homer and writing again

I like to think there are false representations of all human created gods that act with the flaws humans ascribed to them


i think the conception of the "flaws" as defining isn't inherant

it's a side effect of writing


the first people to do a writing didn't really know what they were doing
how writing changed things


before writing the idea that the primary way of understanding the gods was their relationship amongst each other would have been totally incoherent

before homer the way gods were understood was in the relationship between gods and man

because the idea of a pantheon of 12 was pretty novel when homer was writing... in most communities there would be like 3 gods max who were really really relevant to everyone in the community

but once you have writing

you can take stories from all over the world

and sow them into one grand tapestry

and then it becomes about stories about what the gods do to each other
and you step back and look at it and go, oh no, this is immoral
like morality and spiritual potency have anything to do with each other
and you end up with philosophers
who misunderstand everything
but yeah... when you have one, or two gods, who really matter to you, if one of them murders his lover, or strikes a chap down for seeing them naked, that's not immorality, that's a religious mystery
when you have 12 or more... 9 or 10 of them only of tangental interest to you, then it becomes gossip
then it becomes jockeying for status '-i'm- better than that, some god'
you can't seriously contemplate 100 stories of the petty squabbles of the gods
some of which sprang into being becuase they make narrative sense when you are forcing them all into a family tree
i.e. they only exist because they make sense in the context of this story you have accidentally created, because you are the first person to write a whole big story that people can come back to and go over with a fine tooth comb