2.21
Responsive listeners, because they’re engaged with things and their calls, may experience and express things and world in ways that we call ‘mythological,’ in order to express particular ways of relating. Subsequently, mythologies themselves can become things to which we respond and which can harbour renewed ways of engaging things. Walter Otto is one who seeks to understand how the Homeric mythology was lived. He interprets the mythology in a quasi-phenomenological way (a way of being and experiencing).
Each Homeric god cast different lights and revealed things in different ways (§1.55): e.g., Hermes revealed things differently than Apollo. “And so in the case of each deity we find anew that it is most intimately bound up with the things of this earth, and yet it never denotes one single facet but is an eternal form of existence in the whole compass of creation.”[1]
While these gods each opened their own sense of world, the latter wasn’t somehow hermetically sealed. Rather, gods opened to each other: they even warred amongst each other. While Otto tries to downplay the warring side,[2] it’s important to see, first, that Plato takes them as warring,[3] and, second, they certainly did have conflict: there’s no way to have lived ‘equally’ in the midst of all gods since each encompasses the whole; instead, certain gods showed the world in certain ways, and others receded. In this picture, each god encompassed the whole, which never aligned into some greater totality.
We can learn from this mythology, for it shows us something about our existence amidst things that call to us, and the transformative potential in our world. Thales is reported to have said that all things are full of gods.[4] Because these gods are all within the ancient Greek world, and Otto’s use of ‘world’ (§1.55) isn’t the same as mine, I’ll say for now that the gods reveal colourations of the world.
We slight or honour the gods. — We cannot honour them all. But we can cultivate ways of relating to make room for a particular god. Perhaps then we’ll catch a glimpse of a colouration of world.
[1] Otto, The Homeric Gods, p. 162.
[2] ibid, p. 250–2. But see, e.g., p. 170.
[3] Plato, “The Republic,” Book II, 377A-378C range, p. 199.
[4] Aristotle, fr. 4, in A Presocratics Reader, p. 11.