The king of Athens has a son, a strikingly handsome but still virginal youth. This prince’s mother died many years ago, and the king has since remarried. Two years ago, the new queen fell suddenly (and obsessively and absolutely secretly) in love with her husband’s son, the strikingly handsome young crown prince. All through these two years, the queen has suffered her raging obsession in silence, her health slowly sinking under the stress.
Until today, she has never confided her shameful secret to anyone in the world, but now she’s reached her breaking point. For the past three days she has neither eaten nor slept, and now at last she makes her confession to her old nurse, who came with her from their home country when she traveled here to marry the king.
The queen concludes her confession by telling the nurse that she intends to starve herself to death, the only honorable way she can think of to spare both her husband and herself the shame of the true situation becoming known.
The nurse, desperate to save her mistress, arranges a private audience with the young prince and, after getting his solemn oath that he will tell no one what she is about to say, begs him to surrender to his stepmother’s guilty desire for the sake of saving the poor woman’s life. The prince — who though handsome is perhaps something of a prig — is revolted and furious. He threatens to tell his father the whole story as soon as the man arrives home, then storms off. Terrified that the youth will indeed tell her husband, the queen goes into the palace and hangs herself — leaving behind a lying letter to her husband, in which she claims she’s killing herself because the prince has raped her. (We are forced to note that she’s not spotless either.)
The king duly arrives, learns of his wife’s death, and reads her lying letter. Believing his wife’s false accusation, without so much as first seeing or speaking with his son, he calls down a death curse upon the youth.
When the prince arrives and hears of his stepmother’s accusations, he swears himself innocent of any rape or intent to rape; but having belatedly remembered his oath to the nurse, he cannot as a rigorously honorable man betray to his father the secret truth about his stepmother’s erotic obsession. The king, convinced of his son’s guilt, banishes him from the kingdom. The prince duly mounts his chariot to drive off into exile.
But now the father’s curse is horrifically fulfilled. While the youth is driving along the seashore on his way to the border, a dreadful monster arises from the deep, causing the horses drawing the chariot to bolt in terror. The prince, entangled in the reins in the wreckage of the chariot, is fatally dragged and battered across the stones of the beach. Dying, he’s carried back to the palace on a bier and set down before his stricken father.
Before all is done, the king has learned that his son had told him nothing but the truth (if not exactly the whole truth) and was in fact entirely innocent of the crime of which he stood accused.
Childless — and once again a widower, but now a widower facing old age — the king stares into the desolation of wreckage that will henceforward be his life.
As you’ve guessed from the subtitle, that’s the plot summary of a Greek tragedy, specifically Euripides’ third play based on this same bit of myth and legend. All three versions are titled with the name of the doomed prince, Hippolytus — and in case you’re interested, the indications are that Euripides kept reworking and restaging the story because in the first two versions a lot of auditors were unhappy with the way he handled their differential sympathies for the queen, the king, and the prince. (This third version was evidently the charm: it won top honors at the city festival for which the author entered it in competition. The first two versions haven’t survived.)
But now I have a confession to make:
In composing my synopsis, I’ve mostly hidden one crucial aspect of the action, which is that three powerful supernatural beings are directly involved in the story — indeed, three major Olympian gods. Aphrodite and Artemis each show up onstage with the humans, while Poseidon works out of sight in the wings. (The sea-and-earthquake-god may never appear, but he plays an important part nonetheless: it’s He who sends the sea-monster that executes the king’s disastrous curse — and, in the process, the king’s hapless son.)
When this kind of car-wreck happens in a monotheistic culture, skeptics will often ask (more or less gleefully) How can such horrors occur in a world ruled by a single, omnipotent, perfectly just and loving God? Jewish and Christian apologists have been attempting to address such objections for more than two thousand years.
But as soon as we plug the PolyGods back into the narrative, it becomes clear how much more rational a multitheistic model can be. (Not more comforting, mind. Only more rational.)
In my version of polytheism, there are two sorts of gods. There are the purely objective gods, whose characters are consistently expressed in the material cosmos — the ones whose properties we moderns explore via (for instance) chemisty and physics and biology — and then there are the gods expressed in the actions and inactions in which animals engage, which often involve choice. If I tuck a firecracker into a swarming ant colony and light it up, then (all other things being equal) the firecracker will explode. The match and the firecracker have no choice in the matter, no way of resisting the objective gods that govern them. The only one with a choice is me.
And that brings us to the matter of instinctive and reflexive actions versus consciously deliberate ones, and the relation of such actions to self-consciousness.
