Titans and Gods of Greek Mythology

They might be giants. Indeed, the titans and gods of Greek mythology were giants - larger-than-life mythic embodiments of the human stuff that dreamt them up. That is the perverse genius of humans: we make our supreme beings and heroes lifelike - and then we blow them up to exaggerated proportions. So it was in the past. So it is in the present.

This is how it began. In the beginning there was the sunrise - and then there was the word describing that sunrise. But the sun was too powerful, too important, for words to encompass alone. And so we invented songs and rituals to celebrate the sun. (Yes, and the moon, too, and the river, and whatever was of the natural world that forced its import upon our primal consciousness.) These songs and rituals had no intellectual meaning, but they felt correct. An "explanation" was achieved somewhere in the region between the heart and the head.

When you are worshipping your primal gods, and explaining them, you want your performance of the ritual act to be perfect. Two types of perfection soon rose above the crowd of normal worshippers: the performer-priest and the leader-priest. (Sometimes, fortuitously, they were one-in-the-same.) The performer-priest became the poet, the actor and the musician - the one who provided the most beautiful worship of the gods. The leader-priest became the king - the one with the most personal, direct kinship to the gods. We know, of course, that somewhere along the line both the king and

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Category: Philosophy - T