The Shadow of OlympusLove is everywhere. It infuses the very world. Love as attraction. Love as compassion. Love as stability. Love as beauty. Love as protection. Love as instinct. It infuses the entire world, alive or not, with its divine power.
I am not a big believer in creationism. I don’t thiink the universe was created, but rather, that it is a state of change between something that was and something that is and that one day something similar could happen within it to bring about yet another universe. Physicists call this vacuum decay. In terms of my personal theology, I call it infusion.
I see the Gods as forces of a greater universe. Eternal and present in all things. Just as I see love as being in all things, so too are Zeus, Hephaestus, Athena, etc. But at the beginning of this universe there was a power, a sudden infusion of divine power that set off the chain reaction that we call the big bang. Spacetime rushing outward at the speed of light, whatever that might be in the older universe, and evolving into what we see now and continuing to evolve until it has dissipated away all of its energy. This power was Love.
We have many divine names for love, sometimes we think of it as sexual, romantic, loving, caring, etc., and often assign divine names to such distinctions, but that power is all of those things. The bright ones like the emotional bonds between people and the dark ones like jealousy and hatred. Love is a spark that lights a fire, and sometimes that fire is a candle, contained and providing light, and sometimes it is a forest fire that destroys everything in its path.
This love is Primordial Eros.
There isn’t just one myth of creation. Not in Hellenismos and not in any known religion. There are always variations. From nothing there is a spark, a word, a voice, a birth, and from there the rest is inevitable. From the depths of darkness and night comes the egg, a product of their coupling and love. From the chaos emerge night and darkness, air and day, earth and the very love we call Eros. But Eros was also there before. In the love of night and darkness, in their coupling he was there. Unformed, perhaps, but there none the less. Into the chaos came unity, like gravity, like lovemaking, and from it the rest came forth.
Think of it like the old universe being a fallow land and Eros planting a seed from which a great flower blooms full of color, striation, delicacy, and unfolding petals. Each petal a separate thing, but growing from the central stalk.
In my personal theology, there aren’t infinite gods, they are limited, and they are limited because they change over time just as the universe does. From the spark of Eros until the day death himself takes the last bit of energy, the gods change because they too are part of the universe, and the aspects of the true gods, far off in the ultimate realm where everything is contained, slowly evolve and change so that we living beings feel it and give them new names. Names appropirate to our cultures, yes, but also to their times. The primordial Eros becomes Aphrodite and Aphrodite becomes something else as the universe ages until one day that power and spirit of love returns to whence it came just as all the essences and spirit of the other gods will.
Love is in all things. All is full of love, as Björk sang. All is love!
#gods #hellenimos #pagan #paganism #polytheism #religion #prayer
I am not a big believer in creationism. I don’t thiink the universe was created, but rather, that it is a state of change between something that was and something that is and that one day something similar could happen within it to bring about yet another universe. Physicists call this vacuum decay. In terms of my personal theology, I call it infusion.
I see the Gods as forces of a greater universe. Eternal and present in all things. Just as I see love as being in all things, so too are Zeus, Hephaestus, Athena, etc. But at the beginning of this universe there was a power, a sudden infusion of divine power that set off the chain reaction that we call the big bang. Spacetime rushing outward at the speed of light, whatever that might be in the older universe, and evolving into what we see now and continuing to evolve until it has dissipated away all of its energy. This power was Love.
We have many divine names for love, sometimes we think of it as sexual, romantic, loving, caring, etc., and often assign divine names to such distinctions, but that power is all of those things. The bright ones like the emotional bonds between people and the dark ones like jealousy and hatred. Love is a spark that lights a fire, and sometimes that fire is a candle, contained and providing light, and sometimes it is a forest fire that destroys everything in its path.
This love is Primordial Eros.
There isn’t just one myth of creation. Not in Hellenismos and not in any known religion. There are always variations. From nothing there is a spark, a word, a voice, a birth, and from there the rest is inevitable. From the depths of darkness and night comes the egg, a product of their coupling and love. From the chaos emerge night and darkness, air and day, earth and the very love we call Eros. But Eros was also there before. In the love of night and darkness, in their coupling he was there. Unformed, perhaps, but there none the less. Into the chaos came unity, like gravity, like lovemaking, and from it the rest came forth.
Think of it like the old universe being a fallow land and Eros planting a seed from which a great flower blooms full of color, striation, delicacy, and unfolding petals. Each petal a separate thing, but growing from the central stalk.
In my personal theology, there aren’t infinite gods, they are limited, and they are limited because they change over time just as the universe does. From the spark of Eros until the day death himself takes the last bit of energy, the gods change because they too are part of the universe, and the aspects of the true gods, far off in the ultimate realm where everything is contained, slowly evolve and change so that we living beings feel it and give them new names. Names appropirate to our cultures, yes, but also to their times. The primordial Eros becomes Aphrodite and Aphrodite becomes something else as the universe ages until one day that power and spirit of love returns to whence it came just as all the essences and spirit of the other gods will.
Love is in all things. All is full of love, as Björk sang. All is love!
#gods #hellenimos #pagan #paganism #polytheism #religion #prayer