If an anteater had discovered that ant colony before I got there, and had extracted and ingested all the ants before going its merry way, most humans would say that it was acting under the compulsion of the biological god that drives it rather than making a self-consciously deliberate choice, and thus not in any meaningful sense guilty. If instead it’s I who intentionally murder part of the anthill’s population while destroying their living space with my little bomb, most humans would say that I was making a choice and thus morally/ethically responsible for the deaths and the destruction. And in my case, the god that I’m letting run me in that moment is not the one who requires me to eat in order to live, but rather perhaps a Being more interested in elective mischief and/or the exercise of power.
The point of all of which being:
In a polytheistic human culture, it’s understood that sometimes a particular god’s proddings should be ignored or actively blocked rather than succumbed to. It’s common in such cultures to believe that no god is instrinsically evil, but that there are definitely times when it is evil to give in to the temptations or revulsions of a situationally inappropriate god. Which takes us back to Mr. Euripides’ story.
At their roots, the struggles in the Hippolytus are an episode in the eternal feud between Aphrodite (the goddess the Romans called Venus, the one in charge of heterosexual desire and its satisfactions and from whom venereal diseases derive their name) and Artemis (Diana to the Romans, pure patroness of virginal chastity as well as of the moon and the hunt, of wilderness, of wild animals and nature and vegetation, and of childbirth and the care of children).
Aphrodite is implacably offended by the virginal Hippolytus’s unapologetic revulsion from her own carnal stock-in-trade. In her divine eyes, he’s criminally wasting all that youth and wealth and power and sex appeal he’s been so liberally endowed with. When he ought to be out enthusiastically broadcasting his aristocratic wild oats, he’s instead shamefully squandering his best years worshiping the prudish Artemis, all the while guarding his own sexual purity.
The queen, Phaedra, is herself a lifelong devotee of Aphrodite, who has cruelly installed in her this fatal all-mastering lust for her step-son that’s been tearing the poor woman apart for the past two years. Aphrodite has chosen this as her way of bringing down the prince, but Hippolytus for his part has stubbornly persisted in his pure and sexless lifestyle, hanging out with his guy friends and hunting in the forest with Artemis and her annoyingly virginal nymphs and absolutely ignoring his sacred responsibility (as an attractive, wealthy, powerful human male) to have his way with even one human female.
Seen in this frame, the whole drama is a sort of divine chess game, a grudge match between the two goddesses, with Aphrodite so enraged by the prince’s unbroken virginity that in the end she’s willing to sacrifice a queen (literally) of her own to get her revenge. And that’s the really profoundly scary thing here, for me anyway: that the sex-and-love goddess clearly cares more about the punishment of the offending prince than about the wellbeing of the vulnerable mortal woman who’s spent her life as that same goddess’s own faithful devotee.
And it’s not as though Artemis is any less petty and fractious. In the end, she can only rage at Theseus for destroying her favorite devotee (it’s from this goddess’s own lips that this father learns he’s brought about his innocent son’s murder) and vow to be revenged upon her divine colleague-and-rival, which she will do by similarly destroying one of Aphrodite’s devotees at her next opportunity. We hapless mortals are left to surmise that such feuds will go on for as long as there are humans around to bruise the immortals’ senses of entitlement.
It’s an alarming prospect, but in significant ways more reasonable than the monotheistic model.
For starters, the monotheistic Problem of Evil evaporates. Humans in a many-godded system must keep track of many gods and their conflicting requirements, yes; but at least they don’t have to wonder why, in a universe designed and run by a single Absolutely Powerful/Knowledgeable/Loving Deity, anything can actually ever go wrong.
And then, having different gods for different bailiwicks means that the pertinent god in any situation can have something specific and intuitive to do with that situation. The god in charge of childbirth could be a female god, just for one simple instance, rather than a male or genderless one of the sort most monotheists currently conceive.1 The god of war could have three aspects in our liberal modern cultures: one female, one nonbinary, one male. (It seems likely to me that if things were arranged like that, there would always be some identify-as-female soldiers who focused on the male aspect and some identify-as-male soldiers who focused on the female. But what do I know.)
In the end, it’s not as though we won’t still have to keep track of all the same moral and ethical and practical considerations about each bailiwick anyway: it’s just that with many gods, we can imagine more specific and thus more applicable personifications, around which stories and philosophical angles will more sensibly cluster. And when we have a situation where we must choose between mutually exclusive values, we’re more likely to have the gods we need to intuitively represent the various mutually-opposed valences.
Or to put all that perhaps a little more succinctly:
Having One Big God for Everything is definitely the oddity in human history, and repeatedly leads us into problems with acknowledging that there are many, often countervailing forces, both in us and in the universe beyond us, all of which need to be understood and respected (which is not so say always obeyed). If we’re honest about that complexity, we can also give ourselves and each other more conscious credit and compassion for the stresses of the impossible choices we are so frequently presented with.
