I bow to your greater knowledge. It looks like I’ll soon be employed full time. I have a list of books by Dopers I intend to buy. Yours it at the top of the list.
Indeed, but then he learned Latin and replied: Quod licet Iovi, non licet bovi and walked away feeling dandy.
I’d think that god would get pretty bored with it after a few aeons.
Yes, I reckon it would take at least two godotts in some kind of competition against each other to make sense of it. The universes that lose get discarded. Ours was one of the first to be discarded, would be my guess.
Seems like those would be good gods to be discarded by. Maybe we can make some useful compost out of their trash basket, as long as they don’t come back to throw its contents into the burn barrel.
– did you just invent a new theology? I’ve heard of systems in which God created the place and then went away; and of ones in which we’re a dream and when God wakes up it’s all over; and heard people positing that God went away for a while and will be back sometime; and have certainly run into people positing that God must be evil; but I can’t remember anybody positing that God threw the whole universe in the trash on purpose. Somebody probably has, though; my information’s pretty incomplete in this area.
I would have loved to, but for the hassle of being a false prophet. But you were the one that postulated that godott got bored with us. I juts followed your idea one step further, to the bin where boring worlds belong.
Hah! – I have a world in my head on which the main theology includes the idea that humans ought to live in all sorts of different ways, because if the gods get bored, they’re likely to start quarrelling; and if the gods quarrel, they’ll do so by throwing planets and stars and galaxies at each other –
This was Bokononist theology. Was the idea mentioned elsewhere?
Isn’t that also Deism?
I was asking you. (I know nothing about Deism.) It was explicit in Bokononism. Mud as man alone sat up and asked God: Is there a purpose to all this? God said: Must there be one? Man answered: Of course! And God said: Then I leave it to you to invent one. And He went away.
Which highlights that eternal punishment really wasn’t, couldn’t, truly be a thing in the Greek mythology. To the Greeks, the gods were very great, but still finite, and could be defeated, certainly by other gods, and occasionally even by exceptional mortals. If a Greek god sentences you to something “for eternity”, that really just means “until someone powerful enough undoes it”.
@Senegoid - I don’t know much about it myself. But here:
Deists hold that after the motions of the universe were set in place, God retreated and had no further interaction with the created universe or the beings within it.
http://www.religioustolerance.org/deism.htm
A religion whose followers
believe in a God who created the
universe, established its rules of
behavior, set it going, left, and
hasn’t been seen since.
IOKIAGDI
In the Iliad, Odysseus journeys to the underworld and meets up with his old pal Achilles who you might remember died towards the beginning of the story. Achilles isn’t so keen on being dead and Odysseus tells him to cheer up because he was totally awesome in life, they worshiped him as a god, and that he got to lord it over the dead there in the afterlife. But Achilles is miserable in the afterlife and tells him:
By god, I’d rather slave on earth for another man—
some dirt-poor tenant farmer who scrapes to keep alive—
than rule down here over all the breathless dead.
Even for someone awesome like Achilles, the afterlife suuuucked.
Interestingly, this is stated in Hesiod’s Theogony, one of the oldest Greek myth texts we have. That means it isn’t a mitigation of the punishment told about in some old myth by a much later writer (the way the Roman author Ovid reshaped the origin of Medusa as told in the old Greek sources) – the idea that Prometheus was eventually freed is as old as the oldest accounts we have.
So did Zeus allow him to be rescued by Hercules?
Well, Hesiod said so, and it’s hard to get more authoritative than that. Hesiod and Homer were practically contemporaries.
This does bring up an important point – there is no single and – yes – authoritative version of a myth. Myths are stories that people tell, and they change through time. the hoary old trope of comparing the transmission of myth to a game of "telephone’ is rightly criticized as simplistic, but it does contain the truth that myths change through time.
And not just time. I don’t agree with McLuhan that “the medium is the message”, but I certainly do believe that the medium shapes the message. The same myth as told in vase paintings often differs from the version that is written in prose, or from a recited poetic version.
Location also affects the myth. You can hardly expect the Spartans to venerate the local culture hero that Athens does. Theseus is the Hero of Athens, but that doesn’;t mean everyone loves him. I’ve argued that the myths of Perseus rescuing Andromeda, Hercules rescuing Hesione, and Bellerophon rescuing Philinoe are really the same myth, inspired by the same stimuli, but reflecting the culture heroes of (respectively) Argos, Tiryns, and Corinth.
The process of myth changing continues to go on. In the Renaissance they resurrected the classical myths and added their own spins. Today we do the same. Both versions of Clash of the Titans introduced changes. Not only did they choose showier events, the better to showcase the capabilities of stop–motion animation or CGI effects (there’s the medium shaping the message again), but in subtler ways. (Zeus, rather than Athena, is Perseus’ guide and protector in both films. A bit of Western male-centricity, I maintain). Or pitting Zeus against Hades (a dynamic completely absent from classical Greek myth. Even is Disney’s Hercules did the same thing.)
Now I understand the name of that new game that’s coming out. I’d forgotten about Ixion. It’s a survival builder set on a spinning space habitat.
I remember reading both versions as a kid, and somehow conflating them in my mind to the point that I wondered why and how Stheno and Euryale earned the same punishment as their sister.
… and nobody ever explained what happened to Stheno and Euryale afterwards. Did they just sit around on their grim Island At The End Of the World saying to each other “Have you seen Medusa lately?”
As far as I know, they feature in no other myths. Several years ago comic book writer Roy Thomas featured them in a comic story where they crash Perseus’ wedding to avenge their sister, but I don’t remember which one it was. (It wasn’t DC or Marvel, but some other company).
I admit to being confused by the different versions myself as a kid.
Another confusion was that Odysseus, in Chapter 11 of the Odyssey (sometimes called the Nekuia) Odysseus finally ends his contact with the dead because he’s afraid that Hades will send up the Gorgon’s head after him. Which gorgon was this supposed to be?
Apollodorus*, in his Bibliotheka , gave an explanation. I think of him as the Greek equivalent of a continuity-obsessed comic book nerd. He tried to tell the myths in such a way that they fit perfectly together, with no inconsistencies. There was only one mortal Gorgon – Medusa – so the head must be hers! So he put Medusa in the Underworld to be the Gorgon that is said to be there. And obviously the events of the Odyssey must be placed chronologically after those of Perseus, since she has to be dead already. This fits in well with the mention of Perseus in the Iliad (Book 14 – but it only says he’s the son by Zeus of Danae, and doesn’t mention his exploits).
*properly pseudo-Apollodorus, since the book is held to be written by someone just using his name to give his work authority. But I think that going to the trouble of calling him pseudo-Apollodorus, when we don’t have anything the real Apollodorus wrote, is carry propriety too far. Who cares that this isn’t the “real” Apollodorus?