Kerenyi on Greek and Roman Religion

The thing that makes interpretation possible at all for Kerenyi is that the Greek religion started not with some kind of faith, but with "arresting evidence." This arresting evidence is what caused religion to be expressed, and it's the associated ideas of the religion that live on. Both the arresting evidence and the ideas it spawned have a "timeless" quality, which implies that this arresting evidence is still around.

Kerenyi, as if succumbing to his own ambition, almost immediately takes refuge in the insights of Ernst Cassirer, as relates to the problem of mythico-religious "phase." Phases mark transitions. A transition "lifts" an individual or a group out of the uniform course of events, and in this way biological time is linked to cosmic time -- the bios to the mythos. In both the small world of men as well as the greater universe, some "matter of fact" -- the arresting evidence -- is "sensed" or observed and held fast. A phase is marked by something that "shows itself" -- something which is rooted in the universe itself. In one sense Cassirer is referring to phases of time and thus of history. The related phenomena are the spinning tops which mark history. The spinning tops exist because somewhere a phase transition determines an event, and the event shows an image frozen in time.

This is a rather scientific insight and in fact is the only scientific insight of the book, but it establishes the sub-theme of religion and history linked by time, which later becomes important for the Roman understanding.

The reader is next transported into myth. Kerenyi's favorite myth is that of Prometheus, and different aspects of the myth crop up throughout the book. (Kerenyi also concentrates on the Homeric warrior myth.) He starts with the binding of Prometheus to the "rock," which Kerenyi asserts is less a fettering than a garlanding, and as such is a kind of festival celebration. This is a shocking interpretation, but one must understand that this interpretation does not exclude the more traditional "sacrificial" interpretation. The sacrifice of Prometheus represents the festival sacrifice of an ox. The ox represents the deity of the underworld, and Kerenyi concentrates on Pluto. The meaning of Pluto -- "wealth" -- attests to the true meaning of the festival, being a festival of plenty, of life, and not one of death.

Prometheus, while chained to the rock, is visited by the daughters of Oceanus -- Titans -- who have come "from a distance" to view his sacrificial predicament, and so already we have a reference to Cassirer's "phase" in the sense of viewing an "image." These onlookers are godly ambassadors -- theoria -- and their behavior of arrival is mimicked on Earth by those arriving at a festival for the sacrifice. Prometheus is therefore sacrificed, like the ransom sacrifice of Christ, in order to bring the people of Earth closer to godhood.

A festival, says Kerenyi, brings the participants into direct contact with their own collective godhood. The festival-goer is raised to a level where everything is happening for the first time, and time seems to stand still. It is a special kind of primordial time. She is immersed in the company of gods, and she herself becomes divine.

Part of that "elevation" is expressed through a knowledge of beauty. Universal ideas shine as something beautiful, and the Greeks sometimes wrote "Beautiful!" -- Kale -- next to the portraits of female deities on Attic vases. The winged Nike, a goddess of Victory, is inaccessible to mortal man, and she is thus "beautiful" for it. Beauty is a rare thing because beauty can only be appreciated when the mind is quiet; silence is a divine attribute.

There is something Dilthey-esque about this idea of beauty, because beauty is historical and thus tied up with Experience. The winged Victory is man's victory over what has been Experienced. That which "has been" exists for the aspirant in a transfigured form. Experience is projected into the present as a divine image, and the victory is one of communion between man and god.

With victory comes the acceptance of death. Mankind carries both victory and death within himself, in the sense of the Greek daimon, which is that aspect of the divine which appears to mankind as his destiny. Man and the cosmic structure that he lives in are both living and dying at the same time. When man incorporates the cosmic structure into himself, he and the cosmic structure become united as a "noble creature."

Outside of the religious Experience, mankind has no direct experience of the victorious realm as an actual state. At the human and emotional level, the religious Experience is a wishful, intuitive, or imaginative Experience. This intuition provides a continuity between life and death, linking death to our living experience in the real world by making it familiar and thus more friendly.