But back to my main point
I think it could in fact be a relief, in moving from a one-god system to a many-gods one, to know that we need no longer cobble up and evolve tenable justifications for how a universe composed of so many evidently mutually hostile elements and forces and tendencies could possibly be the work of a single benevolent all-knowing all-powerful self-conscious intelligence. I can easily accept that the universe is all a single entity, and that the matter, energy, space, and time of which it is composed act uniformly in any one given sort of context. What I can’t easily imagine is that all of that — all of everything that is — is the conscious work and/or expression of a single Being. Which is to say that I can’t even begin to imagine a real MonoTheos Creator, in the sense of a Person who has intentionally and with full understanding fabricated the whole system as we experience it.
And if there were such a Being, I can’t imagine our ever achieving the necessary scope to comprehend Its nature and intent — Its values and desires, and thus Its preferences about How Then Humans Should Live — if indeed It had any. I’m not saying that I know that such an achievement is impossible (knowing that would require precisely the sort of scope I feel certain we could never achieve), only that it seems to my puny mortal brain that it almost certainly would be.
In any case, my championship of polytheism is not (faithful readers knew this was coming) based on any belief that there are a bunch of literally supernatural gods out there. I only think that if we want to give ourselves any sort of allegorical narrative pantheon to work with in our conceptions of what things are and how they work and how best we may work with them — both in the objective material universe and in our subjective human consciousnesses — it makes better intuitive sense to imagine many overlapping and frequently mutually contradictory deities rather than a single TriOmni One, thereby providing ourselves with a more adequate armamentarium of differential handles for keeping track of the vast arrays both of circumstances we will encounter and of motives that will move us to act (or fail to act) in each of those circumstances.
Oh, and one other possible benefit:
With a monotheism, there is always the danger that we humans will delegate our moral and ethical choices to the people we consider to be experts, which in the case of human good and evil tends to be our religious and/or political leaders. Acknowledging the thorny complexity that polytheisms prominently display may help us to stay mindful that in most dilemmas there are cases to be made for a variety of potential solutions, which is to say that very often no one of them will be fully right or fully wrong. There’s a maturity and responsibility in that which is distinctly lacking when we simply defer to a pope, pastor, rabbi, or sacred text.
You may remember that I titled an earlier post ‘many gods, only one Good’. My One Good God is the force that moves us to compassion, to empathy, to generosity, to kindness, to giving what is needed wherever there is need — the force that induces us to regard others as we would wish to be regarded ourselves, that moves us to act lovingly even where we feel no particular love, in hopes that doing so will increase the presence of goodness in the world. The god, in brief, of caritas — a word I prefer to our Anglophone ‘charity’ because for many people the latter has a strong whiff of condescension about it, a connotation of being something that a superior does for an inferior.
A common canard from Believers is that caritas could only possibly originate in a perfect Superhuman God — that truly selfless love in a human is an impossibility. But in fact the impulse to be good to others is a hugely crucial product of our physical and cultural evolution. As I’ve said before (and will doubtless have occasion to say again), we are the most profoundly and elaborately social of all creatures. In any homo sapiens sapiens community, the individual who is perceived as being bad for the group will be reprehended, up to and including the points of exile or execution. Part of why humans cultivate and value caritas is because living it into reality feels good, and can make you feel good about yourself and others — and that’s true because our evolution over the past however many million years has led us down that path. It’s a pleasant if flippant irony to say that there is indeed a god that directs us to be kind to one another, and that we can find that god literally incarnated in our version of the extraordinary primate genome, which has for a very very long time now (possibly around 52 million years, since unimaginably long before we became human) has had our branch of the tree living in packs and societies and not as rogue loners.2
Of course, one of the great challenges for us as a highly social, powerfully conceptual animal capable of profound empathy is to conceive of and then enact a reality in which we extend caritas not only to our own families and local communities, but to humans wherever we encounter them — and also, to the top of our ability, to every other creature capable of suffering.
In the end of Euripides’ tragedy, the physically destroyed Hippolytus is borne in on a bier and set down before his emotionally destroyed father. As we read in the Wikipedia summary, “Hippolytus forgives his father, kind words are exchanged between father and son, and then Hippolytus dies.”
It’s the only scene in the play where the One Good God really predominates; and while it by no stretch of the imagination makes up for or negates the horrors of the goddess-feud that has led us to it, it all the more seems to me a pretty perfect expression of that caritas-driven God’s singular character and essence.
1 The pun is intentional.
2 https://www.science.org/content/article/how-humans-became-social
It's a shame I never learned about Greek mythology since I was too busy studying the so-called 'Truth' of my religion of origin to waste time on mere 'myths'. smh. We took all the great villainous heroes and condensed them into a single hero and a single villain. In doing so we missed a lot of good insights like this. Embracing the interactions between the conflicting truths is so much more helpful than trying to follow the only true treasure map to the only true treasure.