Theophany is an open and unequivocal confession of pagan piety, a piety that requires no sacred scripture, is non-dogmatic, knows nothing of redemption and resurrection, and is unfamiliar with an omnipotent creator god. Instead, it recognizes a plethora of divine and semi-divine beings. Such a perspective has proven offensive to many. Not only to the early Christians and their theologians, for whom paganism could not be a matter of indifference. So they relegated it to the realm of demonic and magical powers. For Christians, inclusion of pagan piety within their narratives of religious history is rendered impossible, as is evident in the recent phase of Protestant theology and its attempt to demythologize faith. Myth and word are intrinsically united, and not only within the context of the Greek language and religion. The purging of all things mythical from texts and from life deprives modern man in ways that become apparent when we open our eyes to the starkness and lack of imagery in the modern world.
The primary inquiry to be undertaken concerns the relationship between mythology and mythos, that is to say, the scholarly investigation of a domain that has nothing to do with science. The merit of classical studies can solely rest in the faithful and precise reproduction of sources and their interpretation, rather than in interpretations and explanations that originate from entirely different domains, thus necessitating distortions. Neither does an aesthetic appreciation of myth, which divorces it from its foundation, suffice, nor does symbolization, which substitutes meanings for essence. Equally misguided is the naturalization of myth, which eradicates the divine and comprehends it as a natural process and natural force, seeking causal and teleological explanations for it. The hallmark of these endeavors is the reduction of myths to animistic, fetishistic, evolutionary, psychological, and psychoanalytical origins. This includes personification, which is nothing more than a regressive form of depersonalization.
Certain aspects of such interpretations might be astutely designed—acumen increases where sense diminishes—yet they all represent externally imposed constructs. They not only misconceive the myth but work toward its annihilation. They bypass the existence of the Gods, their world, and their sovereignty, from which the Homeric epics, lyric poetry, tragedy, temple architecture, and the sculpted figures of Gods and heroes have emerged.
“The divine,” as Otto states, “can only be experienced.” Experience implies that Gods cannot be invented, conceived, or imagined. Yet, in what kind of experience does the divine manifest? Not every experience suffices for that purpose. Such an experience already contains devotion, without which there could be no encounter. Such a relationship, founded on offerings and gifts, cannot be coerced by willpower or knowledge. There is nothing coercive within it. The Muses approach only the musically inclined individual, the Horae only the one who follows their course and their governance throughout the year, and the Charites bestow their blessings only upon those who can enter into their dance.
Throughout history, only the poetically attuned individual has had a path and access to the Gods. Without rhythm, whose divine origin was certainly known to the Greeks, without its movement, which is festive, everything remains mute. Without rhythm, there is no celebration, without it, all festivity withers.
Friedrich Georg Jünger →
https://olddarkgods.com/p/foreword-on-the-occasion-of-the-one?utm_source=publication-search
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In another book of the same year (Der Geist der Antike und die christliche Welt ) Otto gave a strongly Nietzsche-influenced view of the Jewish and Christian religions in antithesis to the Greek Olympian world. Here, and in a series of articles leading to his main work, the Homeric Gods (1929; English translation, 1954), he supplied a philosophical interpretation of Greek religion, abandoning the philological method that had guided all his previous works. This methodological shift was due to Otto's classicistic conception of the uniqueness of Greek religion compared to any other. He maintained that the Homeric mode of seeing and thinking of the Olympian gods found continual expression within the Greek world "despite all temporal and individual variations, in the representative works of the Greek genius, whether in poetry, plastic art or philosophy" (Otto, 1929/1954, p. 20), being not only the very essence of Greek civilization, but indeed "the religious idea of the European spirit" and "one of humanity's greatest religious ideas" (p. 13). According to Otto, each Olympian god (he dwells on Athene, Apollo, Artemis, Aphrodite, and Hermes, not taking into account Zeus) is an Urgestalt des Seins, capable of revealing from its peculiar point of view the totality of reality—worldliness and naturalness—in human shape. Such are, for example, Apollo, the anthropomorphic revelation of spiritual freedom and distance from the mortal's world, and his twin sister Artemis, who represents "freedom of another sort—the feminine," which is "free nature with its brilliance and wildness, with its guiltless purity and its mysterious uncanniness" (p. 102). As Goethe had pointed out, Greek religion should therefore be considered as "theomorphic" and not as "anthropomorphic," with the divine in its human appearance being the model for mankind—and not the opposite.
Otto deepened his idea of the Greek divine as a revelation of "being" in human form in his other major work, Dionysus (1933; English translation, 1965). Relying on this conception, Otto was one of the few scholars of his time maintaining the Greek provenience of Dionysos, long before Michael Ventris and John Chadwick discovered the god's Mycaenean evidence in 1952. Though not belonging to the Olympian deities, this god discloses "a whole world, whose spirit presents itself again and again in new forms, connecting in an eternal unity the sublime with the simple, the human with the animal, the vegetal with the elemental" (Otto, 1933/1965, p. 188). The very essence of Dionysos lies therefore in the opposition between these incompatible poles; hence his madness, visible in his symbols: the mask (incarnating the simultaneity of presence and absence), the music (embodying both noise and silence), and the wine (symbol of the paradoxical unity of pleasure and pain). This madness, in which brightness and obscurity, and joy and horror, coincide, unifies also life and death, concealing in itself the mystery of procreation. For this reason, the Dionysian world is a feminine one, closely connected to women, as is clearly shown by the god's followers, the Maenads, and his spouse Ariadne.
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