Cosmically, the gods form a boundary to human existence, at which humanity becomes aware of the difference between mortality and eternity. The victory of the gods is only possible because of their proximity to man. In this regard, certain protocols in ancient Greece had to be followed. Things and activities for the Greeks were either "hosia" or "not-hosia."

For example, in the Odyssey it is "not-hosia" to call on the gods in the presence of corpses. Likewise, in the Hymn to Apollo, it is "not-hosia" for mortals to use the horses tethered in the sacred precinct of Poseidon Hippios, because they are sacred animals. In reality these horses were cared for by priests. Poseidon's horses were symbolic of the power behind the Sun, of the movement of time and the journey between cosmic shores. Poseidon's trident was the center of their course: according to Robert Graves Poseidon planted his trident in the Moon and three fountains were born.

Kerenyi later points out that in Roman religion, the priest of Jupiter was not allowed to mount or ride any horse whatsoever -- the horse being under the jurisdiction of the priest of Mars, the antagonistic deity of war. The priest of Mars sacrificed a horse on the October Horse day and thus was in intimate contact with the horse and its spirit.

For the Greeks, an animal sacrifice was a hosioter, and the death-dealer purified himself through the death-stroke. For the Bacchants of Euripides, the Hosia floated as a great goddess on golden wings, a victory of life over death. She made sure that no rite of divine worship was neglected, and thus kept the divinities from exacting punishments. She made sure that both the Jupiter (Olympian) and Martian (Underworld) gods received worship in the form of holy observances. This kind of hosia is surely a precursor to the later Roman religion which was so concerned with Jupiter and Mars.

A characteristic of Greek religion is the "remoteness" of the underworld domain, which is an "inner sanctum." The hosiotes aspired to Olympic heights, and for them the underworld domain was kept in the background, reinforcing the idea of the underworld as a "remote" place. The regular world of the hosios was bright and clear, and the hosate priest did everything in his power to keep the hosia constantly flowing. One might add that in the everyday affairs of the hosios, hosia manifested itself as a simple ritual acknowledgement of the appearances of the Sun and the Moon -- rarely did things get more esoteric than this.

Another Greek term is sebas, which means "awesome," and later came to be associated with the divine ruler of Rome, who was "august." Sebas penetrates to the soul, and is excited in Telemachus by the radiance of the royal palace of Sparta; but Kerenyi explains that the radiance of the palace is seen with the inner eye, and what's really being seen -- a true spectacle -- is the palace of Zeus. Sebas is the beholding of rare beauty, in the stellar sense.

Beauty is treated by the Greeks with humanity and emotion, so that with beauty comes the shame felt for those who desecrate it. When Hector is about to fight with Achilles, his mother Hecuba tries to call him back within the safety of the city walls. She bares her breast and with tears implores: "Hector, my son, before this" -- her breast -- "feel aidos and take pity on me, if ever I gave you the comforting breast. Remember it, dear son, and defend us against the enemy by staying inside the walls."

Aidos means a "feeling of shame" before the gods. Here Kerenyi ranges into a fantastic interpretation. By baring her breast, the invisible Order of the primordial world shines through, and its showing is intended to call to the son's mind another vision, the vision of the desecration of beauty, which is intolerable. Hecuba is appealing to Hector to stay within the walls and not to get mixed up with a battle against the gods. In a way, she's asking her son to respect the gods, and this is hosia.

Hercules, for one, felt no shame before the eye of the gods. He respected the beauty of the gods and for this he was glorified. The solar lion was his badge of honor, and his glorification was a celebration of life over death, of the continuous interface between god and man.

The ancients believed that the pure viewing of the Earth by the gods, the theon opis, was also a pure receiving, and so man and god were mutually backgrounded. The channel was open in both directions. This godly interaction was the same as visionary knowledge. The Greek word for "form" is eidos. For "knowing" the word is eidenai. The form is thus implicit in knowledge. For Plato, the "known world" exceeded in brilliance the world which was merely "seen," the upshot being that the brilliance of knowledge is a measure of the world's transparency and thus of its divine forms.

