Wednesday, May 26, 2010

From my perspective

From my perspective, Hermes is a tremendous God, one who is too often taken for granted or seen as small because of the way myth describes him. This can, of course, be said of all the Gods, because myth, as beautiful as it can be, is also but a tiny fraction of what the ancient religion was. In many ways, Myth even helped destroy the religion of the ancients, as it allowed the Christian oppressors to point to them and ask “How can you worship gods that do this and that?”

But anyone who opens themselves up to the Gods, be they in a Hellenic Context, or any of the myriad others, knows that a god is always so much more than a simple, and often simplistic, story about his birth, life, deeds, and death. In fact, Gods do not die, so therein lies a clue to one of the realities of myth, that they are not strictly true things, but rather the shadows of things that are true in some abstract way, but which can only be conveyed in our reality as these imperfect stories.

In my mind, Hermes is the God that best corresponds with one of the fundamental realities of my personal faith, that the universe of Einstein and Newton is not in conflict with the universe of Nyx, Eros, and Ge. That the universe is indeed composed of several “worlds”, be they called Olympus, Hades, and Tartarus, or Asgard, Midgard, and Hel, or the dimensions of space time. And Hermes, for me, exemplifies the reality of a universe which is whole and entire, yet perceptually divided. That the three dimensions of space, time, and the myriad other dimensions curled up inside of, around, and sideways of our own are all tied together by these beings who are part and parcel of all of them and who inspire in this great totality, life and its aspiration to become something more.

Hermes transcends, and transcendence in the divine sense is different from what you or I might consider transcendence, or what we might be capable of transcending to, but it doesn’t matter, because this inspiration to become something more than we are today is all that life is about. It is evolution, it is civilization, it is philosophy and religion and all the aspirations of every human being alive.

Keep moving ahead, he seems to whisper to us all, and we would be stupid not to take him up on the invitation.
 Greek Death Gods: Hades, Hermes, Tartarus, Charon, Thanatos

Three Greek gods in Egypt: The cults of Aphrodite, Artemis, and Hermes in Greco-Roman Egypt according to the documents and literary notices ([Theses for ... of Master of Arts - University of Hawaii)

No comments: