I am not a religious person. Like many contemporary Jews, my Judaism is rooted in my social justice; I don’t believe in a deity, but I do believe in community, and that is worth sacrificing for.
I was not raised in the Jewish faith. My mother’s father was Ashkenazi (let’s say his parents were from somewhere east of Minsk, which I always thought roughly put them in Belarus, but borders were fungible things in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, so maybe let’s not get too hung up on country-of-origin), but by the time he met my Methodist grandmother, he had no interest in raising a Jewish family, and in fact sent my grandmother an angry telegram from Europe during World War II when she was looking into conversion classes.
For many reasons, while I saw my varied identities as more opportunities, my mother’s generation saw hers as more limitations. The fact that she and her siblings had a Jewish father and a Christian mother didn’t mean that they were both, but that they were neither. And maybe my conception of being both Korean and Ashkenazi is off as well. Maybe the answer is a variant on Captain Kirk’s famous Third Option, which Edward Said reminds us in Culture and Imperialism is sometimes the only one that can chart a path forward.
Maybe those limitations were crystallized for me as well in the little bits of Sunday School and religious training my mother, oddly, insisted I take on when I was seven and eight. The part about a deity that was always looking out for you, of course, is kind of nice, but the way by which it was communicated was, to say the least, stultifying. It was a picture of a world that was much more static than the one I knew, and while I frequently felt like I was doing everything incorrectly and I just wanted to fit in, I had an aversion to conforming myself *that* much. That period ended—we moved away from the church we’d been attending—and I was happy to not have to ever do anything like that again.
About a year later, I was in Los Angeles for the summer with my family, and there was no television for us (it wasn’t a vacation, but that’s a story for another day). The library was it, and it was there that I picked up the Bulfinch’s Mythology my mother had wanted me to read when we were in Massachusetts. I loved the Archie’s comics and Nancy Drews I found, but it was those beautiful, envelope-pushing Roman gods who really caught my attention. As I said, I’m not a religious person, but I much prefer a pantheon to a single (or doubled…) deity who is, if not always the star of every story or lesson, conspicuously observing the action to make sure it’s being carried out just so.
When I got back to Massachusetts in the fall of that year, a friend lent me D’Aulaire’s Greek Myths, and then later helped me pilfer Edith Hamilton’s Mythology: Timeless Tales of Gods and Heroes from a neighbor (yes, I feel bad). I quickly realized these were the OG myths, and they were even more interesting. Thomas Bulfinch was definitely showing his nineteenth century orientation in his tome, so the agency, however limited it might have been, shown by women in these other books was a welcome revelation. Oh yeah, the Greek gods were even more glamorous than their Roman counterparts.
I scrounged for other books, but it wasn’t until I found—no joke—two mythology encyclopedias that I found contentment. For all that people say about the internet being a tool of distraction that sends us down fruitless rabbit holes, it’s nothing compared to reading an entry about a god, hero, or other character and checking through for all of the references—and oh wait, what’s that name showing up on this page? You *can* learn this way, it’s just different from how you’re told you should.
When you’ve taken the stories to heart, you start to see them everywhere. Part of that is a function of authors and artists reading similar source material—Western Civilization has been doing fan fiction since jump—but it’s also because, like any good system of myth, the Greek canon is getting at something true, if not always good.
I fan girled George O’Connor’s Olympians graphic novel series, as you can see from this interview, and I thank him for turning me onto The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony by Roberto Calasso. I hadn’t been imagining certain things, and I felt seen—which fits perfectly.
There is a narrative to the Greek myths. Some might say that’s the difference between folklore and mythology, but I suspect people aren’t looking closely enough at the stories. Every culture has a story it’s trying to tell, and the meandering minor arcs usually end up enforcing it just as much as the main “plot”.
How do we go from Chaos to order, and what is order? That, I submit, is the main storyline of the Greek myths, and the discomfort that underlines every good story is here the compromises we have to make to get to order, and the consequences of those compromises. It is, of course, a modern problem that predates modernity.
The universe, if we can call it that, that existed before the Titans and the Olympians was characterized by duality. There was Chaos, and from Chaos came the beginnings of order. There was Darkness and Night (Erebus and Nyx), and from them Light and Day (Aether and Hemera). There were other primordial deities, but things were rather Manichean at this point.
It’s Gaea/Gaia/Earth that brings uncomfortable variation but not Chaos, from which she is said to have come. Everything else is a force of nature, but she is Life itself. And she is MESSY. All of her original mates—Uranus (the heavens), Pontus (the seas), and Tartarus (the bowels of the earth)—are also her children. Her first marriage to Uranus goes *really* badly. The honeymoon period was characterized by the six sets of beautiful, glamorous Titans (the sun, the moon, time, memory, justice, et al) that any parent would be proud to claim. Reality starts setting in when the next set of children, the Cyclopes, are born. They are skilled but not nearly as beautiful, and Uranus disdains them. But when the Hechatonchineri (literally, the Hundred Handed) are born, Uranus, who wants everything in his universe to be beautiful, imprisons his younger children in Tartarus; effectively, he is forcing Gaea to remain perpetually pregnant.
The conflict between the primordial parents becomes the conflict between the parent and child, and it is Gaea, in keeping with her messiness, that implores her children—or at least her sons—to intervene. If Time is the most human-defined attributed of the Titans, it is fitting to an extent that it is Time—Cronos—who takes up the challenge against his all-powerful father. Time, as the saying goes, is the one thing that cannot be stopped, and the heavens themselves are literally powerless against it.
In fairness, 1) Cronos had help from his mother, and 2) he took what might be considered the cheapest shot in all of mythology, pretty much anywhere. As we discussed in Volume 1, Cronos attacked his father while he was having sex with his mother (I mean, none of us like the idea of walking in on that scene, but he took it further than most), and castrated and/or emasculated Uranus, which resulted in the births of Aphrodite—men’s sexual lust, dressed up in female form—and the vengeful Erinyes (Furies), which made sense from the time I was ten. But however we got there, Time was victorious over the Heavens, and Cronos assumed Uranus’ power.
Did Gaea misread the problem? She wanted to be rid of her husband so she could free her children, but now Cronos makes the same choice his father makes and refuses to free his younger brothers. Does he fear their raw power? Is he offended by their appearance? Does he want to assert his own agency and not be his mother’s puppet? Whatever the reason, Gaea is livid, and gets under his skin as only a mother can, delivering that most bitter curse: “You will have a child just like yourself.” In this case, she isn’t talking about a kid who won’t clean up their space or do their homework, but one who will overthrow him, just as he overthrew his own father.
It is here that we have to ask if Gaea cursed him with a prophecy that she knew to be true, or was her utterance itself sufficient to make the prophecy true? I lean toward the latter, in part because we begin to see Cronos go against his own nature. The god of Time, who achieved dominance as part of progress, now attempts to freeze time. Every child that his sister-wife Rhea bears is summarily consumed by him. Cronos is now not the passage of time, but an old order asserting its dominance—our first fascist.
It’s worth considering how Uranus kept Gaea perpetually pregnant, while Cronos will let his children be born, but only just. It’s also worth considering the grief of Gaea and Rhea, both of whom ache to mother their children.
I could go on—and really, as myths go, this is a good story—but suffice to say that Gaea finds herself continually reeling from the consequences of her own actions. Is that on her? Because while she can push gods and goddesses around, she lacks the agency to fix things that have been done to her. Should she beg instead of promise and manipulate? And it must be said that the people she negotiates with—Cronos, then Zeus—agreed to do as she asked, but not what she (clearly) wanted. She wants Cronos to strip his father of power—so he can free her other children. She later wants Zeus to stop Cronos so he can free her children—but not so he can imprison the Titans, her other children, in Tartatus (and, again, keep her in a state of perpetual pregnancy). If Gaea is messy—and she is—perhaps it’s because she’s working through unfair limitations, and who among us isn’t?
Gaea is as unrelenting with Zeus as she was with Cronos, but he doesn’t need her to curse him to know that the same fate lingers for him: another child who will impose on him the same fate that he brought to his father and that his father brought to his grandfather. Such is the way of the Heavens (Uranus) and Time (Cronos).
But Zeus is having none of it. If Cronos is our first fascist, Zeus is our first benevolent dictator, and he, finally, has inherited some of Gaea’s finesse.
We always look to Zeus’ sons—Calasso suggests that Apollo was the god who should have been king, and he makes a very good argument—but the child Zeus bore down upon the hardest was Persephone.
There’s a way to talk about certain myths as if they are fairy tales, but of course most fairy tales have a sinister side to them when you scratch deep enough. The modern, popular way to talk about Persephone is a coming of age story in which a young, sheltered girl throws off her overprotective mother to become a sexually awakened woman with agency by choosing the thing her mother has always tried to protect her from. Yes, I suppose that’s one way of looking at it, especially if you can ignore certain aspects of it. Perhaps it is because the first time I read it as, literally, the rape of Persephone, I’ve never found it to be particularly romantic, but I have always found it to be disturbingly instructive.
The story, as I know it: Zeus and Demeter, the goddess of agriculture and the harvest, have a daughter, Persephone. She is quite clearly a younger version of Demeter, who is herself a younger version of Rhea (she and Zeus are siblings), who is herself a (slightly) more independent version of Gaea (see above)—
But let’s back up. Zeus and Demeter’s brothers are Hades and Poseidon. After they, plus their sisters Demeter, Hestia, and Hera, help Zeus defeat the Titans, they have a world to split up. We can question whether Hera and Hestia were cheated out of territorial dominion, but Hera ends up with the institution of marriage (among other things), which, given her parents’ and grandparents’ histories, is a big lift. Hestia, eldest of the Olympians, is given home and hearth, another difficult job for someone with no precedent of security.
The brothers draw lots for the world, but it’s never a question that Zeus will end up with the skies (though he may have cheated to draw that lot), Poseidon ends up with the seas (even though Oceanus, the personification of the oceans, is the one Titan brother who didn’t stand against the Olympians), and Hades ends up with the underworld. In some stories, that suits him and his laconic personality, but in other versions, Hades feels slighted. More importantly, Zeus knows this, so when Hades asks for Persephone as a wife, Zeus does not refuse.
In keeping with the absolutely dysfunctional dynamic of the deities before them, we can imagine Zeus and Demeter as separated parents who don’t talk. Zeus gives his permission *without* consulting Demeter, who would not, of course, have ever agreed to that arrangement. So when Persephone is lured away from her companions and then disappears, Demeter is frantic. Not getting an answer from anyone as to where her daughter is arguably drives her to madness. It is only when her cousin Helios—the personification of the Sun, and one of the children of the defeated Titans—tells her that he saw her being abducted by Hades that Demeter realizes what has happened. Demeter confronts Zeus and demands her daughter back. Zeus refuses, and Demeter does the only thing she can and withholds her bounty—plant growth—from the Earth, and scorns the company of the gods. Demeter’s powers of coercion may be limited, but she, too, has learned from both her mother and her grandmother, and she’s going to press whatever advantage she has.
It is during this time that the story takes the turn that defines what’s really going on in this tale. Poseidon attempts to bring her back into the fold, which enrages Demeter even more. Poseidon, now, won’t leave her alone, and Demeter takes the form of a horse to escape him. This is a bad choice, as Poseidon’s waves are often compared to horses, and he is easily able to follow suit and pursue her. Eventually, he catches her—and she later gives birth to the divine horse Arion and the mysterious goddess Despoina.
