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©1992,1998, John Yohalem
Jupiter, Zeus, the jovial star, is lofty these nights. I see Him wink as I walk south home or, almost solemn, He graciously presides in the heavens when I do a midnight rooftop ritual. He's at an odd point in my chart, too — Capricorn, my Fifth House, and lonely out there, the sole planet in my wintry quadrant. (My chart clusters, lopsided, about my Leo Sun.)
Zeus gets a bad press nowadays. The Sky Father who, if half the tales be true, seized power from the Earth Mother, clobbered His own father, and bullied His glorious ox-eyed sister into a marriage of inconvenience, is not popular in this era of the Goddess Rediviva. "Patriarchy" is a filthy word spat from almost any pagan lip.
It's an old story. Establish a one-party regime and everything that goes wrong will be blamed on you — you no longer have a whipping boy to catch the flak. Any tyrant soon discovers this fact — which, no doubt, is why Jahweh, in a panic at the blame he incurred for breach-of-covenant with the Jews, summoned an Adversary into loyal opposition at some point during the Babylonian Captivity. (The Jews knew of no Satan before that time.)
But Zeus, once His father was defeated, His sisters tamed, His grandmother's monstrous incubi outmaneuvered, had no Satan to blame and (be it to his credit noted) never devised one. This is not the easy way out: How can authority, justice, be ethically correct without an obvious evil to set it off, give it form? Choosing right over wrong is simple; choosing one right from among many requires maturity and judgment.
Take the tale of Prometheus, now — a popular figure among those disaffected with the Power That Be, ever since Hesiod's time if not before. We are told Prometheus, "Forethought", created mankind from modeling clay, life being instilled by the breath of Athena. We are told that he tricked Zeus into taking the useless bits of sacrificed meat, while the good stuff went to humanity — but also that Zeus (who had no need for mortal food) knew just what was going on and cheerfully permitted the deception.
We are told Prometheus stole fire, a special perk of the Gods, and concealed embers in a fennel stalk to sneak it out of heaven and down to us. We are told Prometheus was hideously punished for this lèse-majesté, and in general human beings have taken his part. Aischylos was explicit on the point: In his play, Prometheus denounces Zeus for a whimsical, paranoid, power-drunk despot, and gloats over His inevitable fall. That lifelong adolescent rebel Shelley, in a sequel written 2,300 years later, is even more bitter.
Zeus gets no respect.
He has been, perhaps, too many things to too many men. Even the Greeks were confused: Homer saw in Him a principle of abstract justice, the only neutral figure in the heavens above Troy, the court of last and noblest appeal, weighing all things in His balance — swayed for a bit by Thetis, perhaps, and hoodwinked by proud Hera, partial to a human favorite or two (has there ever been a god who wasn't?), but seeing all things with a just, an unblinking eye. The poets ("Liars!" — Plato) named Zeus ancestor to so many kingly lines that His libido became a national joke, and the most notorious thing about Him. To Aischylos He was a tyrant; to Euripides, He was the impulse of mystic destiny "who brings the unthought to be."
To Socrates and his disciples, drifting on irresistible tides towards the hidden reefs of dogma and monotheism, Zeus was unity, the solitary figure representing divine will. This doctrine obliged the raffish and fertile god to hew to an ever tighter moral course, suitable to philosophy, until half the jolly old myths and the metaphors of ever-fecund nature that they expressed had to be discarded as inappropriate, even blasphemous. (No wonder Socrates was accused of atheism!)
Zeus, the rollicking lord of the clouds, consort of the Queen of Heaven, lover of Danaë and Leda and Alkmena and Ganymede, was obliged to an unnatural, hermaphroditic union with Jahweh, the vengeful, asexual, moralizing god of the Hebrews, to produce the witheringly just yet conditionally all-compassionate three-headed chimaera of Christianity. It has never proved an easy identity.
Now I like Zeus. I like His sly wit and His witty weather. I gaze at the clouds and swap a wink, and I think of His justice as an environmental principle: Push here and the bubble will bulge there. The world is a single machine, and Zeus is Maxwell's Demon, blowing on the windmill and oiling the gears. He is also, of course, the deus ex machina, the God from that machine (quite a contraption), showing up at the last to save the day and leave the rubes agog with an unexpected and necessary call for justice, for balance. When the wind dissipates toxic fumes, I know who's in charge, and I wasn't one whit surprised (all the scientists were) to discover flowers blooming in the ash of Mt. St.Helen's only three years after it erupted. That, of course, was a partnership: The Earth blooms under rain; the seeds toss in the wind to fertile beds.
And someone has to take responsibility, damn it. I love Hermes and Hephaistos and I admire Apollo, but the drachma has to stop somewhere: Else, trickster gods will have no order to disrupt, craftsmen no reality to refine, the artistic no dull reality to enliven and inspire.
But that's not how I got to understand Zeus. I got in sync with Him (I like to imagine) by being Him.
My concept of Zeus's personality began to take shape at the age of nine. I had discovered witchcraft the previous summer: All by myself, I concocted a little verbal formula to work the weather or make other shifts in daily reality. They worked, all right — rain came and went to the minute, on command. The spells bore, I have since discovered, a remarkable resemblance to the direct, repetitive, incantatory rhythms of primitive spells in many cultures I had certainly never encountered by the age of eight. Magic is a universal human art.
