An epoch – any epoch – can be assessed by both the quantity and the quality of its gods. Christianity has accustomed us to imagine a single god: an all-powerful Father as the hypostasis of human hope; and once that god has been declared dead, the two only gods we still seem capable of evoking today are a rebellious and all-too-modern pseudo-Dionysus who symbolises human incompleteness, and an agonic Christ who symbolises human solitude and suffering: two purely specular figures of what Christianity made us believe is the human condition in need of the aforementioned Father, but now in the lack of that Father.
Deemed either too naif or too violent, all other gods have been silenced.(⊙) In fact we do no longer remember them. They have escaped both our thought and our sensibility. Arguably, however, what we have lost by losing them is the very nature of the sacred. For the sacred is reduced to provision in the case of the Christian Father-god, who is portrayed as an all-powerful and free provider; while it is altogether absent from the two other figures: the agonic Christ and a pseudo-Dionysus in whom misery, pain, absurdity, and lack of determination are enthroned in turn.
Furthermore, fancying a god as a serviceable Father for us, our as the image of our own debris, amounts to obliterating what the gods are in the last instance. For, as we have repeatedly written,(⊛) the gods were once something else: they named the brightness and the shadows of everything which is, or, what amounts to the same, the forces of the earth, whether positive or negative, that make and unmake the world, any world: e.g. love (Aphrodite) and discord (Eris), darkness (Nyx) and the clear vision of things (Athena), etc. Put otherwise: the gods were – in ancient Greece like elsewhere, outside and before Judaeo-Christianity – mega-demonstratives that helped to reshape as tonal music the earth’s ever-living forces. As such, of course, they did not demand to be believed in, for one does not have to believe in darkness or in the clear vision of things: one rather experiences them.
Naming such forces as such or such (e.g. Nix, Athena, etc.) gives them figural shape, so that darkness and the clear vision of things, for intance, appear as conceptual personae. In short, then, originally gods and concepts do not repel each other. Aristotle, Hölderlin, Schelling, and Gilbert Durand have pointed to it in various ways. Ultimately the only difference between philosophy and mythology is that the latter supplements the concept with imagination; in other words, mythology poetises the concept.
Now, in a time in which the idealist primacy of reason over sensuality (i.e. of the mind over the body) and the materialist primacy of sensuality over reason (i.e. of the body over the mind) are being either revalidated or contested on behalf of an imagination that – it is sometimes claimed – would do fine if it were to emancipate itself from them and set up a world of its own – as though we would not already inhabit an unworld lacking both body and reason! – it might be interesting to ruminate on the possibility of recovering an imagination capable of poetising the earth’s ever-living forces, i.e. the earth’s own shining forth.
With it we would have again a true mythology instead of a theology that aims at rationalising human hope in endless provision.
(⊙) Except perhaps Hermes qua god of (our society of) communication, on which see Michel Serres, Hermes: Literature, Science, Philosophy (ed. Josué V. Harari and David F. Bell; Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982).
Just like naming the gods amounts to making of the earth’s forces recognisable figures, depicting them in human form amounts to locate them on the same level in which their naming takes place: the domain of the human, because that is also the domain of language, which is not the same as to affirm, however, that the ancient-Greek gods were human projections, or that their figures were worshiped as idols.