Can you share an example of something where you were able to see some of those other things?
When Demeter grieves, the world begins to die. She doesn't have to do or not do anything in order to effect this change, as a person might neglect or refuse the practice of their responsibilities: simply because she has lost her daughter under the earth, the earth itself is not fruitful. Barley falls uselessly onto it. Cultivating a field has no effect. People begin to starve and die. When she is reconciled to her daughter's marriage and wintering out, she institutes the mysteries of Eleusis and teaches them to humanity to mark the occasion, but the rites themselves do not restart the fertility of the earth; that is the changing of Demeter's mood. That's the effect of existing as a god, of being grain and civilization as well as something in the shape of a woman who can leave Olympos in bitterness at her brothers and disguise herself as an elderly vagrant and nurse a human child because she misses her own. I have a complicated relationship with the retellings that read the actions of the Greek gods in terms of human psychology, whether negative or positive; I enjoy a number of them and I've even written some myself, but if there's not that aspect of the absolute numinous, they just feel like missing the point. These figures would not be modern even if they were human, and they really are not human to begin with.
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momijizukamori
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Date: 2018-08-15 06:57 pm (UTC)When Demeter grieves, the world begins to die. She doesn't have to do or not do anything in order to effect this change, as a person might neglect or refuse the practice of their responsibilities: simply because she has lost her daughter under the earth, the earth itself is not fruitful. Barley falls uselessly onto it. Cultivating a field has no effect. People begin to starve and die. When she is reconciled to her daughter's marriage and wintering out, she institutes the mysteries of Eleusis and teaches them to humanity to mark the occasion, but the rites themselves do not restart the fertility of the earth; that is the changing of Demeter's mood. That's the effect of existing as a god, of being grain and civilization as well as something in the shape of a woman who can leave Olympos in bitterness at her brothers and disguise herself as an elderly vagrant and nurse a human child because she misses her own. I have a complicated relationship with the retellings that read the actions of the Greek gods in terms of human psychology, whether negative or positive; I enjoy a number of them and I've even written some myself, but if there's not that aspect of the absolute numinous, they just feel like missing the point. These figures would not be modern even if they were human, and they really are not human to begin with.