Showing posts with label Pallas Athena. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Pallas Athena. Show all posts

Friday 1 April 2022

Patriarchy Works.

 








Athens: Better than The Rest 

 “ As I write, Buddhist monks are marching through the streets of Burma, denouncing the nation’s military dictatorship and chanting, “Democracy, democracy!” 

How strange that is! 

Would Catholic priests, even in secular France, chant for rule by lamas? For better or for worse, when the world thinks of a just and rational system of government dedicated to liberty, it turns to The West. 

It turns not to ancient Peking or Persepolis, but to Athens

Even when our despots lie, they use the language of democracy. They lie in a vulgar Greek. 

I’m no idolator of The Vote. It’s A Tool, and needs to be judged as such, according to how well it secures justice, and encourages a people to live good lives. 

But our schools teach two contradictory things about our democratic culture, and, marvelous to behold, they get both wrong. 

First, they teach that the vote is not a tool but the very object of Justice. “Choice is everything, and it doesn’t matter what you choose.”

Second, they teach that different cultures are all equal, even cultures that do not respect our idol of Choice! 

But this happy lie is impossible to uphold when we look at the legacy Athens has left us in government, science, art, and philosophy. Where do people prosper, enjoy leisure, and reap the benefits of great inventions and discoveries? In lands where the heirs of Athens dwell. 

Sure, the Greeks were far from perfect. They were sinners just as we. They employed plenty of slaves. The worst-treated of these were those prisoners of war sent down into the silver mines; in a couple of years the toxic fumes would kill them. 

Sparta survived and thrived by turning all of its free men of fighting age into professional soldiers, to ensure that the enslaved people of the surrounding countryside could not revolt. 

Greek aristocrats developed a cult of pederasty : if your son had curly hair and a nice physique, you had to watch out. Women did much of the work in and around the house, but were not consistently honored for it; the farmer-poet Hesiod calls them pests sent down by Zeus to punish mankind.

Nor was Greek politics always a matter of rational argument in open debate. 

Athens had at times been seized by tyrants, usually supported by the middle class. Pisistratus once tried to win an election by dressing an unusually tall woman as the goddess Athena, and having her cry out from a racing chariot, “Athena for Pisistratus!

That early piece of demagoguery didn’t work, so he took power by a military coup. Then (for he was a benign man, otherwise) he bought the people’s support by means of building projects and elaborate festivals. 

His sons who succeeded him never mastered that art. One was slain by a rival in a homosexual affair. The other was exiled, traveling to Persia to help the emperor Darius turn the Greek world into a tributary province. So there was good reason why Plato labeled democracy as the most debased form of government.

It was Democracy that brought Athens to humiliating defeat at the hands of Sparta. 

It was Democracy that sentenced his teacher Socrates to death. It was Democracy that handed power to the passions of a rabble

Imagine what Plato would say of our polls and focus groups. 

Still, we owe those Greeks an incalculable debt. They gave us the defining epics of the West, Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey. Out of an old religious festival to the wine god Dionysus they developed that heady form of art we call drama. 

They sculpted the human form with a beauty and scientific precision that would not be equaled until the Renaissance. 

They erected human-scale temples and courts of such incomparable beauty and convenience that even now, 2,500 years later, our homes and offices in the West echo their porticoes and pediments and colonnades. They learned all the mathematics the Babylonians had to teach, and incorporated it into a systematic geometry. Breaking free of the bonds of practical utility and bookkeeping, they invented the notion of proof, and added astonishing discoveries of their own, without the assistance of numerals. Archimedes estimated the number of grains of sand on earth, and in the midst of this jeu d’esprit came within a hair of inventing calculus. 

When he wasn’t playing with number theory, Archimedes was more practically employed: inventing fancy catapults, for instance, to defend his city, Syracuse, against Roman invaders. 

The Greeks invented rational analysis of modes of government — what we call political science. 

Herodotus journeyed across Asia Minor and into Egypt to learn what he could about local life, and to pick up information from eyewitnesses of the Persian War. He is called The Father of History, but he might as well be called the father of geography and the father of ethnography. 


The Greeks began Man’s Quest to discover the unseen unity and order underlying the wild variety presented by physical nature. Democritus coined the term atom, meaning a particle that cannot be split.



