| |
|
Anyone used to the rather rigid geneaological approach to deities in western esotericism is in for a rough time when approaching the gods & goddesses of the Indian subcontinent.
I think that's potentially a little unfair, most obviously because my pantheon's better than yours yar boo sucks. Sorry, start again.
Genealogy is certainly very important to Greek mythology, just as family and tribal membership was vital to early Greek society, but the unity that people tend to identiify as "Greek" (or, God help us, "Graeco-Roman) is anything but - they are a motley collection of deities, spirits and cult heroes gathered up from a Greek(ish) sphere of influence that at various times extended to Marseilles in the West and India in the East (no, honest. Probably. It's hard to tell). At different times different attempts were made to impose order on this insane quilt, and some of those attempts were more successful than others (Homer's anthropomorphic deities), but even the relatively limited sources we have - Proclus on the cyclics, Apollodorus, Homer, pretty much everyone else at various points - contradict each other.
Key elements here are geography, local cult and syncretism. Geography sees different deities being worshipped, and being worshipped as different things and in different ways - your classic here is the spread of what apppears to be some form of Isis-worship in the Eleusinian mysteries in Athens, the tales of the march of the worship of Dionysus across Greece, the Orphic elements (Thracian, I think - you get some weird stuff about an Orphic/Thracian shamanic figure being Pythagoras' slave).
This is then complicated by local cult - some gods, while generally accepted as divine, are considered _more_ divine in certain places. This is often a place with a historico-mythical connection to the entity in question - Apollo is credited with killing the (cthonic) Python in Delphi, Athene with patronage of Athens. In other places, the line of human and divine is blurred - in the Peloponnese, f'r example, you've got reasonably convincing evidence of an active cult that worshipped Helen - the poet Stesichorus appears to have written two poems, possibnly for performance north and south of the isthmus, one criticising Helen's lack of morals and the other rejecting this previous finding and claiming that she was in Egypt throughout the entire Trojan War, a story picked up by Euripides as well.
Syncretism, as you know, is the process whereby local divinities acquire the properties and characteristics of more broadly known divinities as they come into contact with each other. It's a kind of divine instantiation of Occam's razor, I suppose, except that rather than compressing to a single deity you usually ended up with a multi-purpose deity in some ways discrete from both minor and major deity.
Bruno mentioned epithets above in the context of Aphrodite, and they are useful. Just as Schrondinger taught us that observing a cat resoolves its state, naming a deity actually creates a different kind of deity. Given the odd origins of some of the deities to start with, this can get very confusing indeed. So, Zeus is the father of the gods. He is also something outside the gods, either a transcendent divinity or a force equating to fate that possibly not even Zeus himself can buck (boulder, meet God). He is also the regulating force of various institutions - as Zeus Basileus, Zeus Xeinios and Zeus Hiketesios are simultaneously Zeus being appealed to in different capacities, and also sort of different kinds of Zeus, and also personifications of instantiating principles on which the society that created them functioned. This ties into the idea of Hindu deities as verbs-not-nouns, I guess, in some ways - Greek deities are nouns, but often quite a lot of nouns...
So, yes. |
|
|