Needless to say, this turn of events does nothing to reconcile Demeter to the Olympians, and her wanderings during this time lead her to more contact with humanity, which is how agriculture is developed (and at least one more child is born). But I’ve always seen that as a sideshow. What I see in the myth is Zeus solidifying his power, and in the most terrible of ways.
Hades has the riches of the underworld, Poseidon all of the seas and oceans, and Zeus has the sky, but Demeter had—was—the bounty of the earth, and Zeus knew exactly how much trouble an earth goddess could get him into. Demeter doesn’t have a son with him, but a daughter, a replacement or backup for herself, and he knows trouble when he sees it. He needs to neutralize them both, but (at least in this version) he can’t do it by himself. Thus let Hades have Persephone so Demeter has to go through a god to get her back, and let Poseidon put Demeter in her place with sexual violence.
And of course, Demeter isn’t the only person who suffers sexual violence in this story. For decades, I have read “kidnapped by the lord of the underworld and forced to marry him” as rape and murder. Again, not romantic (and not romantic even if the worst crime is kidnapping). The modern impulse to remake this as as romantic story, wherein Persephone needs to be forcibly removed from her mother’s environment in order to become a person with agency, baffles me when it doesn’t disturb me. This isn’t romantic, and it isn’t growth, but agreed, it may not be a stretch to see this as a proto Billionaire and the Damsel story, or whatever the latest incarnation of Beauty and the Beast is.
In the end, Demeter and Persephone are reunited—Zeus can’t stand to not be worshiped, but worship is difficult when people are starving—but because Persephone has eaten seeds of a pomegranate (a fruit associated with birth control, among other things) while in Hades, she has to divide her time between Earth and Hades. Yes, I understand that on some level this is a story about the seasons and cycles of growth, but on another level, it’s a story about control. The relationship between mother and daughter has been interfered with, and it will never be as it was, and attempts to return it will be met with violence. The men in the story have successfully asserted their dominance over the women in the story.
Calasso conveys an even stranger version of the story of Persephone: this version skips the middleman and makes Zeus Persephone’s suitor and mate, and here they become the parents of Zagreus who is murdered by the Titans but then reborn—in Zeus’ thigh, as is standard—as Dionysus. Persephone is more powerful here, but the violence of the story is just as awful, only now transferred to the Titans.
As Calasso tells it, the theme running through the Greek myths is that of duality—that which we see as soon as Chaos begins organizing itself—and the terrible alternative of singularity which, by Calasso’s reckoning, is not an opposite but a reflection. And reflection itself is a concept that is central to the stories. Persephone’s other, perhaps original name is Kore, which means, among other things, the pupil of the eye. It is that which sees The Other, but also serves as a mirror for The Other. The intertwining of mirrors and others begs the question of our relations with both our loved ones and our enemies. Do we love someone else, or are we—like Narcissus—in love with our own reflections, as seen through the eyes of others? And when we struggle with an antagonist, are we struggling with someone else, or aspects of ourselves?
Duality is also more subtly woven through the stories: it’s impossible to miss the parallels between Io (chased out of Greece because of Zeus) and her descendant Europa (brought back to Greece by Zeus); Apollo (the god of light and reason whom Hera struggles to keep from being born) and Dionysus (the chthonic god as lightened up as possible for Olympus, whose mother Hera manipulated into an early death that should have made his birth impossible); Gaea, Rhea-Demeter, and Demeter-Persephone (the mothers whose children are stolen, and whose grief drives them to destruction); and Medea (the sorceress-princess who leaves her home to save Jason, only to be abandoned later as a stranger in a strange land) and her cousin Ariadne (the princess gifted with specific knowledge who leaves her home to save Theseus, only to be abandoned shortly after on an empty island)...is it worth noting that they are the granddaughters of Helios, the personification of the Sun, who helped solve the mystery of Persephone’s fate?
With so much repetition, it isn’t a stretch to think that the myths are saying *something*, but what that might be is open for interpretation.
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