Myths to Live By, Part 5

30 January 2005

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

Prayer

Let us find gods worth serving. There are so many powerful voices calling out to us, trying to become our gods for a day, a year, or a lifetime. And so few are worthy. Let us find gods worth serving.

Let us ask, “Does this god cherish me, or manipulate me to benefit others? Does it offer understanding and compassion, or only judgment and condemnation?

We pray from a place that includes all the gods, and seeks to transcend them. For all that is human is in us, and we pray to harmonize it, and tune it in the key of decency, compassion, a quest for truth that stretches us, and a commitment to the courage demanded by this quest for truth.

We yearn to become better people, better partners, better parents and citizens. We want dearly to be a blessing to the world as we pass through it. And we want to feel blessed, to feel cherished.

These are prayers worthy of those better angels of our nature, in whose company we want to feel at home.

May we grow to become the answer to our prayers. May we grow that true, that courageous, that loving. These things we pray with honest minds, open hearts, and a grateful reverence for the gift of life.

Amen.

Sermon

Each time I revisit the ancient Greek myths, I’m more struck by how modern they are. The Greeks saw their Olympian gods as personifications of the natural and psychological forces within and around us. So you didn’t have to “believe in” them the way Western religions have always taught. Instead, you could just look within and around you, and find the powers, the voices, the passions and urges from which the gods were made. They’re still a good way of getting a different kind of understanding of who we are and why we often seem so confused about what to serve with our lives, even from day to day.

I want to talk about four Greek gods, and will start with the one you’re least likely to know about: Hephaestus, the crippled craftsman, whom the Romans called Vulcan, and whose Roman name was taken to describe the kind of person Dr. Spock was on the original Star Trek series.

Hephaestus was rejected by everyone: his father and mother rejected him and his father threw him off Mt. Olympus. He loved Athena and she rejected him. He married Aphrodite, she was never faithful to him and bore him no children, though she bore children to her other lovers.

Hephaestus threw himself into his work, lost himself in his work, and invested all of his passion in his work. He was the only god who worked, and he created many beautiful and useful things for others. But he had no passion left for his wife, no warmth left for people, no tenderness or mercy. Here too was passion that was intense without being integrated, even though it produced things of value for others.

Here is the modern man who throws himself into his work at the expense of his family and friends. Here is the surgeon – and I lived with an uncle who was one of these when I was 20 – who spends twelve to eighteen hours a day at the hospital healing others but never attends to himself or those who love him. It is a passion for work that becomes short-circuited that has lost any unifying vision of the whole person, the whole life. Here is the intense, introverted person who can not express feelings directly, and can become an emotional cripple unless he finds a way to blend his passions into the rest of his life, instead of simply turning them into work and giving them away to strangers.

There is something admirable, noble, even godly, about being able to convert personal sorrow into productive work. It’s a dramatic example of that old saw about making lemonade when life gives you lemons. So I don’t want to ridicule it. But it isn’t the highest goal we’re seeking, is it?

Part of Hephaestus’s myth has it that he made some golden maidservants – robots – to do his housework. What an insight! Hephaestus husbands and fathers can mold both wives and children into golden servants too, dehumanizing them by turning them into machines to do housework and wait on men, ignoring their own needs for love and the companionship of a human being instead of just a provider.

And for all his hard work, life can be frustrating for a Hephaestus man, because in our culture the Olympian heights of success are not filled by those who work with their hands, but by the owners, the dealmakers and investors, by those who work above ground with their wits and clear thinking to control those who earn a living through work. Hephaestus is no match for Apollo, and is still out of place in a Zeus world, as he has been for thirty or forty centuries.

Hephaestus is worth a whole series of sermons on his own, but I want to move on to another god.

Ares

Ares, whom the Romans called Mars, was the god of war, and a son whom Zeus rejected, though you might think he would prize him. But Ares, unlike Zeus, was a creature of immediate passion: he, like Poseidon, was a shadow side of Zeus. He fought spontaneously, without a clear view of the over-all war to be won, and so he was of no use to Zeus, for whom passions must be brought into the service of a clear long-range goal.

What is wrong with Ares is that it is a style of intense power but not integrated power. It is aggression cut loose from any decent or civil purpose. Ares will fight viciously for a cause without the ability to back off and judge whether or not the cause is worth it, or whether in stooping to brutal methods, he has become like the enemy he hates – the Abu Ghraib prison abuses come quickly to mind here, don’t they?