But when they turned their attention to Man, and The Good that Man longs to possess, the Greeks burst into a flowering of creativity that puts our schools to shame. 

They invented philosophy and all its branches: linguistic, metaphysical, moral, political, and epistemological. Seldom has a poet written with more sensitivity to beauty than did the philosopher Plato, and among poets only Shakespeare and Dante can rival Sophocles for philosophical acuity. Only a philosopher at heart could have written Oedipus at Colonus, but only a philosophical people could have fully appreciated it. 

The Greeks weren’t naturally more intelligent than anybody else. Then why did these things happen there? The answers will entangle us in political incorrectness at every step.  


Conan
What gods do you pray to?

Subotai
[looks up
I pray to The Four Winds... and you?

Conan
To Crom... 
But I seldom pray to him --
He Doesn't Listen.

Subotai
[chuckles] 
Ha! What Good is He, then?
Ah, it's just as I've always said.

Conan
He is Strong
If I die, I have to go before him, 
and he will ask me, 
"What is the Riddle of Steel?"
And if I do not know it, 
He will cast me out of Valhalla 
and laugh at me!
That's Crom -- STRONG
on His Mountain!

Subotai: 
Ah, MY God is Greater.

Conan: 
[chuckles] 
Crom laughs at your Four Winds.
He laughs from His Mountain.

Subotai
My God is Stronger.
He, is The Everlasting Sky
Your God Lives underneath Him.



Father, not mother 

At the dawn of historical records, the people who lived in Greece, like other people near the Mediterranean Sea, worshipped fertility gods. 

They sacrificed to Mother Earth, the womb and the tomb for us all, blindly ever-generating and ever-destroying Nature. But around 1500 BC, nomads from the steppes of central Asia, the so-called Dorians, swept into Asia Minor and Greece. 

These Dorians spoke an Indo-European language, related to Germanic, Latin, Celtic, and Sanskrit. As they were not farmers, they did not adore the earth. Rather they worshipped the gods of the vast sky they saw all about them on the plains. These sky gods were also, naturally enough, Gods of Light and the things we associate with Light: freedom, beauty, laughter, and intelligence. 

Their Chief God was Father Zeus (Germanic Tiw, as in “Tuesday,” and Roman Deus pater, which became Deuspiter or Jupiter). He was endowed with the glory and cunning and might that make one divus (Lat.) or dios (Gk.). 

He was bathed in light. Now an odd thing happened : Just as the invading Dorians did not wipe out the natives, so their religion did not wipe out the old fertility cults. It only suppressed them, and that made for a rich system of incompatible gods

The Story is told in Hesiod’s Theogony as a battle between the generations. 

The Old Gods ruled by brute force, or tried to: Ouranos, God of The Heavens, hated the children of his wife Gaia, the earth, and stuffed them back into her belly. 

Then Gaia, showing the first glint of intelligence in the cosmos, gave Her Son Cronus an iron sickle and told him to wait in ambush the next time Ouranos made love to her. 

When Night fell, Ouranos 'covered' Gaia, but Cronus sliced off His Father's testicles and cast them into the sea. 

No testicles, no throne. 

Cronus then ruled by force. His trick was to swallow his children whole. 

But his wife Rhea, aided now by Ouranos and Gaia both, slipped him a rock in a blanket while spiriting her baby away to be raised in hiding. That baby’s name was Zeus

He in turn overthrew His Father, but—and here is the point—by intelligent alliances, and not by force alone. 

He gave powerful positions to some of the older gods. 

Hecate was made goddess of the underworld and patron of warriors. 

The Styx, dread river of the underworld, gained the honor of being invoked whenever the gods swore an oath. 

The horrible Titans of the hundred arms, Briareus, Cottus, and Gyes, were allowed to eat and drink with the young gods on Olympus. They proved indispensible when the other Titans tried to dethrone Zeus. It was no small advantage to have creatures who could hurl a hundred spears at once. It’s a strange concoction. 

The “Old” Gods, associated with earth and blood and lust and vengeance, still exist, and claim their due. But they must be governed. They submit to Zeus, the cunning and mighty. 

He is cunning, but he can be tricked; he is strong, but not strong enough to ignore the rest. 

