The Trident: Creator

Unlike Judaeo Christian creationism, Graeco-Roman creationism is actually fairly complex and laced with symbolism which, when examined with an open mind, can be related to modern theories of both cosmology and evolution. In the Hellenic mythic cycle, the most well known forms of which come from Hesiod, Homer, and some Roman writers such as Ovid, the creation of the world and the creation of humanity are two distinct and different things.

According to these myths, the acts of creation at a cosmological level are manifestations of a divine reality. The primordial Gods are said to emerge from Chaos, a word which means gap, or perhaps even void (a gap is a void in a continuum, after all), and then proceed to multiply. But unlike us, their coming forth or reproducing is also manifest in the physical aspects of the Gods themselves. When Ge emerges, we also speak of solid matter (Earth, for example) emerging. When Ouranos is born, we speak of the starry sky, when the Pontus is born, we speak of the waters of the sea. It is through such symbolic language that we express the reality of nature as being not only a physical thing, but a manifestation of divinity. Turned around, we also relate nature to the Gods themselves, referring to the Earth as Gaea and the Sea as Poseidon, etc.

But what does creation mean? Did the Gods purposely create the cosmos and all that is within or outside it?

The answer appears to be both yes and no. All of nature is a manifestation of the greater reality of divinity, but unlike divinity, it is temporary. It is mortal. But our physical world is also separate, even if stemming from, the divine world, and while the basic foundation and influences of the world may be of divine origin, the universe and all life within it fallows its own path within the construct of universal reality. life is influenced by divinity, but it evolves and changes in accord with its environment. Thought and emotion may spawn from a divine paradigm, but they manifest and are altered by the life that manifest them into reality.

But if we are to look at Poseidon as a creator God, we must conclude that his was a great portion indeed, for all life, from the lowliest to the most advanced partakes of the element of water, which is his. Poseidon imbues us both with the water that is his element and the fluid nature of reality, that ability that is not simply change, but change from one into another along a continuum, along a medium.

As Sea God, Poseidon is creator of all sea life, but as all life evolved from sea life, he must also be the father of all life, or, it should be said, just one of the fathers of life, for life is not like you and me, it did not have one father and one mother, but several fathers and a mother.

Ge is the mother, of course, but the fathers are Eros, the facilitator. Poseidon, the medium of creation. Zeus, the air and spark. And finally, Hades, who ends the cycle.