It is this lack of integration that makes Ares dangerous. A 20th Century example of Zeus rejecting Ares occurred during WWII when Eisenhower – who was even called “the Supreme Commander – relieved General Patton of command because his unpredictable verbal and physical attacks crippled the over-all war effort.

Dionysus

But if we’re going to talk about passion, we need to talk about the most passionate of all the gods: Dionysus.

Dionysus is pure passion, liberated from any need for integration. A passion so powerful it acted like a magnet in the ancient world, drawing people into Dionysian festivals of eating, drinking, and fairly uncontrolled behaviors. One Greek myth tells of a mother who, under the influence of this god, in the frenzy of a festival, killed her own son.

We have never been able to integrate this god, then or now. Instead, the overt expression of powerful passions is usually done during what you could call “time-out” periods of life, like the Mardi Gras in New Orleans, the German Oktoberfest, or some of the festivities every weekend, right in downtown Austin on Sixth Street. Thousands of people leave the more calm, rational, Apollonian lives of Monday through Friday for some mostly mild Dionysian festivals, then on Monday return to work.

This is so similar to the way the Greeks handled Dionysus it is almost eerie. The two gods who were most different were Apollo, the cool and classical one, and Dionysus, the wild and frenzied one. Even in music and the arts, we still speak of the contrast between Apollonian and Dionysian styles. In music, Classical music is sometimes called Apollonian, while Romantic music is called Dionysian.

Yet though Dionysus was pretty pure and powerful passion, he was also a favored son of Zeus’s. And in the temple of Apollo, the most famous of the Greek temples, Apollo was worshipped only nine months out of the year. The other three months were reserved for the worship of Dionysus.

Even the American religious movement known as the Shakers, who were completely Apollonian, even celibate, had periodic ceremonies where they would dance, whirl and shake to the point of exhaustion or unconsciousness. And it was these wild dances, rather than all of their other activities that gave these mostly quiet and Apollo-like people their name as “Shakers.” Dionysus is a powerful spirit, no matter how little time you spend under his spell.

Hermes

Now on to one of the most popular and powerful gods in both ancient Greece and modern America: the god called Hermes, whom the Romans called Mercury. Hermes is the messenger god. He is even the symbol of the Greek Post Offices.

Last time, I talked about Apollo, the high-level functionary who serves the wishes of the Father or Boss, and who sees people not as people but as parts of whatever scheme he needs to manipulate to reach the boss’s goals.

In pursuit of these goals, almost any means seem to be acceptable, including clever persuasion and its darker side, outright deception. In the terms of Greek mythology, these are the realms of Hermes, the messenger god. He could travel between all the realms, was the god of clear and persuasive speech, and often had trouble telling the difference between honest persuasion and dishonest persuasion, as long as it got him what he wanted.

In literature and religion, the field of hermeneutics is named after Hermes. Here too, the idea is that if we interpret great literature or religion properly, we will be finding the kind of wisdom that’s associated with the gods.

The gifts associated with Hermes are behind the brilliant orator, teacher, and preacher, but also behind crooked lawyers, deceptive advertising, and hypocritical preachers. He is clever and persuasive, but he is a trickster, and will do what he needs to get what he wants. This too is something Americans admire: Tom Sawyer, Brer Rabbit, Robin Hood and Peter Pan are modern incarnations of Hermes, but so are rascally politicians who say anything they need to say in order to get elected.

Hermes is the power of persuasion, linking high, godly ideals with action. But persuasion is the goal, not the quality of the ideals, so neither gods nor humans can trust Hermes – or any other trickster figure.

Apollo and Hermes make an effective, if dangerous, pair. Apollo doesn’t see people as people, but only parts in a scheme to serve “the father,” the boss, or “God.” He links with Hermes, who knows how to trick them by using high words to serve low aims.

And the manipulation of us masses has been a constant part of American politics for a very long time. Until recently, it was talked about quite openly, going all the way back to the 1920s. The name from that time, one of the most important Hermes figure in the art of bamboozling the masses, was Edward Bernays. Bernays had worked in Woodrow Wilson’s Committee on Public Information, the first U.S. state propaganda agency. Bernays wrote “It was the astounding success of propaganda during the (First World) war that opened the eyes of the intelligent few in all departments of life to the possibilities of regimenting the public mind.” (Noam Chomsky, p. 54 – I think it’s from his book on Manufacturing Consent, but have lost the notes and book.)

