2.55
Just as meditation on death can open transformative possibilities—through reflection on other possibilities for understanding world—so, too, can reflection on other orientations. On ancient Greece, Walter Otto writes: “[Athena] is the meaning and actuality of a complete and self-contained world […].”[1]
In Otto’s account, the role of the Greek gods is to show a way that beings are gathered: they say, “Look at things like this”:[2] ‘this is how things would be if I (Artemis, Aphrodite, Hermes) were the sole gatherer.’
But what is equally important is that they’re not the sole gatherers, not “self-contained,” for they’re from a larger gathering of Greek gods. Because they show world colourations (§2.21) within the horizon of the Greek gods’ world, even if “each desires to fill, shape, and illumine the whole compass of human existence with his [sic] peculiar spirit,”[3] they cannot do so.
Homeric gods were never supposed to be the final gods. The Greeks knew the Fates were spinning out the threads of their duration. This brought temporality into the core of the onto-theological domain.
The ancient Greek world contained a variety of world-colourations, and, more primordially, unforeseen possibilities, for, because the gods were fated, other gods were possible. The ancient Greek world promised and embraced the filling of the world and the downfall and succession of gods by other gods and other world-disclosures.
[1] Otto, The Homeric Gods, p. 60.
[2] Zwicky, W&M, LH38.
[3] Otto, The Homeric Gods, p. 160–1.