The Olympian Spirit
The guiding philosophy of this publication
“Goethe carefully concealed the emptiness of his being beneath [an] Olympian air.”
– Roberto Calasso, The Ruin of Kasch
This resembles many scholarly critiques of the Romans. Supposedly, they “lacked an inner life.”
In all moderns and postmoderns there is a predisposition toward romanticism. Beauty becomes associated with emotionalism, sentimentality, effusion, lack of clarity, fuzzy aesthetics in art, whimsy, the cult of love, the cult of romance, fragility, psychic disturbance, and the notion of many indefinable selves.
If the Romans (and Goethe) lacked an “inner life,” this was virtue; and to call it Olympian is apt, because it was an orientation that sought Height, not depth . . . a summit and cold air.
What is beautiful? A broken teacup whose contents have spilled out in a vaguely pleasing pattern? A pining love? The lamenting weakling that’s been dashed to pieces, subjecting us to his inner states? Or Nature? Sheer Nature–expanse of forest and lightning . . . Or Order, imposing columns; the sculpture that’s still and yet breathes?
The Titan and False Olympian
The titans, and those titans pretending to be olympians, have their origin in sheer nature. They are natural force, elements, elemental force and natural processes. Personified, these are: Ouranos as the sky, Gaia as the earth, Poseidon as the ocean, Hephaestus as fire, Dionysus as frenzy, Hades as death, Kronos as time, so on and so forth. For quite a while the Greeks worshiped sheer nature and sheer element, echoes of which remained even after the titans were “humanized.”
One may protest here: “Dionysus is an olympian! He brings us liberation!” And herein lies the clue. The titans, all of them – especially those on Olympus – all despise Reason and seek to scatter the Mind. Their means are many: violence, pain, terror, frenzy, lust, fear, convention. But Dionysus himself prefers pleasure. By means of it, he entraps you. Then, through ritual excess and a divinely felt hysteria – he ruins you; destroys you, forever.
There is a difference for sure between the original titans and what I’ll now refer to as the “false olympians.” The former are concerned with matter: the material world and the body. They constrain, loosen, or amplify these. But mostly, they compel work. The titans teach us the realities of labor, suffering, bondage, obligation, long toil and rest. At the most they can offer you respite, delay of death, crops and children.
Their threats, when analyzed, also revolve around the body and matter. They threaten you, your children, your fetus, your harvests, your village as a whole or they simply send natural disasters. Even their metaphysical threats are material: some ghost or some shade will visit you in the dead of night . . . again, to physically harm you. The titans love bondage, restriction, hierarchies based on age or proximity, submission and fear of authority. Terror and pain are their recourse.
The “old religion,” as some scholars call it, has the benefit of synchronizing humans with sheer nature. It absolutely stands that some archaic Greek village would be healthier for the average person than any modern city. The question is whether the closing of one’s Spirit and Mind is worth it. Those who have awakened either will revolt, finding their Mother (Gaia) and their Father (Kronos) unbearable and crushingly despotic.
We can regard the modified titans – or False Olympians – as being: Dionysus, Aphrodite, Ares, Demeter, Hermes (whose nature alternates), and others. These are more clever, and are fixated on undoing the Olympian principle. They strive to cause confusion, to blur lines, invert meanings, to cause mischief, they encourage humans to give in to voluptuous emotions, and they all have records of destroying their favorites. Rarely do their heroes have a happy end.
But both variants, the titan and the False Olympian, seek to bind and limit humanity. The cultivation of Reason is a provocation; an ignorant shepherd is blessed! We ought to add also, that the romantic alluded to in the introduction . . . is allied with the False Olympian. And since these do not rule with an iron fist (except in the case of Ares), they cannot detect their own bondage and think pleasure and frenzy are pathways to freedom.
The Olympian
The True Olympians indicate: Spirit, Mind, Nous and Logos. Zeus is rulership, Victory, expansion and abundance; Apollo is light, illumination, purity and truth; Athena is overcoming, intelligence, wile and reason. The concern here is the Spirit, and the body’s obligation to act on it.
The success or failure of the Hero . . . or perhaps we could say “initiate” . . . is meant to determine their ontological stature. Victory brings immortality (and on occasion, deification). The meaning here is simple. All humans are ordinarily destined for Hades; the realm of unconscious shades. It is a place where the dead are dark wisps, in the outline of their human forms. It is a pathetic existence, as alluded to by Achilles. But it so happens, in the Greek tradition, that this fate can be avoided.
The true meaning of the Hero’s Journey, before the psychologists got to it, was not integration nor individuation: but actual eternal life. And this eternal life was marked by . . . Consciousness. After death. The very thing that the shades in hell lose, and that the titans and False Olympians hate.
Gaia promises eternal sleep; Kronos will outright eat you; Demeter sends you to Hades still, but to a more sanctified spot; Dionysus, Aphrodite, Hermes and the rest all scatter your mind so you do not think, rendering you debaucherous – until the shock of death.
Such contrast – the Olympians compel of their favorites: Virtue. Also Courage, Action and Excellence. They are not spared the human condition, but are instead exposed to an amplified version of it. More struggle, more suffering, more pain and more hardship. But as the Mind and Spirit grow, through an upward orientation, they experience also Joy: Overcoming and Transcendence.
Such is the philosophy of The New Olympian.
Postscript
The current mode of America is remarkably like that of the False Olympian. Our times are marked by dissolution, frenzy and a decline in the ability to think. Suspicion and fear are on the rise and we are seeing our first demagogue. Individually, we are bereft of Virtue and embody pleasure-based ethics — which enables us to do little more than to cry out or join the madness.
Greece and Rome went through the same. Hysterics and vice accompanied the rise of tyrants and demagogues. But it always remained that the Olympian Spirit was accessible. They called it Virtus, Aretē, Thumos and the like, but the larger message is that there is a thing transcendent that can resist and triumph over the pull of the lower.