Here are more words from this most influential American who was such an influential incarnation of Hermes in the mid-20th century: “The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society.” To carry out this essential task, “the intelligent minorities must make use of propaganda continuously and systematically,” because they alone “understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses” and can “pull the wires which control the public mind.” This process of “engineering consent” – a phrase Bernays coined – is the very “essence of the democratic process,” he wrote shortly before he was honored for his contributions by the American Psychological Association in 1949. (Chomsky, 53) It is also the essence of the power of Hermes. And now, like then, his people are tricksters whom nobody can really trust. Their thrill and fulfillment lie in the power of persuading people – not in the quality of the things they’re persuading them of.

Another member of Woodrow Wilson’s propaganda committee, and another avatar or incarnation of Hermes, was Walter Lippman, perhaps the most influential and respected journalist in America for about fifty years. The intelligent minority, Lippman explained in essays on democracy, are a “specialized class” who are responsible for setting policy and for “the formation of a sound public opinion.” They must be free from interference by the general public, who are “ignorant and meddlesome outsiders.” The public must “be put in its place;” their function is to be “spectators of action,” not participants, apart from periodic electoral exercises when they choose among the specialized class. (Chomsky, 54) Again, Hermes would be so proud!

Hannah Arendt once described totalitarianism as the triumph of politics over truth. She was intimately familiar with both the Russian revolution of 1917, and the rise of Nazi power in Germany. She would recognize many of the patterns of contemporary America immediately.

This visit to the Greek gods can give us a new way of understanding both ourselves – especially men – and the world that men are running: namely, our world. One thing this means to me is that all the griping among political liberals about G.W. Bush is a little misdirected. As the Greeks would see, he isn’t unique; he’s just the puppet, the instrument, of the rise to power of the gods Apollo and Hermes, with Ares operating our Army and soon, perhaps, our domestic police. They are in the service of the voice they have taken to be the voice of their Zeus: the voice of the privileged class who feel entitled to money and power taken from the “ignorant and meddlesome” masses.

Our four gods now are Apollo, Hermes, Ares and an ersatz Zeus. Zeus is played by the large corporations, directing both our domestic and foreign economic policies. Nothing godly there except their power and arrogance. Apollo is all the functionaries serving these demands, including (at least) our past four presidents. Hermes is Karl Rove, Karen Hughes, the speechwriters and advertising companies who wrap the agenda in deceptive language and images, to sell it to those of us who have been put in our place as spectators of action.

And Ares invades Iraq for its oil and strategic military location, soon to be followed by Iran in the imperialistic scheme of the corporations and wealthy individuals who form the collective incarnation of our weird modern version of Zeus. But when the public is told our motives are to find “weapons of mass destruction” or the “liberation” of Iraq, while published papers by Paul Wolfowitz and Dick Cheney from 1992 say we need to invade Iraq to control their oil and military location, and when Wolfowitz gives an interview last year candidly acknowledging that the reason we invaded Iraq but not Korea was because Iraq was “swimming in oil” – then the agents of Hermes are at work, lying to America’s ignorant masses to serve the low and greedy agendas of the corporate interests that comprise their make-believe Zeus. These are the gods behind the action, not something nobler.

No one could argue that the gods America is serving in its treatment of our poor, or the citizens of other countries, have anything to do with either Jesus or the God of the Old Testament, whose prophets routinely attacked the rich and powerful on behalf of the poor.

What the Greek gods can help us understand about the biblical God whose stories are more familiar to us is that each god is only partial. Our task is coordination and integration in search of what Joseph Campbell called the lost Atlantis of the coordinated soul. It’s never done completely, for the gods represent passions and allegiances that are always shifting, always beckoning to us, and sometimes persuading us.

The art of coordinating the voices of the gods is the art of coming to our full humanity, of growing up and growing whole.

I’ll continue this theme in two weeks when we think about religious tolerance. If there are so many gods, are they all to be encouraged, or even tolerated? The Greeks didn’t think so, and neither do I. But if not, where do we find our center? What is the authority for choosing among the gods?

Those questions are more profound than answers. But live with them for a couple weeks, will you?

I said that as though we really have a choice!