It’s a system that invites the mind to probe the riddles of human life. 

How can the passions be governed by reason? Should they always be? 

What is the relationship between authority and goodness? 

Can the old traditions be violated at will? 

Is there a law to which even the gods must submit — a law which Ouranos and Cronus violated, and perhaps Zeus too? 

Is there such a thing as progress or moral evolution, and if so, where is it going? 

What remains changeless?  



Man turned a corner in Greece, and this religion was partly responsible. The dramatist Aeschylus recounts it in mythic form.

Orestes learns that His Father, King Agamemnon, has been butchered. Blood calls for blood; that is the ancient law of vengeance. 

But The Murderer was his own mother, Clytemnestra. How can he kill the woman who bore him and suckled him? The Mother’s claim too is primal. What must he do

The Traditions, by themselves, offer no escape. When he does kill Clytemnestra, he is pursued by The Furies, Ancient and Hideous Goddesses of The Underworld, who avenge those who violate the old taboos of blood. They are also the terrible gnawings of Orestes’ awakening conscience. 

He cannot endure it; he flies to Athens to stand trial before The Gods. 

There The Young Goddess of Wisdom, Athena, will preside. 

It is The Old against The New, The Instinctual against The Rational, The Furies against Apollo, Orestes’ Protector, with Aeschylus giving The Furies the better of The Argument. 

The jurymen deadlock. 


Athena casts the deciding vote, for acquittal. 

Because she was born from the head of Zeus, She Says, She always favors The Father. 

Therefore She favors The Rights of The City : The King’s Murderer must be punished. 

We mark here a shift from The Tribe to The Polis — free men debating and determining what course to take. 

The biggest surprise is not how the jurymen vote (and, given The Case, their vote is fair), but that there is a jury at all. They are none other than The Free Men of Athens. 

Men have the capacity — not The Right, but the capacity, if they set their minds to it — to govern themselves

They can acknowledge The Rights of Tradition, of The Unwritten Laws, of Mothering Nature, and in so doing they can order their affairs rationally

If they have A King, he should be like Sophocles’ Theseus : calm, patriotic, and wise in the glory and the frailty of man’s soul. 

This self-government of a people is a gift from Zeus. It conforms them to that god enthroned upon Olympus whom they call 'Father of Gods and Men' not because of his reproductive habits (which are prodigious), but because of his political strategy and the power of his mind.  

The Greek Isles Effect 


The Compromise on Olympus reflected the sorts of government the Greeks almost had to invent. Consider the terrain of the Greek lands. It is furrowed with rugged mountains and ravines. There are plenty of splendid harbors, but no long navigable rivers

The weather is excellent for farming, especially for cultivating The Grape and the all-purpose Olive, but it is hard to find enough flatland for raising huge stores of Grain. 

The Greeks, then, could not be self-sufficient; they had to trade. Nor could any one city establish a vast empire covering the whole area. Before Alexander The Great and his armies, it was impossible

So The Greeks built small outposts of highly advanced Civilization : The Polis, or City-State, from which We derive Our Word “political.” 

These City-States studded the Greek peninsula, the Aegean, the Turkish shores, and, eventually, Sicily and southern Italy, with hundreds of self-governing communities. 

They were not all democratic. Most began as hereditary Kingdoms or as aristocracies, governed by the influential men of the oldest and most established families. It was, if you will pardon an anachronism, a kind of Federalism, guaranteeing plenty of Freedom for The Polis, and making each into a Laboratory for Statesmanship, The Arts, Poetry, Philosophy, and almost any other Creative Endeavor you can name. 

It’s worthwhile to pause to appreciate this phenomenon, which I’d like to call The Greek Isles Effect



It isn’t peculiar to Greece. We can find it among the Christian monasteries in the Middle Ages, the fledgling states in America, and The Italian Republics of the Renaissance. 

We can find it, though disincarnate, on The Internet now



In all these cases there is some form of unity, more cultural than governmental, coinciding with great freedom to experiment. 

Let’s look at The Unity first. 

Allowing for dialects, the Greeks were united by a single language

They were united by forms of worship; we see this at the Pan-Hellenic games, the most famous of which were in Olympia. 


