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The Varied God

~ On the Human Experience of the Seasons.

The Varied God

Monthly Archives: July 2014

Apollo Ascending

27 Sunday Jul 2014

Posted by Tom Cooper in Apollo, Goddess Worship, History, Mythology, Nature, Seasons, Summer

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Apollo, Belief, Mythology, Seasons

It seems incredible to most of us that people used to believe strange things about how the world works. For instance, the very idea that the sun was Apollo, dashing through the sky in his golden chariot, is unseemly and fantastical. I mean, does it in any way look like that? Do you see a handsome Greek god with a whip in his hand, urging his chargers on? No, I don’t either.

Then again, we are all so busy these days, how many of us would notice? We expect it to be light at certain times, dark at other times, with those times lengthening and shortening with the course of the seasons. If it’s dark when we drive home from work we turn on the car headlights. If it’s light, we don’t. That’s about the extent of our interaction with the sun.

I’ve never been good at photography, though it is an art form I very much appreciate. A while back I decided that I could practice enough to at least bring my skills up to rudimentary. So for a while I was stepping out every Sunday morning, before the rest of the family was awake, camera in hand, to find subjects longing to be immortalized in passable photos. I had noticed that sunrises over the barn and woods and pasture were picturesque, so I thought I’d capture one. This particular morning was already light, but the sun had not begun to clear the trees on the eastern horizon. I stood and waited. Then sat and waited. Then walked around the property, coming at it from different angles, waiting for the Brilliant Solar Orb, the Chariot of Apollo, to appear. It finally came up, and yes there were nice colors in the clouds, and sunbeams streaked across grasses and fence posts, but I didn’t get any good pictures. I just don’t know how to stage a photograph, how to frame the subject matter. 

But the one lesson the exercise left me with was that if we take the time, we can watch the sun move (yes, I know, watch the earth move relative to the sun). And I guess in times long ago, when people were closer to nature, when its patterns truly dictated so much of everyone’s daily lives, they could see things like a benevolent deity rolling out each morning to bring them the warmth of the sun. They saw the chariot racing through the sky. The Greek gods, like so many ‘pagan’ deities, shared this world with us, even if they did operate on a higher plane of existence. They were beside us, around us, tending to the many details of life and nature.

I can’t help but feel that something was lost when monotheism replaced the old religions. Lost was the sense of personal deities, of gods dedicated to the things that mattered most to this person or that person. Lost were all the great stories. In their place we got a simple formula: God–the one, omnipotent God–created everything and set it in motion. Done. Needless to say it was a strict, necessarily male God. So no more goddesses, sorry. We still have many holiday observances that evoke these old deities, which descend down to us through the ages from their worship, though we usually don’t acknowledge that fact. But there is still something missing in not being able to ask Persephone to arise from the Underworld and bring on the reluctant spring, to weep for Adonis and beseech his blessings on our summertime crops, or to cast a glance skyward and ask great Apollo to please becalm himself on this already too hot day.

It’s all in how we stage the shot, how we frame the subject matter. When my daughter was about seven or eight years old she began to ask me if Santa Claus was real. I answered her question with a question: Do you think Christmas would be more fun or less fun if there was no Santa Claus? Yeah, I know, a little too sophist for a second grader. But I hope you see my point. Any fool can ‘learn’ things, such as what really exists or doesn’t exist, and what are the true explanations for natural phenomena. It takes an open intelligence and a willing heart to see the universe in terms of daily wonder: and it takes a force of will, at least it does for me, to be that open and willing.

So to say that I understand and respect those who created the old myths understates what I feel about them. I envy them, I miss what they had, and I think that in a larger sense, the world may be missing it too. I may have given up on the camera, but I intend to keep watching for Apollo.

The Word ‘Constantinople’ Is Hard to Type

22 Tuesday Jul 2014

Posted by Tom Cooper in Seasons

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The most important lesson I have learned about the seasons, and perhaps the most useful for people to understand, is that seasons do not end–they become the next season. This is not a semantic quibble, but a scientific fact. Everything is a continuum, and anything that is not busy becoming the next version of itself is busy dying. This is not a semantic quibble and so much more than a scientific fact. As with most things we can glean by a practiced nearness to nature, it is a way to understand ourselves, to improve ourselves, to keep moving forward all the time. Aging is not moving closer to death, but becoming older versions of ourselves. We can choose to honor these older versions of ourselves, to add new talents, new knowledge, new experiences, accepting that our new selves are different, but no worse than the old selves. I can no longer do some of the physical things I could do when I was eighteen. But when I was eighteen I knew nothing about the history of Greek philosophy, post-war Japanese fiction, or the development of Steppe societies. Does it matter that I know these things now? That’s not really a fair question.

People have different priorities, and one of mine is to seek to know something new every day. One of the most important things I know is that concerning most people, in most situations, I have no right to judge. I don’t know them, and I don’t know what makes them tick. It may sound pithy and wise to say that people who do not learn all the time are leading wasted lives. But I’m sure there are plenty of people who think I am wasting my life. Suppose I spend the day before my death reading a book about Constantinople. In the evening I will sit over dinner telling my wife some of the things I found deeply interesting about the eastern capital of the Holy Roman Empire. She will politely not roll her eyes, though this will be the ten thousandth such impromptu lecture I’ve given on a subject she cares little about. Later I will go to sleep, and never awake. What does it matter that I died knowing about Constantinople? How many people do I know who will shake their heads that I never experienced with them the things they enjoy most: that I never peddled a bicycle 100 miles in one day with my friend Al, or hunted deer in mid-winter with my friend Curt, or sipped expensive cognac and lit up at a high-end cigar bar with my friend Mark?

So I don’t judge. I only know that being fully human is about being true to what most defines us, and carrying it ever forward. There is no season which is not complete and necessary in itself. All seasons take what is most necessary within them into the next season, where it is changed, and changed again, and carried into the season after that. We also take what is complete and necessary within us into each season we enter, but it is up to us to nourish it and help it grow so we can move on, and move on, and move on.

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