Fascinated by Greek Mythology, we had signed up for a
mythology walking tour which sadly was drained out by the heavy rains. Luckily, the sun shone on our final day,
allowing us to reschedule. We arrived,
however, to find our “private tour” packed with 14 people and a quiet guide,
and suddenly our decision to reschedule was seeming less brilliant.
Nonetheless, we walked the streets of Athens and the
Acropolis to hear all about the exciting lives of the Greek gods. Created in the late 8th century BC
by a poet hoping to make religion more accessible and relatable to the Greeks, these
gods had different strengths, personalities and always a fair bit of drama.
Zeus and his wife, Hera, reinforced the traditional
male-female relationship, with the all-powerful Zeus loving Hera but also
frequently disappearing to copulate with beautiful Greek mortals. Hera was the jealous wife always scheming to
get rid of Zeus’ mistresses. Dionysus,
the god of wine and theatre, for example, was born out of Zeus’ leg after Hera
was so intent on ensuring that this progeny of one of Zeus’ indiscretions
wouldn’t be born, that Zeus ate his mistress and sewed the baby into his thigh
until he was fully plumped.
When Hera finally had a child of her own, the baby was so
ugly that she threw him off a cliff, causing Hephasteus additional disfigurement
that only made things worse. Hephasteus
then devised a cunning plan to hurt his mother which he managed to
strategically turn into a marriage to Aphrodite, the most beautiful goddess of
them all. Unfortunately, the fates did their
work and eventually Aphrodite managed to marry the most beautiful man in the
kingdom, Ares.
But what was surprising was the similar themes that Greek
Mythology had to other religions.
First, and most obviously, Roman mythology. The Romans were fascinated by the Greek gods
and their escapades. When the Romans
conquered Greece, they decided to keep the religion and simply change the names
of all of the Gods to reflect their culture.
The stories all remained virtually the same.
But Greek mythology also has remarkable parallels to Christianity. For example, the story of Zeus and the Great
Flood. The opening of Pandora’s Box had
caused many problems in Greece and humanity had become unruly. To punish them, Zeus decided to send a great
flood to wash away mankind and start again.
As such, he protected only the King and Queen, putting them in a box,
while floods drowned the rest of them.
When the water cleared, the King and Queen emerged from the box, solved
a riddle and then threw stones over their shoulders which created new human
beings that repopulated the earth.
Perhaps we are all more similar that we sometimes think…
No comments:
Post a Comment