They were united by their mythological and literary heritage. A Greek from Halicarnassus off the coast of Turkey would recall Achilles’ dilemma in the Iliad, and would be able to discuss it with a fellow Greek born in Thebes on the mainland but now residing in Acragas, thousands of miles away in Sicily. 

Precisely because they valued that Tradition, they could converse with one another. Unlike the students in our Tradition-despising schools, they had something to look at in common. 

Ask a college senior to recite a short poem by that most American of poets, Robert Frost, and he will look at you blankly. Ask him to name a single general of the Revolutionary War other than Washington, and he will ask why you are troubling him with trivia. 

Even if he has learned to think, he has very little to think about or with. He is, intellectually, like a peasant without the wheel and the plow. 

The Greeks did not suffer that deprivation.  

Saturday 23 December 2017

Prometheus' Other Great Gift to Mortal Man








(ll. 507-543) Now Iapetus took to wife the neat-ankled mad Clymene, daughter of Ocean, and went up with her into one bed. And she bare him a stout-hearted son, Atlas: also she bare very glorious Menoetius and clever Prometheus, full of various wiles, and scatter-brained Epimetheus who from the first was a mischief to men who eat bread; for it was he who first took of Zeus the woman, the maiden whom he had formed. But Menoetius was outrageous, and far-seeing Zeus struck him with a lurid thunderbolt and sent him down to Erebus because of his mad presumption and exceeding pride. And Atlas through hard constraint upholds the wide heaven with unwearying head and arms, standing at the borders of the earth before the clear-voiced Hesperides; for this lot wise Zeus assigned to him. And ready- witted Prometheus he bound with inextricable bonds, cruel chains, and drove a shaft through his middle, and set on him a long- winged eagle, which used to eat his immortal liver; but by night the liver grew as much again everyway as the long-winged bird devoured in the whole day. That bird Heracles, the valiant son of shapely-ankled Alcmene, slew; and delivered the son of Iapetus from the cruel plague, and released him from his affliction -- not without the will of Olympian Zeus who reigns on high, that the glory of Heracles the Theban-born might be yet greater than it was before over the plenteous earth. This, then, he regarded, and honoured his famous son; though he was angry, he ceased from the wrath which he had before because Prometheus matched himself in wit with the almighty son of Cronos. For when the gods and mortal men had a dispute at Mecone, even then Prometheus was forward to cut up a great ox and set portions before them, trying to befool the mind of Zeus. Before the rest he set flesh and inner parts thick with fat upon the hide, covering them with an ox paunch; but for Zeus he put the white bones dressed up with cunning art and covered with shining fat. Then the father of men and of gods said to him:

(ll. 543-544) `Son of Iapetus, most glorious of all lords, good sir, how unfairly you have divided the portions!'

(ll. 545-547) So said Zeus whose wisdom is everlasting, rebuking him. But wily Prometheus answered him, smiling softly and not forgetting his cunning trick:

(ll. 548-558) `Zeus, most glorious and greatest of the eternal gods, take which ever of these portions your heart within you bids.' So he said, thinking trickery. But Zeus, whose wisdom is everlasting, saw and failed not to perceive the trick, and in his heart he thought mischief against mortal men which also was to be fulfilled. With both hands he took up the white fat and was angry at heart, and wrath came to his spirit when he saw the white ox-bones craftily tricked out: and because of this the tribes of men upon earth burn white bones to the deathless gods upon fragrant altars. But Zeus who drives the clouds was greatly vexed and said to him:

(ll. 559-560) `Son of Iapetus, clever above all! So, sir, you have not yet forgotten your cunning arts!'

(ll. 561-584) So spake Zeus in anger, whose wisdom is everlasting; and from that time he was always mindful of the trick, and would not give the power of unwearying fire to the Melian (21) race of mortal men who live on the earth. But the noble son of Iapetus outwitted him and stole the far-seen gleam of unwearying fire in a hollow fennel stalk. And Zeus who thunders on high was stung in spirit, and his dear heart was angered when he saw amongst men the far-seen ray of fire. Forthwith he made an evil thing for men as the price of fire; for the very famous Limping God formed of earth the likeness of a shy maiden as the son of Cronos willed. And the goddess bright-eyed Athene girded and clothed her with silvery raiment, and down from her head she spread with her hands a broidered veil, a wonder to see; and she, Pallas Athene, put about her head lovely garlands, flowers of new-grown herbs. Also she put upon her head a crown of gold which the very famous Limping God made himself and worked with his own hands as a favour to Zeus his father. On it was much curious work, wonderful to see; for of the many creatures which the land and sea rear up, he put most upon it, wonderful things, like living beings with voices: and great beauty shone out from it.