However, the philosophers knew that as meanings change over time, true knowledge loses its brilliance. What was once beautiful may become ugly. An cacogen is a masked god, and the mask is frequently horrible. But underneath the horrible aspect (which is knowledge displaced by time) lies beauty. The goddess takes off her mask and she is lovely. This change in aspect is a resurrection to the afterlife, where beauty reigns eternal. The cacogen is the agent, the genius, of that beauty, which shines from the past as an eidolon: a living memory of the dead. "Do not look back," warned Persephone, setting her captive free. But as Orpheus sailed through the horizons back to Earth, he finally did look back and the shrouded Eurydice, pale and silent and hardly recognizable, vanished. The Sun holds the memories of all those it has consumed, but the knowledge is displaced by time.

This brings us back to the festival, which takes place in a kind of isolated arena of time. Like knowledge, the radiant vision of the form during a festival will eventually fade, and when the brilliance fades we are brought back to reality. Forms have the character of "retiring" into the background of the visible world, so that the eye of the beholder is left with displaced images of the Sun or the Moon -- both of which are clear and actual, and both of which stand as a testimony to the divine experience of the festival.

Roman Religion
Kerenyi starts his analysis of Roman religion by contrasting the Titans with Zeus in the Greek religion. The name "Titan" means "king" and conveys a meaning of a primordial world separate and remote from the new world of Zeus's sovereignty. At the same time the Titan world is made present and actual as the opposite of Zeus's world and therewith "lifted" altogether out of time. As a background to all of the Olympian forms there stands the sovereignty of the Titans, defeated but still "possible."

As the Greek religion faded, time moved forward and a similar dichotomy arose between Greek and Roman religion. In this case the Greek myths were defeated but still possible, and the Roman cult was ascendent.

The Romans had no interest in the marriages and family trees of the gods; they were more concerned with the marriages and family trees of each citizen. Myth, which might be considered a higher form of reality, was brought into the ordinary realm by establishing boundaries, by making worship less open and more cult-like -- the cult being one of careful ceremony. Within established boundaries, the activities of man, like the movements of the stars, ran their course.

Chief among the Roman gods was Jupiter. The priest of Jupiter was called the flamen Dialis, and Plutarch described this man as a "living holy statue." The sacred life of the priest was a "substance" that filled time. The Roman religion was not completely restricted -- the priest also existed in a timelessness that manifested as a call for all around him to stop their work when he walked through the streets of the city. But the proscribed daily activities of the priest himself were very strict. Religion was thus reduced to activity bound by time, or rather, time was filled with the stuff of life. In essence, the Roman religion had come down to Earth.

This dependence on time is related to the Greek word noos. Noos is defined as a pervasive spiritual horizon that reflects things which are far away. Noos is also a sort of power by which things are driven. Hipponoos means "being driven by a horse's nature," and by a dual construction one can say that the horses of Mars "drive" the horizons of the universe. The horizons of the universe reflect the distant forms of our own godhood.

The noos is "closely wrought," like a fine mesh, and thus is too opaque for anything to slip through. Mars throws a "net" over Venus and thus captures her. More broadly, Mars has captured the entire universe, and thus "drives it."

The real difference between Greek and Roman religion was how Earth was perceived in relation to the rest of the star. For both religions the gods were physically inaccessible. This is an important point, because there is no "second universe" -- there is only the Earth that we live on. For the Greeks, the Earth and the realm of the gods existed as one, with the Earth caught up in a single moment of stellar time and eternally linked to the divine. The Roman view was slightly different: for them the Earth was directly caught up in the stellar flow and in the unfolding of time.

Thus the whole of Roman history is objectified in its religion. This de-anchoring of the Earth from its stellar "moment" automatically throws the Earth into the forward arrow of stellar collapse, and this means that Roman religion brings with it the idea of "catastrophe." But even catastrophe can be worshipped, and this was done with the bull sacrifice to Jupiter.

