A History of Religious Ideas, Volume 1: From the Stone Age to the Eleusinian Mysteries

by Mircea Eliade

Only the Greeks would envision a Golden Age of all dudes, just duding our with each other,

Cough - Late Bronze Age Collapse - cough.

Does this mean that they experienced an endemic existence similar to Kronos’ own Race of Gold?

Except there is no accident or sin to explain the end of the Race of Gold; their demise was entirely as a result of conflicts among and between the gods.

Is Eliade proposing a syncretism between religious traditions he believes linked to Indo-European and Semitic racial groups? Why does so much with Eliade come back to notions of race?

I thought so.

It will be the end goal of the mystery cults, undergoing an initiation that guarantees eternity in Ellysium.

Because it seems wrong to have some sort of blessed afterlife and no means of entry.

The process of the creation of man.

The Greeks did have quite a few mutually exclusive creation myths.

Again, not super prudent.

Sort of how Christianity will define hell as the absence of god.

Unavoidable

At some point the Greeks, like Vedic Indians reimagined the significance of the rituals of sacrifice. What had been instituted as meaningful by one generation was given a new meaning by their ancestors.

I thought that he was also angered by being deprived the best meat from the animal. Though, I believe I remember other myths proclaiming that what the gods craved was the smoke from the burning fat. I feel like I even remember another author pointing out that refusing physical nutrients was essential to divinity, hence young Hermes stealing Apollo’s cattle, but refusing the meat to secure a place beside his divine father, rather than his mortal mother,

I knew I remembered that from somewhere.

The mortal sin of Prometheus.

How do we know specifically when festivals and rituals involving Prometheus became less common? Can we really attribute that to a single Playwright? Do we even know how widely these plays were distributed among contemporaries?

That’s a weird transition.

Now that’s pessimism.

It always struck me as odd to conceive of an afterlife, but to conceive of one that is, rather than being a blissful reward or a hellish punishment, just rather blandly unpleasant.

Nobody ever remembers Ixion. Everyone remembers Sisyphus and his bolder. A fare few people remember Tantalus being tormented by food and drink right outside his grasp, or, at least, the memory lives on in the word tantalizing. Nobody remembers poor Ixion bound to his flaming wheel.

Which seems to have been the goal of many of the latter Vedic rituals, and of Shamanism. See the poem about Soma from the previous chapter.

So some set of laws, and some concept of justice exist independent of the gods. One can see how this religious tradition would give rise to Plato.

Ajax the Lesser.

The same advice given as treatment for anxiety.

I don’t know that it’s paradoxical. There is something inherently admirable about staring into the inevitable and struggling against it.

THAT is a bit paradoxical.

I should learn to enjoy moments a bit more like the Greeks, rather than worry about the future.

The whole “born last, regurgitated first” dynamic.

Again, does his incipient rivalry with his brother demonstrate that some people worshipped Poseidon as supreme to Zeus? Could his place in myth just be a representation of the tension between two capable and ambitious siblings who fall into a stable, if not entirely comfortable, hierarchy?

How do we know that this god was imported from inland? If he was imported from South Russia / The Caucus Mountains, wouldn’t the Indi-Europeans have been familiar with the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea?

This is somewhat of a better point. The connection between Poseidon and horses did always strike me as a bit odd.

If this is an import brought by Indo-European migrants, shouldn’t a Father of the Earth, or god descended from such a title also be evident in Vedic and pre-Zoroastrian Iranian religion?

This brings us back to the idea that early smiths, and people who could smelt and work metals, were conceived of as a type of magician.

Interesting, he attaches things to one another. In some ways he defines reality. THAT is clearly quasi-magical.

I feel like I remember Apollo’s name being derived from one of the languages from Western Anatolia. Carrion? Luwian? Lydian? I do not remember which.

Apollo does a lot of killing for a god of priests and philosophers.

We are working with the theory that these myths explain how an Anatolian god displaced (and therefor killed) a number of local gods. One would hope that this is supported by something other than the fact that Apollo has a foreign name.

Do the need for expiation and the myth’s connection to a specific necessarily prove that it is a parable about Apollo’s displacement of some native god?

Not very useful as a way to map Apollo’s location. I guess it works well for the general proposition that he came from “north.” Somewhere.

It’s another neat little story about the seasons.

So, this implies a connection to Thrace, or somewhere in modern Romania or Bulgaria.

I feel like almost all religious notions rely heavily on synthesis for their origin. Religions and religious ideas spread rapidly, and they pick up lint as they travel.

I am guessing this means the rules of conduct, of ritual, or of both, that are associated with or derived from religion.

An interpreter of religious texts.

He learned about purification from the business end of the practice.

Almost the inverse of Ma’at, or a reverse Mitzvah. It seems that this idea of acts altering (for good or for ill) the structure of the world seems fairly common in Eastern Mediterranean religion.

Literally “navel.” It has come to refer to a central location of great importance, but that connotation may be a result of the omphalos’ importance at the temple of Delphi, and not a clue to the origin of its name.

Yeah, but nobody knew that one was a fat lazy eagle, and that the true meeting place was all the way in Anatolia.