(ll. 585-589) But when he had made the beautiful evil to be the price for the blessing, he brought her out, delighting in the finery which the bright-eyed daughter of a mighty father had given her, to the place where the other gods and men were. And wonder took hold of the deathless gods and mortal men when they saw that which was sheer guile, not to be withstood by men.

(ll. 590-612) For from her is the race of women and female kind: of her is the deadly race and tribe of women who live amongst mortal men to their great trouble, no helpmeets in hateful poverty, but only in wealth. And as in thatched hives bees feed the drones whose nature is to do mischief -- by day and throughout the day until the sun goes down the bees are busy and lay the white combs, while the drones stay at home in the covered skeps and reap the toil of others into their own bellies -- even so Zeus who thunders on high made women to be an evil to mortal men, with a nature to do evil. And he gave them a second evil to be the price for the good they had: whoever avoids marriage and the sorrows that women cause, and will not wed, reaches deadly old age without anyone to tend his years, and though he at least has no lack of livelihood while he lives, yet, when he is dead, his kinsfolk divide his possessions amongst them. And as for the man who chooses the lot of marriage and takes a good wife suited to his mind, evil continually contends with good; for whoever happens to have mischievous children, lives always with unceasing grief in his spirit and heart within him; and this evil cannot be healed.

(ll. 613-616) So it is not possible to deceive or go beyond the will of Zeus; for not even the son of Iapetus, kindly Prometheus, escaped his heavy anger, but of necessity strong bands confined him, although he knew many a wile.

Friday 25 November 2016

BreXit : The Manifestation of The Goddess at Tilbury

Delivered on 9/19 August 1588 to the land forces assembled at Tilbury in Essex in preparation to repel a possible invasion by the Spanish Armada.

On the Invocation of the Virgin goddess Pallas Athena, The Shaker of the Spear


My loving people,

We have been persuaded by some that are careful of our safety, to take heed how we commit ourselves to armed multitudes, for fear of treachery; but I assure you I do not desire to live to distrust my faithful and loving people. Let tyrants fear, I have always so behaved myself that, under God, I have placed my chiefest strength and safeguard in the loyal hearts and good-will of my subjects; and therefore I am come amongst you, as you see, at this time, not for my recreation and disport, but being resolved, in the midst and heat of the battle, to live and die amongst you all; to lay down for my God, and for my kingdom, and my people, my honour and my blood, even in the dust.

I know I have the body but of a weak and feeble woman; but I have the heart and stomach of a king, and of a king of England too, and think foul scorn that Parma or Spain, or any prince of Europe, should dare to invade the borders of my realm; to which rather than any dishonour shall grow by me, I myself will take up arms, I myself will be your general, judge, and rewarder of every one of your virtues in the field.

I know already, for your forwardness you have deserved rewards and crowns; and We do assure you in the word of a prince, they shall be duly paid you. In the mean time, my lieutenant general shall be in my stead, than whom never prince commanded a more noble or worthy subject; not doubting but by your obedience to my general, by your concord in the camp, and your valour in the field, we shall shortly have a famous victory over those enemies of my God, of my kingdom, and of my people.


Monday 11 July 2016

Important Safety Tip


"Don't fall asleep"  - alright, Important Safety Tip, 

Thank You Athena.

I received this message from The Goddess when it came through to me, as clear as day as I just lay dozing off on the very edge of falling asleep whilst watching Ghostbusters and it had the effect of knocking me immediately straight back to full alertness and awareness, absolutely Determined to find some kind of pencil or pen with which to ensure I was able to get the whole, complete message down on paper with complete accuracy, word for word, even down to accurate punctuation.


I think I'm real going to like her - clear, simple, lyrical and brief.

Not to mention remarkably helpful.

Goddess of Wisdom eh, or what?