The bull sacrifice is a smaller version of the catastrophe of creation, of the collapse of the "noble creature." Like the Leviathan, the noble creature represents the universe. In cosmic terms, the living Earth arises from the sacrificed noble creatures, and thus is resurrected from death. The light and beauty of Earth stand triumphant over death, and in one sense the gods are jealous for it.

The noble creatures stand under the protection of the gods, and in archaic Roman religion the noble creatures were the gods themselves. It must be added that the noble creature is also the noble Roman. For the Greeks, phaseis means "appearances" -- these being the images implicit in the divine relationship. These images are a higher reality only visible to the mind's eye. The Romans preferred those appearances driven by a lower and closer horizon -- not the distant one of the divine form. The Romans followed, then, the motions of the planets as seen from the Earth, and the activities of their priests were proscribed thereby.

The primordial Titans -- the eternal forms -- were uniquely Greek. For the Romans, primordial time was objectified and called the "Golden Age." It was thus placed in the stellar flow of time. And, as Hesiod noted, the "gods and mortal men are of the same origin." This statement is a further temporalizing of the divine relationship.

Kerenyi at this point returns to Prometheus, who was himself a god but foremost a representative of men. Prometheus performed the first sacrifice and by doing so bridged the gap between god and man, between the image and the reality, and by slaughtering the animal brought an awareness or knowledge of the gods to mankind. This is a myth of human existence, and also a myth of the distance between gods and men.

The gods were angered by Prometheus because he stole the best part of the sacrifice -- of the star -- for men: fire, i.e., the Sun. Though initially angry, this taking of the fire left Zeus with a serene outlook. The noos of Zeus became calm and motionless, like a mirror.

In the Homeric legend, the noos of the divine realm was stirred up by the warrior Achilles, or more specifically, by his horses. While driving his horses towards a battle taking place on a celestial battlefield, the horses acquired human speech. Like the doves of Dodona, they became oracular. It was Apollo, god of oracles, who spoke through these animals. He tried to warn Achilles to stop. This breaking of the divine silence, manifested by Achilles' disregard for the divine, brought about his (or equivalently Hector's) tragic end - to be dragged to death by his own horses.

The Achilles' tendon -- the divine weak spot -- can be equated with the hind tendon of a horse, and since the horses of Mars leave their hoofprints in the Moon, the weak spot of Mars is associated with the Moon. We know that the divine form is only visible from the Moon, which means that the weak spot of the gods, where their true form is visible, is the platform of the Moon.

When the warrior Hector is dragged by his heels around the battlefield, it really means that the Moon is dragged by Mars (and one can go further by saying that both the Mars and the Moon are dragged by Jupiter).

This story is a divine decree about the separation between the Earth and Mars, which is a sacred separation. The misuse of the sacred horses opens up the entire star to temporal influences, to the detriment of mankind. The misuse of the divine is not-hosia. This idea of temporal injection from one realm to the next is directly related to the objectification of time by the Romans, who seem to have had a specific picture in mind when it came to the motions of the heavens and the activities of their priests.

Unlike the timeless Greeks, the Romans were administrators and calendar makers. Each victory of war was a victory for Jupiter, and each general was Jupiter himself until he laid the laurel wreath at the feet of Jupiter's "statue," after which he became human again. The Roman State was a creation of the gods, and its history was at the highest level a cosmic history. The Emperor was the divine protector against catastrophe and collapse.

But this minor theme of collapse was really a major theme; Jupiter was both a protector and a punisher, as was the god of Christianity. The Christian god was embraced by the people of Rome because it seemed to explain that punishing aspect of life, and thus served the needs of all concerned. The time was right and the people were ripe for it.

It must have been a slow, even ceremonial death. The activities of the State that once overshadowed the divine form now itself became increasingly indistinct. The Roman spectacles were marked by the Sun's dull gleam, a light thrown like a red haze across the horizons. The Greeks lived during a Golden Age, a carefree era that seemed brilliant and eternal. But the Romans had it right, because behind the scenes the clock was ticking.

Reference
Kerenyi, Karl. The Religion of the Greeks and Romans, E.P. Dutton & Co., 1962

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