But, though my willing worked, something lingered in the air, a sense of a self outside me, pondering me, like a dog sniffing some odd little creature wandering between its paws, uncertain whether to bite or bark or let the harmless curiosity pass. I felt the hot breath of — what? — on my neck as I walked alone in the woods, the wet tongue in my ear as if to say, Yes, you can command me, if that's really what you wish to do — but you're not awake and in charge all the time — isn't it better, more mature, more reasonable, to accept and endure all weather than to try to be awake and in command at all times, anticipating my every whim? And I have a lot of whims. I can do really big things, if I'm inclined, or if I'm interrupted so much in my — duties — that I find you a nuisance. So don't rile me, little one. We can be friends, if you'll learn to understand and respect me. We can work together.
Was that Zeus? Zeus is a sky god, a god of weather. And He harbors no grievance against us — He does not set out to frustrate us with hurricanes or heat waves. My conception of the gods as natural forces means that They Have A Lot On Their Minds. Humans and their preposterous concerns are only a little bit of it. A tree or an ant — an anthill, any way — is of as much concern to them as a human or a city. Top priority is the natural flow. Don't get in the way of the juggernaut, because it will not stop.
But I decided, barring emergencies, to leave the weather alone. The sense of power, the ego-boost of feeling I had some control over the world (and you need that at nine, especially if you're the puny, pensive type), was insufficient to balance the terrors of responsibility, the feeling that I was interfering with a delicate mechanism that ran just fine without my tinkering, and I'd only get whiplash of some sort if I didn't leave well enough alone. Message received. Over and out.
I did not put names to all this, mind you, till that fall, when we — Harvey and I — started our club: The Gods Club. Everybody in it was a god — Greek, preferably.
Of course I was Zeus. Who else would want the job? My hair was not cloudily curled and my chest not yet magnificent; nor has magnanimous justice often been a feature of my humor (and as a kid I was much worse; a very feline Leo; a strutting absurdity, and what the hell are you laughing at?). Still: I had the imperious temper for the job, and I was at least as likely a candidate as Harvey was for Apollo. (Harvey's an hour or so younger than I am; perhaps it is his altered ascendant that leavens his Leo into overwhelming phlegm.)
And the other kids whom, caustic and sportsless, I had never led, were tickled by this new toy: Gods! Simply divine, my dear.
For three days I held absolute power. Nothing since then — possibly excepting my first mescaline trip and leading large Wiccan rituals — has proved so heady a high. Power is it.
From my Gods Club days I learned to understand Fascism — the psychology of a Stalin, a Hitler, a Nixon: the total divorce from reality. Maintaining any perspective at all must require incredible balance, and this must be done while manipulating and distorting the perspective of others. And to do it day after day — for years! — ignoring other neurotic problems and appreciating the whirl of real events in the objective world — is almost inconceivable. I was dizzy and drunk in half a week. (True, I was only nine.)
Three days about did it for most of the kids. A tyrant requires one of two things to remain on top: The people must be terrified or entertained. Tyrants take office when folk are afraid — afraid of an enemy (or a situation) from which only the tyrant can save them, or too afraid of him to fight back. Failing that, tyrants must use the Mussolini approach: Keep `em amused. I had no thunderbolts about me, and after three days no one was amused anymore.
It was my introduction: to the Gods, and to the problems of godhead.
In the years that followed, I learned humility. If not before my fellow creatures (that took longer), at least before the Gods. Athena inspired me, holding me to high standards and proud (it seemed) of the successes I laid at her feet. Hera warmed me: Womanly majesty, the mercy side of justice, inspired me, too, to aspire to worthiness. Aphrodite alarmed me: I hid from a power I guessed would too greatly shake me, but I have learned (hard lessons) how to approach Her, adore Her, love Her as She wishes (and deserves) to be loved, and win Her favor by loving Her gifts in other people.
But I never forget just and wily Zeus, and my heart lifts at the sight of roiling, rococo clouds on the frescoed dome of a perfect day in the country. And I rejoice in His apparent unruliness: You see the other side of what's happening, don't you? (My concept of a godly intelligence is one able to perceive all the input and output of every action, allowing for what is awkward and recycling what is needed, and knowing this in advance. God as Frederick Law Olmsted and the world as Central Park.)
For the Zeus I came to know was no despot: Not through fear but justice, balance, keeping the system running — subduing disorder to match His order, death to march with life, drought to disturb His rain — did He earn honor. Else, how long would noble Hera have continued to honor Him?
The all-seeing gods are beyond what we can attain, but the symbol is potent: Zeus is a take-charge, can-do, keep the world moving kind of guy, and jovial to boot. He takes responsibility: It is an image of the adult male I have always aspired to. And I aspire to it as I raise my hymns to His planet: the jovial star.
And Prometheus? That discordian troublemaker, utterly misnamed? Too indulgent to us. For Zeus was right: Give us fire and there's no telling where it will end. Nuclear war we seem to have escaped, but polluting ourselves to death is all too likely. And whose fault is that, I ask you? Prometheus got off easy. Zeus knows best.
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