. The Greeks were pragmatic in the belief that all things came to an end, even the gods would someday end.  The gods did not age, but they were not eternal.  They had a beginning and thus an end.  A universe created by gods that had a beginning shows that there is an inevitable end to all things.  The Greeks did not believe in eternal life, their stories, epics and tragedies always came to an inevitable end.  Heroes would die and cease to exist.  Death in Hades was not a pleasant experience, they did not believe in a resurrection or a heaven the way that the Judeo-Christian faith does.  A polytheistic faith answered their questions about things in the universe that they could not comprehend, but they did not have a belief in eternal life.  For the Greeks the only way to achieve immortality was to achieve glory, the kind of glory that would be sung about for the ages.